Unit 13 · Enoch in the New Testament

The Letter of Jude sits just before Revelation at the end of the New Testament. It has only 25 verses. The writer calls himself Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James (Jude 1). Christian tradition has often identified him with Jude, or Judas, named in Mark 6:3 as a brother of Jesus. Some scholars accept that tradition, and others think a later writer used Jude’s name. The date is also debated.

Jude says he meant to write about the salvation his readers shared. Instead, he felt he had to warn them. Certain people had slipped into the community, he says, and were turning grace into an excuse for wrong living (Jude 3–4). To make his point, Jude reaches for well-known stories of judgment. He names Israel in the wilderness, the angels who left their place, and Sodom and Gomorrah (Jude 5–7).

Many of Jude’s examples come from the Hebrew Bible. Some do not. In verse 9 he mentions the archangel Michael arguing with the devil over the body of Moses. That scene is not in the Hebrew Bible. Early church writers said it came from a Jewish book about Moses that survives only in part. In verses 14–15, Jude quotes the Book of Enoch. Richard Bauckham’s commentary Jude, 2 Peter (1983) reads Jude as a careful user of these Jewish traditions. This makes Jude a window into the wider library of Second Temple Jewish writings.

Jude 14 introduces its quotation with a title: Enoch, the seventh from Adam. That title comes from a count. Genesis 5 lists the family line from Adam to Noah. If you count Adam as the first, Enoch is the seventh name: Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared and Enoch. Ancient readers often counted this way, and the number seven had a sense of completeness in many biblical texts.

Genesis gives Enoch only a few verses, but they are unusual. Every other man in the list lives, has children and dies. Enoch lives 365 years, and then the text says he walked with God, and he was not, for God took him (Genesis 5:24). The chapter does not say that Enoch died. Readers have wondered about that line for more than two thousand years.

Jewish writers in the Second Temple period filled in the gaps. The book we now call 1 Enoch presents itself as Enoch’s own words. It tells of journeys through heaven and of messages he carried. First Enoch also calls him the seventh from Adam (for example, 1 Enoch 60:8). When Jude uses the same title, he is speaking the language of that tradition. Many commentators on Jude treat the shared title as one sign that Jude knew 1 Enoch well.

Put Jude 14–15 beside 1 Enoch 1:9 and the match is plain. Both say the Lord comes with ten thousands of his holy ones. Both say he comes to carry out judgment on all. Both say he will convict the ungodly of their ungodly deeds and of the harsh words they have spoken against him. The order and the repeated word ’ungodly’ line up closely.

Most scholars agree that Jude is quoting 1 Enoch, not just an idea from the air. The opening chapters of 1 Enoch survive in Aramaic fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls, in Greek, and in full in Ge’ez. J. T. Milik published the Aramaic Enoch fragments from Qumran Cave 4 in The Books of Enoch (1976). Jude’s wording is closest to the Greek, though scholars still discuss exactly which form he knew. The key point is simple: Jude introduces the words with ’Enoch prophesied’.

Readers have handled this in different ways. George Nickelsburg’s commentary 1 Enoch 1 (2001) sets the Aramaic, Greek and Ge’ez forms of the book side by side, so readers can see how 1:9 was passed on. Heiser argued that Jude treated 1 Enoch as a respected guide to Genesis 6, though Jude does not call it Scripture. Some Christian readers think Jude quoted one true saying without approving the whole book. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church reads the match as support for 1 Enoch’s place in its canon.

Jude 6 describes a group of angels. They did not keep their first position, or rule, and they left their own home. So they are kept in everlasting chains under darkness until the judgment of the great day. The verse is short, but every phrase counts. The Greek word for ’first estate’ can mean an original rank or domain. The ’habitation’ is their proper dwelling place.

Genesis 6:1–4 tells of the sons of God taking human wives. It says nothing about chains or darkness. First Enoch fills in that part. In 1 Enoch 10, God tells the angel Raphael to bind Azazel and put him in darkness. He tells Michael to bind Semjaza and his companions under the earth until the day of their judgment. The Book of Jubilees tells it in a similar way: the angels are bound in the depths of the earth (Jubilees 5:6). These leaders of the Watchers are held, not destroyed.

Many commentators, Heiser among them, read Jude 6 as pointing to this Enoch story. Jude 7 supports the link, they note. It says Sodom and Gomorrah sinned ’in like manner’ and went after ’strange flesh’. That reads like a comparison with angels crossing the line between heaven and earth. Other readers see Jude 6 as a general reference to angels who rebelled, perhaps at the beginning, with no link to Genesis 6. Both readings are held by serious scholars.

Second Peter 2:4 says God did not spare the angels who sinned. The King James Version says God cast them down to hell and handed them over to chains of darkness until judgment. The English word ’hell’ hides something. The Greek verb is tartaroō, which means ’to put in Tartarus’. It appears only here in the whole New Testament.

Tartarus was a well-known word to Greek speakers. In the poet Hesiod’s Theogony, written about 700 BCE, Tartarus is a deep, dark place far below the earth. There the Titans, an older generation of gods, were locked up after losing a great war. So when 2 Peter uses this word, Greek-speaking readers would hear the idea of a prison for defeated divine beings, not a place for dead humans.

Jewish texts used the word too. The Greek text of 1 Enoch 20:2 names the angel Uriel as set over Tartarus. So 2 Peter uses a word that both Greek and Jewish readers linked with imprisoned rebel beings. Many commentators think the writer chose it on purpose for that reason. Other scholars agree the word is borrowed but say it may simply mean ’the lowest depths’, without any intended link to the Titans.

Read 2 Peter 2:4–8 as a list. First come the angels who sinned (verse 4). Next comes the flood in the days of Noah, when God kept Noah and seven others safe (verse 5). Then come Sodom and Gomorrah, and the rescue of Lot (verses 6–8). The writer uses these examples to show that God knows how to rescue the faithful and hold the wrong-doers for judgment (verse 9).

Look at the order. In Genesis, the sons of God story (Genesis 6:1–4) comes right before the flood (Genesis 6–9). Sodom comes later (Genesis 19). Second Peter follows the same sequence. Many scholars take this as a clue. Jewish writers of the time read Genesis 6 as a story about angels. Josephus, writing about 93 CE, says many angels of God joined with women and fathered sons who trusted in their own strength (Antiquities of the Jews 1.3.1).

Other readers disagree. A long Christian tradition links the fall of angels with a rebellion led by Satan before the creation of humans, or around the time of Eden. In that reading, 2 Peter 2:4 refers to that early fall, and the order of the list is not meant to point to Genesis 6. Readers of both views agree that 2 Peter uses the angels, the flood and Sodom as warnings and as signs of rescue.

First Peter was written to Christians who were being treated badly for their faith. In chapter 3, the writer encourages them with Christ’s example. Christ suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring people to God (3:18). He was put to death in the flesh but made alive in the Spirit. Then comes a surprise in verses 19–20.

In the Spirit, the text says, Christ went and preached to the spirits in prison. These spirits had disobeyed long ago, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. Only eight people were saved through water. Verse 21 links that water to baptism. Verse 22 ends with Christ in heaven at God’s right hand, with angels, authorities and powers made subject to him.

Readers have argued over these verses for a very long time. Who are the spirits? Where is the prison? When did Christ go there, and what did he preach? The Greek verb is kēryssō, which means to announce or proclaim. It does not always mean preaching a message of rescue. Keep these four questions in mind. The next two lessons look at three main answers.

In 1 Enoch 12–16, the Watchers are already bound. They ask Enoch to carry a written request to God, hoping for forgiveness. Enoch goes, and he returns with God’s answer. They will have no peace, and their request is refused. In that story, a righteous man goes to imprisoned spirits and announces God’s verdict on them. Early Christians knew this picture. Irenaeus, about 180 CE, remembered Enoch as God’s messenger to the angels (Against Heresies, book 4).

Many scholars argue that 1 Peter 3 draws on this story. The Catholic scholar William J. Dalton made the case in detail in a 1965 study. In this reading, the spirits in prison are the Watchers who sinned before the flood. Christ, like a new Enoch, goes to them and announces that he has won. They are not given a second chance. Verse 22 then shows the result: angels, authorities and powers are placed under Christ. Heiser took the same view in The Unseen Realm (2015).

This reading explains some puzzling details. The New Testament usually uses ’spirits’ for non-human beings rather than for dead people. It explains why Noah is mentioned and why the passage ends with powers made subject. Critics of this reading ask a fair question. If Peter meant Enoch or the Watchers, why did he not name them?

One reading comes from Augustine, a bishop in North Africa, who wrote about it in a letter in the early 400s. He thought the preaching happened in Noah’s own time. Christ, by his Spirit, spoke through Noah to the people of that day. They did not listen, and so they are now ’in prison’. Some later Protestant scholars have followed this reading, which does not need 1 Enoch at all.

A second reading is often called the harrowing of hell. Here, between his death and resurrection, Christ went down to the realm of the dead. There he announced the good news to the people who had died, including those of Noah’s time. Readers often point to 1 Peter 4:6, which says the gospel was preached to the dead. The Apostles’ Creed says Christ ’descended into hell’, which many churches understand in this way. Eastern Orthodox icons of the resurrection often show Christ pulling Adam and Eve from their graves.

So there are three main readings: preaching through Noah, preaching to the dead, and proclaiming victory to the Watchers. Each has strong points and hard questions. Scholars still disagree, and all three are held by careful readers today. Knowing all three helps you see why 1 Peter 3 is called one of the hardest passages in the New Testament.

A canon is the list of books a community treats as its Scripture. The New Testament canon took shape over several centuries. Some books were accepted early and almost everywhere. Others were questioned for a time. Jude was one of the questioned books. So were 2 Peter, James, 2 and 3 John and Revelation, for different reasons.

Eusebius, a church historian writing about 325 CE, grouped Jude among the ’disputed’ books. They were known and read by many, but not accepted by everyone. Jerome, the scholar who translated the Bible into Latin, wrote in 393 CE that many rejected Jude because it quoted Enoch, a book not in Scripture. He added that Jude had gained authority by its age and use, and was counted with the holy books.

In the end, Jude stayed in the New Testament of every major church. Most churches did not add 1 Enoch. This history shows a tension. Early readers noticed that Jude valued Enoch’s book, and that bothered some of them. Yet they kept Jude. Annette Yoshiko Reed traces this history in Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity (2005). She follows how Jews and Christians first valued the Watchers story and how many later set it aside.

Quoting a book is not the same as calling it Scripture. Paul quotes Greek poets in Acts 17:28 and Titus 1:12, yet no church put those poets in the Bible. Many readers apply the same rule to Jude and 1 Enoch. Others note that Jude says Enoch ’prophesied’, a word he does not use lightly. Around 200 CE, the North African writer Tertullian argued that the Book of Enoch should be respected, partly because Jude quotes it.

Judaism did not include 1 Enoch in the Hebrew Bible, and most churches followed. The Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Protestant canons all leave it out. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Eritrean Orthodox Church are different. Their canon includes 1 Enoch, and Jubilees as well. That is why the full text survived in Ge’ez, copied by hand in monasteries for centuries.

In 1773 the Scottish traveler James Bruce brought Ge’ez copies of 1 Enoch to Europe. English translations followed, including R. H. Charles’s in 1917. Then the Dead Sea Scrolls showed that Jews in the Second Temple period had read Enoch in Aramaic. Today scholars such as George Nickelsburg and James VanderKam, who published a new translation in 2004, study 1 Enoch as a key witness to Jewish thought in the time of Jesus, whether or not a church counts it as Scripture.

Ephesians 1:20–21 says God raised Christ and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places. He is far above all rule, authority, power and dominion, and every name that is named. Colossians 1:16 says all things were created through him, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones, dominions, rulers or authorities. Paul returns to the same set of words again and again.

Behind the English stand Greek words. Archai means rulers or beginnings; the King James Version says ’principalities’. Exousiai means authorities, often translated ’powers’. Dynameis means powers or mighty ones. Kyriotētes means dominions or lordships, and thronoi means thrones. Every one of these words was also used for human government. They describe someone by the rank or territory they control.

Jewish writings from near Paul’s time use the same kind of words for heavenly beings. In the Parables of Enoch, 1 Enoch 61:10 lists the angels of power and the angels of principalities among God’s host (R. H. Charles, 1917). Walter Wink, in Naming the Powers (1984), showed that Paul’s power words name both human offices and unseen beings. Clinton E. Arnold, in Powers of Darkness (1992), argued that Paul’s first readers heard them as names for spirit beings. Some scholars link them to the divine council.

Ephesians 6:12 is Paul’s most famous list of powers. It says the struggle is not against flesh and blood. It is against rulers, against authorities, against the world-rulers of this darkness and against spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. The King James Version says ’high places’. The Greek phrase is the same one Ephesians uses for where Christ is seated (1:20).

One word here is rare. Kosmokratores means world-rulers. It appears only here in the New Testament. In Greek writings of the time it could describe powerful gods thought to rule the world. So Ephesians is describing beings, not only human leaders. The very next verses talk about truth, righteousness, peace, faith and the word of God, pictured as armor. The passage calls on readers to stand firm.

Some scholars, such as Clinton E. Arnold, read this verse as describing personal spiritual rulers who oppose God’s people. Other readers point out that the letter also has plenty to say about human life: families, work and the way people treat each other. Many see the passage as describing both unseen powers and their effects on human life. It is a call to stand firm, not a set of steps or rituals.

Romans 8 ends with one of Paul’s best-known passages. He says he is convinced that nothing can separate believers from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Then he gives a list: death, life, angels, rulers, things present, things to come, powers, height, depth, and anything else in all creation. The list moves from the biggest human experiences to the whole unseen world.

Some words in the list are easy to read. Death and life, present and future, need little explanation. Others are harder. ’Height’ and ’depth’ were words sometimes used in ancient star-watching for the highest and lowest points of the stars in the sky. Some scholars think Paul had those ideas in mind. Others think he simply meant ’anything above or below’. Either way, Paul’s point is that nothing anywhere is strong enough to break God’s love.

For many readers, the list shows how Paul saw the unseen world. Angels, rulers and powers were real to Paul, and some of them opposed God. Yet Paul places them all under the phrase ’any other created thing’. They are creatures, not rivals equal to God. Readers who take the powers in other ways still see Romans 8 as a statement of comfort. It is meant to steady people, not to make them afraid.

Deuteronomy 32:8 says that when the Most High divided the nations, he set their borders by a number. In the traditional Hebrew text, the Masoretic Text, the number matches the ’sons of Israel’. But a Hebrew manuscript from the Dead Sea Scrolls reads ’sons of God’. The ancient Greek translation, the Septuagint, has ’angels of God’. Many scholars, Heiser included, think ’sons of God’ was the earlier reading.

Scholars of the divine council, such as E. Theodore Mullen in The Divine Council in Canaanite and Early Hebrew Literature (1980) and Mark S. Smith in The Origins of Biblical Monotheism (2001), compare this verse with the Ugaritic tablets. There the high god El leads an assembly of gods called his sons. In the Bible, Deuteronomy 4:19 and 32:17 say other nations served other beings. Psalm 82 pictures God judging the gods. Daniel 10 names a prince of Persia and a prince of Greece.

Heiser built much of his work on this reading. He argued that God placed the nations under lesser divine beings after Babel but kept Israel as his own, and that Paul read his Bible with this picture in mind. On this view, Paul’s rulers and authorities are those same beings, now in rebellion. That would explain Paul’s words of territory and rule. Some scholars accept this link. Others think Paul’s words are more general, or that he mainly meant human and social powers.

In Corinth, a Greek city, meat was often sacrificed at temples before it was sold or served. Christians there asked Paul whether they could eat it. In 1 Corinthians 8 and 10, Paul answers carefully. An idol is nothing, he says, just carved wood or stone. But then he adds something in 10:20. What the nations sacrifice, they sacrifice to daimonia, not to God, and he does not want believers to share with them.

Paul is echoing Deuteronomy 32:17. That verse says Israel sacrificed to shedim, not to God, to gods they had not known. The Septuagint translates shedim with the Greek daimonia. Paul uses the same Greek word. The King James Version translates it ’devils’ in both places. Modern translations usually say ’demons’. In Paul’s world, daimonia could mean any lesser spiritual beings.

The Septuagint says the same thing another way in Psalm 95:5 (Psalm 96:5 in Hebrew numbering): all the gods of the nations are daimonia. Some scholars read Paul’s echo as showing that he took the gods of the nations to be real spiritual beings, lesser than God. The idol itself was nothing, but something stood behind it. Other scholars agree Paul is quoting Deuteronomy but read it more simply. Paul’s main point, they say, is loyalty: believers cannot share two tables at once (10:21).

In 1 Corinthians 2:6–8, Paul speaks of a hidden wisdom of God. He says none of the rulers of this age understood it. If they had, he says, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. The Greek word for rulers here is archontes. The same word can mean human officials or spiritual rulers. Paul adds that these rulers are ’passing away’ or ’coming to nothing’ (2:6).

One reading says the rulers are the humans who took part in the crucifixion: Pilate, Herod and the temple leaders. Acts 4:26–27 uses ’rulers’ this way, naming Herod and Pontius Pilate. A second reading says the rulers are spiritual powers. A third reading holds both. It says spiritual powers worked through human officials. Many scholars today take one of the last two views.

Many scholars hold the spiritual reading. The powers, they argue, did not understand God’s plan. They thought killing Jesus would be their victory, but the cross was their defeat. An early Christian writer read it in a similar way. Ignatius of Antioch, writing about 110 CE, said Mary’s virginity, her child and the Lord’s death were hidden from the ruler of this age (Letter to the Ephesians 19). Readers who favor the human reading point to how ’rulers’ is used in the Gospels and Acts.

First Corinthians 11:2–16 is about how men and women should appear when they pray or prophesy in the gathered church. The passage deals with head coverings and hair, and it is debated on many points. Verse 10 adds a short, puzzling reason. A woman ought to have authority, or a sign of authority, on her head ’because of the angels’. Paul does not explain what he means.

Readers have offered several answers. Around 200 CE, Tertullian linked the phrase to the angels of Genesis 6 who were drawn to human women. Heiser argued for a reading in the same direction. In Reversing Hermon (2017), he connected the phrase to the Watchers story and its concern about the boundary between heaven and earth. Other scholars think of angels as present in worship. Some Dead Sea Scrolls describe angels as joining the community’s gathering, so good order mattered.

Still other readers focus on the Greek word exousia, ’authority’. They read verse 10 as saying the woman herself has authority over her own head. The whole passage is sensitive. It deals with gender roles, and churches today apply it in very different ways. Some keep head coverings in worship, and many do not. A careful reader can lay out each view of ’because of the angels’ without deciding the wider questions for anyone else.

In Galatians 4:3, Paul says that before Christ came, ’we’ were enslaved under the stoicheia of the world. In 4:9 he calls them weak and poor, and asks the Galatians why they want to be enslaved to them again. Colossians 2:8 and 2:20 use the same word. The King James Version says ’elements’ or ’rudiments’. Some modern translations say ’elemental spirits’. The translation depends on the reading.

Stoicheia is a Greek word for things in a row, like the letters of the alphabet. It can mean basic principles, the ABCs of a subject. It can mean the physical elements, which Greeks listed as earth, water, air and fire. By the early centuries CE, some writers also used it for spiritual beings linked to the elements or the stars. So there are three main readings: basic principles, physical elements, or spiritual powers.

Galatians 4:8 is often part of the debate. There Paul says the Galatians once served beings that by nature are not gods. Readers who see the stoicheia as spiritual beings, as the divine-council reading tends to, connect 4:8 with 4:9. They see Paul describing the powers behind the nations’ religions. Readers who favor ’basic principles’ note that Paul is talking about the law and religious calendars in 4:10. Scholars have not reached one answer.

In the twentieth century, scholars argued a great deal about Paul’s powers. The Dutch theologian Hendrikus Berkhof, in Christ and the Powers (1953 in Dutch), read them as the structures that hold society together. These include the state, tradition, morality and religion. They can serve people or trap them. The British scholar G. B. Caird’s Principalities and Powers (1956) also explored how the powers relate to law and government.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the American scholar Walter Wink wrote a series of books starting with Naming the Powers (1984). Wink read the powers as the inner spirit of institutions, such as a company, a nation or an army. In 1992, Clinton E. Arnold’s Powers of Darkness argued the other way. He said Paul’s first readers understood the powers as personal spiritual beings, as many Jewish writings of that time did.

A third line of reading ties the powers to the Hebrew Bible’s gods of the nations. Michael Heiser’s The Unseen Realm (2015) linked them to Deuteronomy 32 and the divine council. Many readers now combine views. They hold that Paul meant spiritual beings, and that those beings work through human systems. Knowing these options helps you see what is at stake in each reading.

Colossians 2:13–15 describes what the writer says God did through the cross. It speaks of forgiveness and of a record of debt canceled and nailed to the cross. Then verse 15 turns to the powers. God disarmed the rulers and authorities, made a public show of them and triumphed over them in it. The King James Version says ’spoiled’, an old word meaning ’stripped’.

The picture comes from Roman life. After a big victory, a Roman general could hold a triumph, a parade through Rome. The defeated leaders were led along, stripped of their weapons, for all to see. The Greek verb in Colossians 2:15, thriambeuō, means to lead in such a triumph. The same verb appears in 2 Corinthians 2:14. The image is surprising. A cross was a sign of shame, but here it becomes a victory parade.

Readers who take the powers as spiritual beings link this verse with 1 Corinthians 2:8. The cross, which looked like the powers’ win, was their loss. Other readers stress that Colossians places this victory next to forgiveness, so the defeat of the powers and the canceling of debt belong together. Readers in the line of Berkhof and Wink see the cross as exposing unjust human systems. All agree the verse pictures a public reversal.

Ephesians 3 describes a mystery now revealed. The mystery is that non-Jewish people, the nations, now share fully in God’s promise with Israel (3:6). Then 3:10 says something striking. Through the church, God’s many-sided wisdom is now made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. The church itself becomes a message to the powers.

Readers who follow the divine-council reading of Deuteronomy 32:8–9 read this verse against it. If God had placed the nations under lesser beings after Babel, then Jews and non-Jews joining together would be a sign. The nations were being reclaimed. On this view, the powers see their territories won back, not by force, but by people from every nation joining one family. Luke tells a similar story of nations in Acts 2, where people from many lands hear one message.

Other readers stress the human side of Ephesians. For them, the key is peace between Jews and non-Jews, who had been divided (2:14–16). The powers are the audience, but the reconciled community is the point. Readers of many views can agree that Ephesians links the unseen realm with a very visible community. It pictures ordinary people from different nations sharing meals, worship and life.