My Africa Today

The Apocryphical Book of Enoch
The Lost Text
“One of the most important apocryphic works of the Second Temple Period is Enoch.”
- Milik, Jazef. T., ed. The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

The Book of Enoch is “an ancient composition known from two sets of versions, an Ethiopic one that scholars identify as ‘1 Enoch’, and a Slavonic version that is identified as ‘2 Enoch’, and which is also known as The Book of the Secrets of Enoch. Both versions, of which copied manuscripts have been found mostly in Greek and Latin translations, are based on early sources that enlarged on the short biblical mention that Enoch, the seventh Patriarch after Adam, did not die because, at age 365, ‘he walked with God’ - taken heavenward to join the deity.”
- Zecharia Sitchin, When Time Began

“In the Book of Enoch the arcane wisdom is said to have been betrayed to mankind by fallen angels, but a Talmudic tradition claims that God whispered it to Moses on Mount Sinai. According to this tradition its secrets were then imparted to seventy elders who thereafter transmitted them orally to their successors.”
- David Conway, Ritual Magic

“The Book of Enoch is a pseudoepigraphal work (a work that claims to be by a biblical character). The Book of Enoch was not included in either the Hebrew or most Christian biblical canons, but could have been considered a sacred text by the sectarians. The original Aramaic version was lost until the Dead Sea fragments were discovered.”
“The original language of most of this work was, in all likelihood, Aramaic (an early Semitic language). Although the original version was lost in antiquity, portions of a Greek translation were discovered in Egypt and quotations were known from the Church Fathers. The discovery of the texts from Qumran Cave 4 has finally provided parts of the Aramaic original. …Humankind is called on to observe how unchanging nature follows God’s will.”
- Milik, Jazef. T., ed. The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

Although the Book of Enoch is considered as apocryphal, it was clearly known to early Christian writers as the following quote from 1 Enoch 1:9 indicates:
“In the seventh (generation) from Adam Enoch also prophesied these things, saying: ‘Behold, the Lord came with his holy myriads, to execute judgment on all, and to convict all the ungodly of all their ungodly deeds which they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners spoke against him’.”
- Jude 14-15

“Prior to the eighteenth century, scholars had believed the Book of Enoch to be irretrievably lost: composed long before the birth of Christ, and considered to be one of the most important pieces of Jewish mystical literature, it was only known from fragments and from references to it in other texts. James Bruce changed all this by procuring several copies of the missing work during his stay in Ethiopia. These were the first complete editions of the Book of Enoch ever to be seen in Europe.
- Graham Hancock, The Sign and the Seal

The Patriarch Enoch
“According to the biblical narrative (Genesis 5:21-24), Enoch lived only 365 years (far less than the other patriarchs in the period before the Flood). Enoch ‘walked with God; then he was no more for God took him’.”
- Milik, Jazef. T., ed. The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

“According to Sumerian chronicles of the earlier times, it was at Eridu’s temple that Enki, as guardian of the secrets of all scientific knowledge, kept the ME’s - tabletlike objects on which the scientific data were inscribed. One of the Sumerian texts details how the goddess Inanna (later known as Ishtar), wishing to give status to her ‘cult center’ Uruk (the biblical Erech), tricked Enki into giving her some of those divine formulas. Adapa, we find, was also nicknamed NUN.ME, meaning “He who can decipher the ME’s’. Even unto millennia later, in Assyrian times, the saying ‘Wise as Adapa’ meant that someone was exceedingly wise and knowledgeable….The ‘wide knowledge’ imparted by Enki to Adapa included writing, medicine, and - according to the astronomical series of tablets UD.SAR.ANUM.ENLILLA (’The Great Days of Amu and Enlil’) - knowledge of astronomy and astrology.”
“…It is almost certain that the biblical ‘Enoch’ was the equivalent of the Sumerian first priest, EN.ME.DUR.AN.KI (’High Priest of the ME’s of the Bond Heaven-Earth’), the man from the city Sippar taken heavenward to be taught the secrets of Heaven and Earth, of divination, and of the calendar. It was with him that the generations of astronomer-priests, of Keepers of the Secrets, began.”
- Zecharia Sitchin, When Time Began

“The learned savant
who guards the secrets of the gods
will bind his favored son with an oath
before Shamash and Adad…
and will instruct him in the secrets of the gods.”
“Thus was the line of priests created,
those who are allowed to approach Shamash and Adad.”
- Sumerian tablet (W. G. Lambert, Enmeduranki and Related Material)

“The legend [of Enoch] begins…with the Sumerian King List. This is a list of rulers before the Flood, and is preserved in several forms, including Berossus. Here one of the kings, often given as the seventh (as Enoch is in his list), is called Enmeduranki or Enmeduranna. He is generally associated with the city of Sippar, which was the home of the cult of the sun god Shamash. Moreover, in other texts this Enmeduranki was the first to be shown, by Adad and Shamash, three techniques of divination: pouring oil on water, inspecting a liver, and the use of a cedar (rod), whose function is still unclear. These were to be transmitted from generation to generation, and in fact became the property of the guild of baru, the major group of diviners in Babylon.
“These details show how the biblical portrait of Enoch may have been compiled from Enmeduranki: each is seventh in the antediluvian list; the biblical 365 preserves the affinity to the sun, rather than the sun god; walking with God (or perhaps, ‘angels’?) suggests the intimacy between god(s) and man. The final connection links not with Enmeduranki, but with a fish-man (apkallu), with which each of the first seven kings associated and from whom they learnt all kinds of knowledge. Enmeduranki’s apkallu, called Utu’abzu, is mentioned in another cuneiform text, where he is said to have ascended to heaven. This last link remains provisional, but at all events, the writer of Genesis 5:21-24 appears to either have created Enoch as a counterpart of Enmeduranki or, equally probably, to have alluded to an already existing Jewish tradition about Enoch, already modeled on the earlier figure.”
- John Rogerson and Philip Davies, The Old Testament World

“One cannot rule out the possibility that, as Enmduranki and Enoch, Adapa too was the seventh in a line of sages, the Sages of Eridu, and thus another version of the Sumerian memory echoed in the biblical Enoch record. According to this tale, seven Wise Men were trained in Eridu, Enki’s city; their epithets and particular knowledge varied from version to version. Rykle Borger, examining this tale in light of the Enoch traditions (’Die Beschworungsserie Bit Meshri und die Himmelfahrt Henochs’ in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, vol. 33), was especially fascinated by the inscription on the third tablet of the series of Assyrian Oath Incantations. In it the name of each sage is given and his main call on fame is explained; it says thus of the seventh: ‘Uta-abzu, he who to heaven ascended’. Citing a second such text, R. Borger concluded that this seventh sage, whose name combined that of Utu/Shamash with the Lower World (Abzu) domain of Enki, was the Assyrian ‘Enoch’.
“According to the Assyrian references to the wisdom of Adapa, he composed a book of sciences titled U.SAR d ANUM d ENLILA - ‘Writings regarding Time; from divine Anu and divine Enlil’. Adapa, thus, is credited with writing Mankind’s first book of astronomy and the calendar.”
- Zecharia Sitchin, When Time Began

“And I saw there something horrible: I saw neither a heaven above nor a firmly founded earth, but a place chaotic and horrible. And there I saw seven stars of the heaven bound together in it, like great mountains and burning with fire. Then I said: ‘For what sin are they bound, and on what account have they been cast in hither?’ Then said Uriel, one of the holy angels, who was with me, and was chief over them, and said: ‘Enoch, why dost thou ask, and why art thou eager for the truth? These are of the number of the stars of heaven, which have transgressed the commandment of the Lord, and are bound here till ten thousand years, the time entailed by their sins, are consummated.’ And from thence I went to another place, which was still more horrible than the former, and I saw a horrible thing: a great fire there which burnt and blazed, and the place was cleft as far as the abyss, being full of great descending columns of fire: neither its extent or magnitude could I see, nor could I conjecture. Then I said: ‘How fearful is the place and how terrible to look upon!’ Then Uriel answered me, one of the holy angels who was with me, and said unto me: ‘Enoch, why hast thou such fear and affright?’ And I answered: ‘Because of this fearful place, and because of the spectacle of the pain.’ And he said unto me: ‘This place is the prison of the angels, and here they will be imprisoned for ever.’”
- Enoch 21:1-10

Enoch’s description of the punishment prepared for the fallen angels has clear parallels with the chaotic void in the Necronomicon.

“…The Book of Enoch has always been of great significance to Freemasons, and…certain rituals dating back to long before Bruce’s time [1730-1794] identified Enoch himself with Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom.”
- Graham Hancock, The Sign and the Seal

“Enoch was the first who invented books and different sorts of writing. The ancient Greeks declare that Enoch is the same as Mercury Trismegistus [Hermes], and that he taught the sons of men the art of building cities, and enacted some admirable laws…He discovered the knowledge of the Zodiac, and the course of the Planets; and he pointed out to the sons of men, that they should worship God, that they should fast, that they should pray, that they should give alms, votive offerings, and tenths. He reprobated abominable foods and drunkenness, and appointed festivals for sacrifices to the Sun, at each of the Zodiacal Signs.”
- Hebraeus

According to Masonic lore, Enoch was the inventor of writing, “that he taught men the art of building”, and that, before the flood, he “feared that the real secrets would be lost - to prevent which he concealed the grand Secret, engravnen on a white oriental porphyry stone, in the bowels of the earth.”
- Royal Masonic Cyclopaedia

“In his Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus writes that Adam had forewarned his descendants that sinful humanity would be destroyed by a deluge. In order to preserve their science and philosophy, the children of Seth therefore raised two pillars, one of brick and the other of stone, on which were inscribed the keys to their knowledge. The patriarch Enoch….also constructed an underground temple [at Moriah] consisting of nine vaults, one beneath the other, placing in the deepest vault a triangular tablet of gold bearing upon it the absolute and ineffable name of Deity. According to some accounts, Enoch made two golden deltas. The larger he placed upon the white cubical altar in the lowest vault and the smaller he gave into the keeping of his son, Methuselah, who did the actual construction work of the brick chambers according to the pattern revealed to his father by the Most High. In the form and arrangements of these vaults Enoch epitomized the nine spheres of the ancient Mysteries and the nine sacred strata of the earth through which the initiate must pass to reach the flaming Spirit dwelling in its central core.”
- Manly P. Hall, Masonic, Hermetic, Quabbalistic & Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy

Methuselah ” took the object back to Sippar. Enoch remained at Moriah, to become the old man on the mountain. He lived 365 years, according to Genesis, and then he died. Or did he vanish into thin air?”
- Brian , “ENOCH The Greatest Story Never Told “

Enoch’s “name signified in the Hebrew, INITIATE or INITIATOR. The legend of the columns, of granite and brass or bronze, erected by him, is probably symbolical. That of bronze, which survived the flood, is supposed to symbolize the mysteries, of which Masonry is the legitimate successor from the earliest times the custodian and depository of the great philosophical and religious truths, unknown to the world at large, and handed down from age to age by an unbroken current of tradition, embodied in symbols, emblems, and allegories.”
- General Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma

There was a substantial Zoroastrian Influence on Judaism when Jewish exiles were exposed to the Persian religion during the Babylonian captivity.

“Some Jews adopted Enochian tradition in Babylon during the Exile and brought it back to Canaan when Cyrus gave them leave to Return. The Enochian Jews were detested by the priesthood in Jerusalem, and they were forced to ‘flee’ into the desert before 300 BCE. Naturally, they supported the Maccabees during the uprising of 165 BCE. The Enochians at Qumran ‘updated’ the text to include Judah the Hammer in the big story.”
“The last of the Essence stragglers buried it [the secret book] in Cave IV at Qumran c.70 CE. The urban Christians and Jews of the Near East rejected it. The authors of the Apocalypse rewrote and retitled it, but they didn’t understand the heptadic structure of the original lines, the arrangement of sevens. (The Revelation of St John is pure gibberish, a sloppy rehash of Babylonian myths and legends.) Only the students of the Merkabah (in Babylonia) possessed the key to the Enochian mystery.”
- Brian , “ENOCH The Greatest Story Never Told “

The Secrets
“At that hour, that Son of Man was given a name, in the presence of the Lord of the Spirits, the Before-Time, even before the creation of the sun and the moon, before the creation of the stars, he was given a name in the presence of the Lord of the Spirits.”
- 1 Enoch 48:4

The Messiah “first appears as preexistent in the apocryphal First Book of Enoch, which was originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic about 150 BC. From that period on, the concept of the Messiah who was created in the six days of Creation, or even prior to them or who was born at variously stated subsequent dates and was then hidden to await his time, became a standard feature of Jewish Messianic eschatology.
- Raphael Patai, The Messiah Texts

“From the beginning the Son of Man was hidden, And the Most High has preserved him In the presence of His might, And revealed him to the elect.”
- 1 Enoch 62:7

“Written both as a personal testament and as a historic review, the Ethiopic Book of Enoch, whose earliest title was probably The Words of Enoch, describes his journey to Heaven as well as to the four corners of Earth.”
- Zecharia Sitchin, The Stairway to Heaven

“And after that I saw all the secrets of the heavens, and how the kingdom is divided, and how the actions of men are weighed in the balance. And there I saw the mansions of the elect and the mansions of the holy, and mine eyes saw there all the sinners being driven from thence which deny the name of the Lord of Spirits, and being dragged off: and they could not abide because of the punishment which proceeds from the Lord of Spirits.
And I saw the chambers of the sun and moon, whence they proceed and whither they come again, and their glorious return, and how one is superior to the other, and their stately orbit, and how they do not leave their orbit, and they add nothing to their orbit and they take nothing from it, and they keep faith with each other, in accordance with the oath by which they are bound together.”
- 1 Enoch 41:1-2, 5b -6a

“In the Book of Enoch it was the archangel Uriel (’God is my light’) who showed Enoch the secrets of the Sun (solstices and equinoxes, ’six portals’ in all) and the ‘laws of the Moon’ (including intercalation), and the twelve constellations of the stars, ‘all the workings of heaven’. And in the end of the schooling, Uriel gave Enoch - as Shamash and Adad had given Enmeduranki - ‘heavenly tablets’, instructing him to study them carefully and note ‘every individual fact’ therein. Returning to Earth, Enoch passed this knowledge to his old son, Methuselah.”
- Zecharia Sitchin, When Time Began

The knowledge granted Enoch included:
“All the workings of heaven, earth and the seas, and all the elements, their passages and goings and the thundering of the thunder, and of the Sun and the Moon; the goings and changing’s of the stars; the seasons, years, days, and hours.”
- The Book of the Secrets of Enoch

According to the The Book of the Secrets of Enoch, “it seems that when the prophet Enoch was ‘taken up’, he saw the air and then the ether. Then he reached the first heaven, where ‘two hundred angels rule the stars’ and where he saw a sea ‘greater than the earthly sea’.
“The second heaven was gloomy. In the third heaven, he saw the Tree of Life, with four streams, of honey, milk, oil, and wine, flowing from its roots. The Place of the Righteous is in this heaven and the Terrible Place where the wicked are tortured. There was also the ‘place on which God rests when he comes into Paradise’.
“In the fourth heaven, he saw luminaries, wondrous creatures, and the Host of the Lord. There were many ‘hosts’ in the fifth, and in the sixth he saw ‘bands of angels who study the revolutions of the stars’. Finally, in the seventh heaven he saw great angels and he got a distant glimpse of the Lord on His Throne.”
- Richard L. Thompson, Alien Identities

“I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know - God knows. And I know that this man - whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows - was caught up to Paradise. He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell.”
- 2 Corinthians 12:2-4 (the apostle Paul describing his own experience)

“Enoch’s third heaven…seems very similar to the region known as Ilavrta-varsa, which is described in the Fifth Canto of the Bhagavata Purana. Thus, in Ilavrta-varsa there are four gigantic trees, and four rivers flow from their roots, including a river of honey. There is also a city called Brahmapuri, which is visited by Lord Brahma and which may correspond to the ‘place on which God rests when he comes into Paradise’.”
The Venerable Bede, an eighth-century English theologian and historian, wrote that “the seven heavens are (1) the Air, (2) the Ether, (3) Olympus, (4) the Element of Fire, (5) the Firmament, (6) the Angelical Region, and (7) the Realm of the Trinity.”
“According to the Fifth Canto of the Bhagavata Purana, Brahmapuri and the residences of eight prominent Devas [administrators of the Universe] are situated on the top of a mountain in Ilavrta-varsa called Meru, and therefore Mount Meru corresponds to the Greek Olympus. Thus, if Ilavrta-varsa corresponds to Enoch’s third heaven, then it is also reasonable to say that this third heaven corresponds to the Greek Olympus.”
- Richard L. Thompson, Alien Identities