The Book of Enoch is a Jewish text from around the first century B.C.E., with its authorship purported to be Enoch, an ancestor of Noah. The book is excluded from most Abrahamic religions’ canons. This presentation investigates the history of the Book of Enoch and opinions on its canonicity.
The Book of Enoch is a Jewish text from around the first century B.C.E., with its authorship purported to be Enoch, an ancestor of Noah. The book is excluded from most Abrahamic religions’ canons, with the only exceptions being found in Ethiopia. This project investigates the history of the Book of Enoch and opinions on its canonicity. In Genesis 5, Enoch is said to have lived for 365 years, walking with God during his lifetime; rather than dying, “God took him away” (Genesis 5:24 NIV). This establishes Enoch as the only person in Judaism to walk the earth without dying. In Christianity, Enoch is one of two figures on earth to not experience a worldly death, with Jesus Christ being the other; the New Testament’s Hebrews 11:5 (NIV) also states that Enoch “did not experience death.” The Book of Enoch, a text purported to be written by him, explains the origin of giants (Nephilim) through angels, and a verse from its first chapter is quoted by Jesus’s brother in the book of Jude. Enoch is a profoundly unique figure with intense implications for God’s nature and humans’ souls. How is the possible work of such a man deemed unfit for canonicity, or even heretical, by Jewish and Christian theologians throughout history? This presentation examines the presence of Enoch within canonical religious texts, the content of the Book of Enoch in relation to these texts, and historical acceptances and denials of the Book of Enoch as an authoritative religious text.
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