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Find the answers to all those questions you were too embarrassed to ask in Sunday School. Welcome to Weird Stuff in the Bible, where we explore scripture passages that are bizarre, perplexing or just plain weird. Hosted by Luke Taylor.
Enoch’s Prophecy that Is NOT in the Bible
Jude 14-18
Introduction
In Jude 14-16, he quotes from a prophecy of Enoch:
It says
14 It was also about these that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying, “Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his holy ones, 15 to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him.” These are grumblers, malcontents, following their own sinful desires; they are loud-mouthed boasters, showing favoritism to gain advantage.
What’s weird about this prophecy is: it’s not found anywhere in the Old Testament.
Enoch is. It specifically says which Enoch. There’s an Enoch in Genesis 4 and an Enoch in Genesis 5. This is the Genesis 5 Enoch; the one everybody knows about. It specifically says who he is. It quotes a prophecy that he gave. But this prophecy is recorded nowhere in the OT.
So where did this prophecy come from? I mean, it’s a true prophecy. If it wasn’t true, it wouldn’t be quoted here in Scripture. So it’s a real prophecy; but where was it recorded? It was recorded in an ancient document called The Book of Enoch. And the Book of Enoch is not a book in your Bible. And yet, the Bible quotes from it and says it’s true. Jude quotes from a prophecy that is NOT in the Bible.
I find all this to be weird, and I’d like to find out why it’s in the Bible. Or in this case, why it’s NOT in the Bible.
So turn to the book of Jude and let’s get weird.
[theme music]
What is Canon?
Welcome to Weird Stuff in the Bible, where we explore scripture passages that are bizarre, perplexing or just plain weird. This is Luke Taylor, and today we’re going to be talking about the relationship of the New Testament writers and the book of Enoch.
Some Christians cringe when they hear the term “The Book of Enoch.” And some have no idea what it even is. Some say it’s not scripture so we shouldn’t read it, that it will only confuse our faith, that it’s spiritually dangerous to engage with its material, that it was a forgery so it should be disregarded, and 99% of Christians don’t study it at all. I’d say a good portion of them have never even heard of it.
I’d like to cut through some of the misconceptions about the book of Enoch today. I’d like to make the case that there’s really no good reason NOT to study it. It doesn’t mean you have to. But a good reason to is that it’s supplemental to our understanding of the ancient world. It helps provide some context and fills in some blanks regarding biblical stories. But you don’t HAVE to read it; you can have a good, solid, rich Christian faith without ever touching the book of Enoch. But for those of us who like to dive into some of the mysterious elements of the Old Testament- or as I like to put it, for those of us who like learning about weird stuff in the Bible- the Book of Enoch is a valuable resource for our understanding, and probably something I’ll take us through in the months ahead after we finish the book of Jude.
So let me be clear: I am not claiming that Enoch is a lost book of the Bible, or that it SHOULD be considered Scripture. I believe God had a hand in guiding mankind to select which books would be considered the Word of God and which books would not. I don’t believe anything was lost. I believe Scripture is sufficient. I believe the canon is closed.
The canon are those books that are considered true Bible. Back when I was a kid, I loved the Star Wars movies. And there was a limited number of Star Wars video games. There were 6 movies. Actually, when I was younger, there were only 3 movies, but eventually we got 6 movies. One TV show. About 100 books. A handful of video games. And that was considered the canon. That was all you needed to know to know everything there was to know about Star Wars. And I knew everything there was to know.
We Star Wars nerds had our own website that catalogued all you need to know about Star Wars. You’ve probably heard of Wikipedia. But did you know about Wookieepedia? Yeah, there’s a Wookieepedia which was the magnum opus of Star Wars geekdom. And if something was truly canon, you’d find it on Wookieepedia.
And then Disney bought Star Wars in 2012, and over the next few years they announced that they were basically keeping the movies and TV show and dropping everything else. They were going to have a new canon. And new books and new shows and new games- and forget everything you think you know about Star Wars. So I was a bit disappointed in that. And then they came out with their new canon books and my wife read like a page of one of them and ever since then, she has teased me that she knows more about Star Wars than me because all my Star Wars knowledge is based on the old canon and she read a whole one page of the new canon. So officially, she knows more about Star Wars than me now. And she has NEVER let me forget it for like the past 10 years.
And Wookieepedia is like unusable now because it’s trying to keep track of two canons and now they contradict all over the place. And in my heart the original canon is always going to be the true canon. But my heart didn’t spend 4 billion dollars to buy the rights to Star Wars so it doesn’t mean much.
Anyway, God is not going to do that to us with the Bible. God has set the canon, and I believe that as Jesus said: Heaven and earth will pass away but God’s Word will never pass away. God protected His canon and made sure we got what we NEEDED.
So where does the Book of Enoch fit into all this? Enoch the book is an ancient text that’s 108 chapters long. Now that sounds like a lot, but its chapters are actually a lot shorter than a typical Bible chapter, more like 5-10 verses. The Book of Enoch is about the world of the time of Enoch and Noah. It gives a lot of detail about what was going on in the world in the centuries leading up to the flood. It has conversations with archangels. It has prophecies about the end times. It has historical information about Noah that you won’t find in Scripture. It has Enoch’s name attached to it, but there’s a lot of evidence that it had several different authors. Enoch was perhaps one of them, or at least part of it contains his words, but there were apparently lots of people who contributed more to it over the years.
So I’m going to give you a few new vocabulary words today. I already gave you “canon.” And you probably already knew that one. Here are a few more: Pseudepigrapha. Apocrypha.
Pseudepigrapha. Apocrypha.
Pseudepigrapha is a word that refers to ancient books that are forgeries. And by forgery, I mean that the book or part of the book is thought to not be actually written by the person who claimed it was. Other ancient books in this category include Jubilees, the Psalms of Solomon, the Life of Adam and Eve, and the Testament of Job.
When I say it’s a forgery: some of it may be genuine, but not all of it, and you can never really be sure how much of it is genuine and how much of it is not. So the fact that Jude quotes from Enoch means, at a bare minimum, the words that Jude quotes are genuinely from Enoch. But that doesn’t mean the entire book is.
Just like, if I quote from the encyclopedia, the entry I’m quoting might be all true, but that doesn’t mean the entire encyclopedia is true. Encyclopedias might be generally reliable, but they aren’t perfect. They can have mistakes. They can even have lies. And the books in the Pseudepigrapha have varying degrees of truth and lies. One of the reasons that the councils that put together the modern New Testament rejected Enoch is because it claimed to be written by Enoch, but they had reason to doubt that it all was. They only called it Enoch because it was mainly about Enoch, but not because it was written by him. Similar to the books of Joshua or Esther.
Another problem they had is that they didn’t not have ancient manuscripts of it in Hebrew, like they did with the rest of the Old Testament. Their oldest writings of Enoch were in Aramaic and Greek. So, the first 36 chapters of the Book of Enoch are probably what has the highest likelihood of coming from Enoch himself. This is sometimes called the Book of the Watchers.
The Book of Enoch is NOT part of something called the Apocrypha. Those are historical books from the time that the Bible was written, but they are not God’s Word. Sometimes in the past they have been included with the Bible. I think the Catholic tradition will print them with the Bible. And the Apocrypha are generally reliable. But they aren’t God’s Word, either. Books in the Apocrypha include The Wisdom of Solomon, the Letter of Jeremiah, and I and II Maccabbees.
Look, the Maccabbees books are fascinating. A great story that every Christian should know about a rebellion that took place between the Testaments. Daniel prophesied about it before it happened. It’s the origin of Hanukkah. It’s a great story. But it’s not Scripture.
And the Book of Enoch is a similar ancient work. It’s not in the Apocrypha. It’s part of Pseudepigrapha because of the mysterious origins. The Apocrypha are historical records that are generally trustworthy. The Pseudepigrapha are more of a mixed bag. The authorship is in question. Their claims are a little more far-fetched. It’s hard to know what to believe in those books. And even if they sound like they’re trying to be Scripture, they don’t meet the high standards that scholars of the past used when determining what was truly Bible.
We Christians consider Scripture to be the books that are the inspired Word of God. Scripture is infallible. It’s perfect. It’s not always translated perfectly into English, but in its original form, it’s perfect, pure and holy. You can trust anything written in the Bible.
We don’t make that claim about the book of Enoch. Here me on this: even if everything in Enoch is 100% true, that doesn’t mean it’s God’s Word. Just like I could write you a step-by-step guide on how to drive from my work to my house. The guide might be 100% true. That doesn’t mean it’s God’s Word. Because God’s Word is God’s Word. So even if everything in Enoch is 100% true, that doesn’t mean it’s God’s Word.
And it’s probably not 100% true. It probably has some mistakes, or exaggerations, or maybe even some stuff that’s totally made up. We have no idea if everything in Enoch is true. It talks about spiritual matters like conversations between angels in heaven, and we just have no idea how to determine whether it really happened or not.
They make sense and seem congruent with the Bible, but there’s no way to verify that they were legitimate prophecies or if they were made up.
The New Testament authors quote Enoch
So the word that I like to use to describe Enoch is that I say it’s “reliable.” I am not claiming that it’s the Word of God. I am not claiming that it’s perfect. But I do believe it’s reliable.
Reliable means “consistently good in quality or performance; able to be trusted.”
It’s a reliable source of information. Information about the time of Noah, and Enoch, and the flood, and the pre-flood world, and I believe it’s probably reliable in what it says about spiritual reality.
The reason I say that is that the Bible writers relied on and therefore seemed to believe in the Book of Enoch. Peter clearly believed in the book of Enoch based on I Peter 3 and II Peter 2. Jude obviously, as we quoted before. John has allusions to the Book of Enoch in Revelation. And there’s one other person in the New Testament that I’ll mention later.
So Jude quotes this book of Enoch in Jude 14 and 15, which are a prophecy about the Second Coming of Christ, when Jesus returns at the end of the tribulation, and
It says
14 It was also about these that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying, “Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his holy ones, 15 to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him.”
Now, did I say that perhaps Enoch did not write all of the book of Enoch? Yes, I did say that. This is why it’s classified as pseudepigrapha.
But did Enoch write SOME of the book of Enoch? Also yes. Or at least, some of it is his actual words. Because you have to remember something: Jude right here is speaking under inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Jude attributes this to Enoch, and he specifies which Enoch. It’s the Enoch of Genesis chapter 5, where it gives a pre-flood genealogy and Enoch is said to be the seventh person from Adam. So it is without a doubt THAT Enoch, according to the testimony of the Spirit of God.
I don’t know how Enoch’s words were preserved through history like that and how much of the Book of Enoch he had ultimately written. But we know he at least had a hand in SOME of it. And that some of his words were truly preserved for thousands of years, up until the time of Jesus, and up until today.
Does any of that mean the entire Book of Enoch could be considered scripture? No. Even Jude doesn’t cite it as scripture. Often the New Testament will use phrases like “it is written” or “the scriptures say” or “according to the scriptures” when they refer to something in the Old Testament. Something that’s actually Bible. But Jude doesn’t call Enoch’s prophecy scripture. He just refers to it as a prophecy.
It was also about these that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying
So see, there’s even a difference in how Jude is citing it. Jude’s not saying it’s supposed to be scripture. But it does mean Jude is verifying that it’s a legitimate prophecy from God. And it’s obvious that the Book of Enoch was part of the worldview of the Biblical authors.
Mailbag & Closing
And most modern Christians are missing some puzzle pieces of understanding the Old Testament because they haven’t studied the Book of Enoch. So there’s a lot about spiritual reality and the Old Testament context that modern Christians don’t know as much about as the Early Church Christians did. Because they read Scripture through an understanding of the Book of Enoch. I want us to have that understanding as well, so we’ll be looking at some of it on future episodes and how it dovetails with scripture and illuminates our understanding. And it’ll probably be soon because I’m excited to get into it.
Now, I mentioned earlier that both Peter and Jude referenced the Book of Enoch when writing their books, but there was one more person who possibly references the Book of Enoch in the New Testament, and that is Jesus Christ Himself. I was sitting in a prayer meeting a few weeks ago and, totally randomly, a woman walks up to me and says, “Did you know Jesus quoted from the book of Enoch?” I said, “No, but I’d be interested in learning more about that.” So next time, I’m going to examine this question: did Jesus quote from the book of Enoch?
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So we learned some words today. Canon. Apocrypha. Pseudepigrapha. And Wookieepedia. Also note that there are two Es in Wookiee. Not that it matters because the site is no longer worth visiting.
But now that we’ve established where Enoch’s prophecy came from, let’s not forget to look at what it means. He’s warning us to be ready for the return of Christ. To always live ready. Don’t let your life coast and plateau and drift, because when you drift, you never drift toward God. You always drift away from God. And when Jesus returns, it’s going to be bad news for the ungodly, those who never knew Christ, or those who drifted away from Him.
But Jude 17-18 give us this advice to protect ourselves from drift:
17 But you must remember, beloved, the predictions of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ. 18 They said to you, “In the last time there will be scoffers, following their own ungodly passions.”
Jude’s encouragement to us is to remember what the apostles said. When you hear other people scoffing at the idea that the return of Christ is near, or the idea that there’s going to be an end of the world, Jude says “remember what the apostles said.” What is that? The Words of the New Testament. The words of the Bible.
The apocrypha is interesting. And the Book of Enoch is interesting. But it’s not Bible. Above all else, know what the Bible says. And the Bible says to always be ready for the return of Christ. Don’t let your life drift. Ignore the scoffers. Read your Bible. Stay ready.
A solar eclipse is not supposed to make you start living ready for the return of Christ. I mean, if it does, that’s great, but that’s not what your motivation is supposed to be. If Iran attacking Israel makes you live Godly- well, that’s nice- but that’s not supposed to be the basis of our faith. It’s supposed to be “what the apostles said.” And the apostles said Enoch was watching for the coming of Christ 5,000 years ago. And you should be ready for it, too.
And if that sounds weird…
The Bible is not weird. WE are weird, because we don’t know about about Enoch’s prophecy that WASN’T in the Bible…but then Jude recorded it in his own book, so now it IS in the Bible.
Thanks for listening, God bless you for sticking around until the end, and we’ll see you next time.