Genesis gives the strangest story in the Bible four verses. Sons of God take human wives, giants appear, and then God regrets making people. Genesis 6 moves on without explaining any of it.
The Book of Enoch is the explanation, and for a few centuries a lot of Jews and Christians read it as one.
What it is
1 Enoch is not one book. It is five, written by different hands between about 300 BC and the first century, and collected under the name of the man Genesis 5:24 says “walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.” A man who never died is a good person to have seen everything.
- The Book of the Watchers (chapters 1-36): the fallen angels, and Enoch’s tour of heaven and the underworld.
- The Parables (37-71): visions of a heavenly figure called the Son of Man. Scholars still argue about how this relates to the gospels.
- The Astronomical Book (72-82): a 364-day solar calendar, and possibly the oldest section.
- The Dream Visions (83-90): the history of the world told with animals.
- The Epistle of Enoch (91-108): warnings to the rich and comfort to the righteous.
The story that made it famous
Two hundred angels called the Watchers descend on Mount Hermon and swear an oath together, because their leader Shemihazah is afraid of being the only one held responsible. They take wives. Azazel teaches people to make swords and armor, and also bracelets and cosmetics. Others teach enchantments, root-cutting and the reading of the stars.
Their children are giants, and the giants consume everything until the earth itself cries out. God sends the flood. The Watchers are bound in the dark until judgment.
Read it now and it is hard to miss the shape of it: beings with far more capability than wisdom hand people a technology, and nobody can take it back. We wrote about that shape in the golem essay.
Why it is not in your Bible
The honest answer is less dramatic than “banned.” Nothing here looks like a vote.
Early Christians knew the book well. The letter of Jude quotes it. Tertullian defended it. But as the angel story grew uncomfortable, and as church leaders tightened their lists around books with an apostolic claim, opinion turned. Augustine doubted it. Jerome treated it as apocryphal. In the Greek and Latin worlds, scribes stopped making copies, and a book nobody copies is gone within a few generations.
Ethiopia kept copying. When the Scottish traveler James Bruce carried manuscripts to Europe in 1773, Western scholars finally held the complete text. Then in 1947 the caves at Qumran gave up Aramaic fragments of most of the book, some of them older than the Book of Daniel, which proved it was not a late Ethiopian oddity at all.
Where to start
Read Genesis 6:1-4 and Jude 14-15 in your own Bible. Then read 1 Enoch chapters 1-16 in the free Charles translation. It takes under an hour, and you will know more about this book than most people who have opinions on it. Save the Parables for later.
Want a copy? Most editions on sale are the same 1917 text, so read our guide to which translation to get first.
Common questions
Is the Book of Enoch in the Bible?
Not in Jewish, Catholic or most Protestant and Orthodox Bibles. It is part of the Bible in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Eritrean church, which never dropped it.
Does the Bible quote the Book of Enoch?
Yes. Jude 1:14-15 quotes 1 Enoch 1:9 and names Enoch as the speaker. 2 Peter 2:4 also appears to draw on the story of the imprisoned angels.
Who are the Watchers and the Nephilim?
In 1 Enoch the Watchers are 200 angels who descend on Mount Hermon, take human wives and teach forbidden knowledge. Their children are the giants, the Nephilim named in Genesis 6:4, whose violence becomes the reason given for the flood.
Was the Book of Enoch banned?
No council issued a ban. Early Christian writers disagreed about it, leaders such as Augustine and Jerome set it aside, and in the Greek and Latin world people gradually stopped copying it. That is how most of these books disappeared.