The Book of Enoch, is an ancient, non-canonical Jewish work. Estimates vary on the actual dates of authorship. However, Enoch was alive during the Antediluvian period as recorded in the Hebrew Bible. Fragments of the text, were discovered in cave 4 of the Qumran caves in 1948.
Enoch, born in the 7th generation from Adam, was the grandfather of Noah. Enoch prophesied concerning the judgments on mankind (Jude 14-15 & Enoch 1:9). Enoch says his prophetic words were not for his generation but for a “generation of elect and righteous people far in the future that would be living in the day of tribulation when all the wicked and godless are to be removed.” (Enoch 1:1). He compiled his visions and prophecies into a book of parables and passed the secrets on to Noah (The book of Enoch 68:1).
Among the secrets passed down, Enoch gives a more detailed accounting of the relationship between the fallen angels (watchers) and the daughters of men in Genesis 6:2-4. He reveals the secrets of the luminaries and the weather and concludes with a prophesy concerning the condition of man and purging of the evil on earth.
By : Translated by Robert Charles (1885 - 1931)
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As the Book of Enoch is, in some respects, the most notable extant apocalyptic work outside the canonical Scriptures, it will not be inappropriate to offer a few remarks here on the Apocalyptic Literature generally. In writing about the books which belong to this literature, Prof. Burkitt says very pointedly that "they are the most characteristic survival of what I will venture to call, with all its narrowness and its incoherence, the heroic age of Jewish history, the age when the nation attempted to realize in action the part of the peculiar people of God. It ended in catastrophe, but the nation left two successors, the Christian Church and the Rabbinical Schools, each of which carried on some of the old national aims. And of the two it was the Christian Church that was most faithful to the ideas enshrined in the Apocalypses, and it did consider itself, not without some reason, the fulfilment of those ideas. What is wanted, therefore, in studying the Apocalypses is, above all, sympathy with the ideas that underlie them, and especially with the belief in the New Age. And those who believe that in Christianity a new Era really did dawn for us ought, I think, to have that sympathy. . . . We study the Apocalypses to learn how our spiritual ancestors hoped again that God would make all right in the end; and that we, their children, are here to-day studying them is an indication...
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