Is the Book of Enoch Scripture?

It is sold as the book they took out of the Bible. Videos promise its secrets, paperback editions call it the lost Scripture, and many sincere believers have been told that the churches hid it from them. Read it, the story goes, and you will finally understand the angels, the giants, the Flood, and the end of the world.

This study tests the Book of Enoch the only way any book can be tested: by the word of God. The measure is simple, and we will use it all the way through. Where the book contradicts Scripture, it is false. Where it goes beyond Scripture, it is hearsay, unprovable at best. Either way, it is not the inspired word of God.

Why the question matters

What we receive as the word of God decides what we believe about God. A book admitted into that place teaches with God’s authority, and every doctrine drawn from it is treated as His. That is why Scripture guards its own boundary so carefully:

Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you.

Every word of God is pure: he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him. Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar.

The question is not whether a book is old, or interesting, or quoted by someone we respect. Many old books are all three. The question is whether God gave it. And the test for that is the one Isaiah gave: “To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them” (Isaiah 8:20).

What the book actually is

The Book of Enoch, usually called 1 Enoch (to distinguish it from two later Enoch books), is not one book but five, stitched together:

These parts were written at different times, generally placed between the third century before Christ and the first century after. Aramaic fragments of four of them were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Parables, the section most often quoted about the Son of Man, were not found there at all, and survive in no Aramaic or Greek copy. The whole collection exists only in Ge’ez, the old liturgical language of Ethiopia.

The man Enoch did not write it. Scripture records that he lived before the Flood (Genesis 5:21–24), yet the book names places as they were known long after it. It sets God’s descent upon Mount Sinai (1 Enoch 1:4), the mountain whose holiness belongs to Moses’ day, and places the angels’ oath on Mount Hermon (6:6). The Flood broke up the face of the whole earth; the book reads the later map back into the world before it. Its opening lines also rework the blessing of Moses (Deuteronomy 33:2) and the oracle of Balaam (Numbers 24), both written long after Enoch was taken. A book that borrows from Moses cannot have been written before him.

The Scriptures Jesus named

The surest way to know what belongs in the Old Testament is to ask what Jesus called Scripture. After His resurrection, He told His disciples exactly where to look:

And he said unto them, These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me. Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures,

The law, the prophets, and the psalms: the three divisions of the Hebrew Bible, the last named by its first and largest book. Jesus argued with the religious leaders of His day about nearly everything, but never about which books were Scripture. He also measured the whole span of that Bible in a single sentence, from the first murder in its first book to the last in its final book: “From the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple” (Luke 11:51; compare Genesis 4 and 2 Chronicles 24, the last book in the Hebrew order). Paul adds that God entrusted His words to Israel: “unto them were committed the oracles of God” (Romans 3:2).

History confirms what those books were. More than a century before Christ, the translator of the book of Sirach already spoke of a settled collection, “the law itself, and the prophecies, and the rest of the books,” and set his grandfather’s own work outside it. Near the end of the first century, the Jewish historian Josephus wrote that his people had “only twenty-two books” that were “justly believed to be divine” (Against Apion 1.8), the same books as our Old Testament, counted differently.

Jude 14–15, head-on

The strongest argument for the book is a real one, and it deserves a straight answer. Jude writes:

And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.

This closely matches the first chapter of 1 Enoch:

And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of His holy ones To execute judgement upon all, And to destroy all the ungodly: And to convict all flesh Of all the works of their ungodliness which they have ungodly committed, And of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.

There is no point pretending otherwise. But notice exactly what Jude says, and what he does not. He says that Enoch prophesied these words. He does not say “it is written,” the formula the apostles use for Scripture, and he does not commend the book. Writing by inspiration, Jude confirms that this one prophecy is true and that the man Enoch spoke it. That is all his words guarantee. Whether the saying reached Jude through this book or through the same tradition the book drew on, the inspiration rests on Jude’s sentence, not on everything else that was later gathered under Enoch’s name.

The apostles did this more than once. Paul quoted a Greek poet to the philosophers in Athens: “as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring” (Acts 17:28). He quoted a Cretan writer to Titus: “One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, said, The Cretians are alway liars” (Titus 1:12). He even borrowed a line from a Greek comedy: “evil communications corrupt good manners” (1 Corinthians 15:33). No one concludes that those pagan books belong in the Bible. Quoting a true line is not canonizing the book it came from.

Where it contradicts Scripture

If the book only added details, we could set it aside as unprovable. But at several central points it says the opposite of what God has said. Wherever that happens, it is false, however old and however popular it may be.

Angels who marry

The best-known story in the book, the one most people come to it for, is the Book of the Watchers. Two hundred angels descend to the earth, take human wives, and father a race of giants whose violence fills the world. This is presented as the meaning of Genesis 6. But Jesus Himself spoke to the question of whether angels marry, and He answered it plainly:

For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.

Mark records the same words (12:25), and Luke adds that the resurrected “are equal unto the angels” (20:36). Angels are “ministering spirits” (Hebrews 1:14), and Jesus Himself said that “a spirit hath not flesh and bones” (Luke 24:39). From the first page of the Bible every living thing brings forth “after his kind” (Genesis 1:24). A story of angels marrying women and fathering a mixed race runs against all of it.

The book even admits the problem in its own words. Later in the Book of the Watchers, God is made to say to the angels who sinned:

But you were formerly spiritual, living the eternal life, and immortal for all generations of the world. And therefore I have not appointed wives for you; for the spiritual ones of heaven, in heaven is their dwelling.

So by the book’s own account, angels were never made for marriage. And yet its whole story depends on angels doing exactly what their nature has no provision for. Christ’s words settle the matter; the book’s own words only show that it cannot keep its story straight.

What Genesis 6 actually says. Read in its own setting, the chapter is about men from beginning to end. It opens “when men began to multiply on the face of the earth” (6:1). God’s verdict is on man: “My spirit shall not always strive with man” (6:3); “the wickedness of man was great in the earth” (6:5); “I will destroy man whom I have created” (6:7). Nowhere does God judge rebel angels for what happened; the judgment falls on mankind.

The “sons of God” are the godly line of Seth. Scripture has already told us, two chapters earlier, that when Seth’s son was born “then began men to call upon the name of the LORD” (Genesis 4:26), and the King James margin gives the alternative rendering: “to call themselves by the name of the Lord.” They were the family that bore God’s name. Luke traces that very line back to “Adam, which was the son of God” (Luke 3:38), and God elsewhere calls His faithful people His children (Deuteronomy 14:1). The “daughters of men” were the daughters of Cain’s line, the people who had gone their own way. When the two lines intermarried, the last restraint on the world gave way.

The texts usually raised. Three passages are offered for the angel view, and each deserves an answer. In Job the “sons of God” are indeed heavenly beings (Job 1:6; 38:7), gathering before the LORD; but the meaning of a phrase is set by its setting, and Job’s council in heaven is not Genesis 6’s families on the earth before the Flood. Peter and Jude speak of “the angels that sinned” (2 Peter 2:4), the angels “which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation” (Jude 6): the rebellion in heaven, when Lucifer and those who followed him were cast out. Neither verse mentions marriage. And when Jude goes on to say “Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner” (Jude 7), the “in like manner” most naturally joins Sodom to the cities about it, which together went “after strange flesh.” None of these texts says that an angel ever took a wife. Only the Book of Enoch says that, and Christ says the opposite.

Contradicts Scripture → false

Who were the giants?

If the giants of Genesis 6 were not the children of angels, who were they? The answer is in the verse itself, read slowly:

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

Four things in this verse undo the angel story.

1. The word is not a name. The King James Bible never uses the word Nephilim at all. Not once. It translates the Hebrew word, and translates it “giants.” The word is nephil (Strong’s H5303), from naphal, “to fall” or “to fell,” and the lexicon defines it as “properly, a feller, i.e. a bully or tyrant.” It describes what these men did: they fell upon others. That is exactly what the chapter goes on to say about their world: “the earth was filled with violence” (6:11), and God said to Noah, “the earth is filled with violence through them” (6:13). The word belongs to the vocabulary of the violent, not of the half-angel.

2. The giants came first. The verse says there were giants “in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men.” The giants were already in the earth before the intermarriage began. They could not have been its offspring. Genesis is giving us a marker of the age: in those days, there were giants.

3. The children are named separately. What the marriages produced is described in different words: “mighty men which were of old, men of renown.” The Hebrew is gibbor, “powerful; by implication, warrior, tyrant.” The offspring of those marriages were the famous strongmen and warriors of the old world, men renowned for their power. They were men.

4. Men were simply larger then. The world before the Flood was not the world we know. Men lived for centuries: Methuselah for nine hundred and sixty-nine years (Genesis 5:27). The race had not yet declined from the strength God gave it at creation, and the Adventist pioneers understood that men of that age were of far greater stature than men today:

By our measure, the whole race was of giant size; and even among them, some stood out as giants of their own day, the tyrants and men of renown whose violence filled the earth. Genesis is not introducing a second race of monsters. It is telling us what kind of world it was: “there were giants in the earth in those days.”

And after the Flood? Giants appear again in Moses’ day: the sons of Anak (Numbers 13:22, 33), the Emims, who “also were accounted giants” (Deuteronomy 2:11), and Og king of Bashan, whose bed was nine cubits long (Deuteronomy 3:11). Goliath stood “six cubits and a span” (1 Samuel 17:4). These are tall human families, with names, genealogies, and cities, the last remnants of a stature the race was steadily losing. And they create a problem the angel story cannot solve: if the giants were the children of angels, the Flood should have ended them. Tall men surviving into the days of Moses and David fits exactly the picture Scripture gives: a race that began great, and has been diminishing ever since. (Even the spies who reported the sons of Anak brought, the Bible says, “an evil report” — Numbers 13:32.)

Contradicts Scripture → false

Another Son of Man

The Parables of Enoch build up, chapter after chapter, a glorious heavenly figure: the Son of Man, the Chosen One, who sits on a throne of glory, judges the world, and is worshipped by all who dwell on the earth. Readers often assume this must be a prophecy of Jesus. Then, at the climax, the figure is named. Enoch is taken up, and he is greeted with these words, in the Ethiopic text as it stands:

You (are) that Son of Man who was born for righteousness, and righteousness dwells on you…

In the book as we have it, the exalted Son of Man is Enoch himself. The popular 1912 English translation by R. H. Charles prints “This is the Son of Man” instead, but Charles admits in his own footnote that the text reads “Thou art”; he changed it to fit a theory about a lost passage that no manuscript supports. And since the Parables survive only in Ethiopic, there is no older copy to appeal to.

Scripture leaves no room for two. The Son of Man of Daniel’s vision “came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him” (Daniel 7:13). Jesus claimed that title at His trial: “Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven” (Matthew 26:64). And He defined Him as the One who came down, not a man who went up: “no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven” (John 3:13). The only begotten Son of God is the Son of Man. A book that gives His throne to a patriarch points away from Him, whatever else it says. Paul’s warning covers even the most impressive messenger: “though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you … let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8).

Contradicts Scripture → false

A year out of step with God’s lights

The Astronomical Book (chapters 72–82) lays out a fixed year of exactly 364 days, presented as revealed to Enoch by an angel. But when God made the lights of heaven, He appointed them, sun and moon together, to mark the times:

And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:

“He appointed the moon for seasons: the sun knoweth his going down” (Psalm 104:19). A 364-day year does not keep pace with the lights God appointed. It falls behind by more than a day every year, so that within a generation it no longer matches the seasons it claims to count. A calendar that drifts away from the sun and moon is not a revelation from the One who set them in their courses.

Contradicts Scripture → false

Where it goes beyond Scripture

Much of the book does not contradict the Bible so much as add to it, filling the silences of Genesis with detail no one can check. Here the verdict is simpler: what cannot be confirmed from God’s word cannot be believed as God’s word. It is hearsay.

• Giants of fantastic size. The book describes the giants as “great giants, whose height was three thousand ells” (1 Enoch 7:2), well over half a mile tall; other copies have three hundred. Scripture’s tallest men are measured in single digits of cubits.
• Demons as the ghosts of giants. The book teaches that evil spirits are the spirits of the dead giants. Scripture says nothing of the kind; it shows the fallen angels themselves at work, and says that the dead “know not any thing” (Ecclesiastes 9:5).
• Noah born glowing. In the Epistle, the newborn Noah lights up the whole house and speaks to the Lord. Genesis records only his birth and his name (Genesis 5:28–29).
• Named angels over everything. The book assigns names and offices to angels over winds, stars, and nations, far beyond Scripture, which names only one of the holy angels, Gabriel (Daniel 8:16; Luke 1:19).
• Portals for the sun and moon. The Astronomical Book describes gates through which the lights rise and set. In places this echoes the Bible’s own picture of the heavens, but its particulars cannot be tested by Scripture. They are neither proof for what the Bible teaches about the firmament nor grounds to mock it; the believer’s understanding of the heavens rests on the Bible, not on this book.

This is the pattern of speculation. Scripture gives a single verse, “And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24), and around it later writers built not one book but several, each more elaborate than the last, until a later Enoch book turns the patriarch into an exalted angel. The Bible’s silence was not an invitation to fill it.

Beyond Scripture → hearsay

What the church did with it

The book was known and read in the early centuries, and a few Christian writers prized it. The Epistle of Barnabas quotes it as Scripture, and Tertullian defended it, though he admitted the objection plainly:

…the Scripture of Enoch… is not received by some, because it is not admitted into the Jewish canon either.

But the church at large refused it. Origen reported that the books of Enoch “are not generally held to be divine by the churches” (Against Celsus 5.54). Jerome noted that the epistle of Jude itself had been doubted by many because it quotes Enoch. Augustine set the book aside. Only in Ethiopia, and in the neighbouring church of Eritrea, did it keep a place, within a broader and looser collection of sacred books than any other church has held.

The modern revival is recent. The Scottish traveller James Bruce brought Ethiopic copies to Europe in 1773; the first English translation appeared in 1821; and R. H. Charles’s translation of 1912, now free of copyright, is the version most people read online today. What is being sold as a hidden ancient Scripture is, in the West, a two-hundred-year-old rediscovery of a book the church considered and declined.

Quoted, similar, found at Qumran

Three arguments are offered again and again. None of them makes a book Scripture.

“The New Testament quotes it.” Jude quotes one prophecy, as we have seen, and the apostles also quoted Greek poets. A quotation vouches for the line quoted, not for the book.

“The New Testament sounds like it.” Similar language usually has a common source, and that source is the Old Testament. The throne room of Revelation (“ten thousand times ten thousand,” 5:11) comes from Daniel 7:10, not from Enoch. When Jesus answered the Sadducees about the resurrection and the angels, He told them they did not know “the scriptures” (Matthew 22:29), and then quoted the Scripture He meant: “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Matthew 22:32, from Exodus 3:6). His words on the angels come from His own knowledge, and they contradict the Watchers story.

“It was found with the Dead Sea Scrolls.” So were community rules, hymns, commentaries, calendars, and many other writings that no one considers Scripture. The caves were a library, not a Bible. Being ancient and being kept proves only that people read a book, not that God gave it.

A note on what is being critiqued

Walking with God as Enoch did

The real Enoch did not need a secret book. Scripture tells us everything we need to know about him: he “walked with God” (Genesis 5:22, 24), and “before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God” (Hebrews 11:5). The way he walked is not lost. It is open in the same Scriptures Jesus named, and they were written to lead us to Him:

Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me.

The Bible is not a shoreline we have finished exploring. “The entrance of thy words giveth light” (Psalm 119:130). Everything the Book of Enoch promises, the angels, the judgment, the end of the world, the coming of the Son of Man, is told truly in the sixty-six books, and it all points to one Person: not Enoch, but the Son of God, the Son of Man Who came down from heaven, and Who is coming again with ten thousands of His saints.

Further reading

The angels, the Flood, and the heavens, from Scripture alone. For quick answers on the Son of God, see the Answering Common Heresies Cheat Sheet.