Unit 17 · How the Story Was Received, and Capstone

Jubilees is a Jewish book that retells Genesis and the start of Exodus, written around the 100s BCE. Chapter 4 says that in the days of Jared, angels of the Lord called the Watchers came down to earth. Their task, it says, was to teach people and to do justice. Chapter 5 then tells that these angels took human wives, and that their children were giants. So Jubilees gives the Watchers a good first mission that went wrong.

That is a real difference from 1 Enoch 6. In 1 Enoch, the Watchers desire human women while still in heaven and swear an oath on Mount Hermon. In Jubilees, they come down for a good reason and fall later. Both books build on Genesis 6:1–4, and both fill in what Genesis leaves out. Comparing retellings like these is how scholars trace the reception of a text: how later readers took it up and reshaped it.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, found near Qumran from 1947 on, show how widely the story was read. Among them are Aramaic copies of parts of 1 Enoch, which J. T. Milik published in The Books of Enoch (1976). There are also pieces of a Book of Giants, studied by Loren T. Stuckenbruck in The Book of Giants from Qumran (1997). The Damascus Document, another scroll text, briefly recalls that the Watchers of heaven fell.

The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs present the last words of Jacob’s twelve sons to their children. Each son gives moral advice drawn from his own life. Scholars debate their date and origin. The form we have was shaped by Christian hands, but it likely keeps older Jewish material. For that reason, readers treat them as a witness to how the Watchers story traveled, but not as a fixed early date.

Chapter 5 of the Testament of Reuben uses the story as a warning. It says that before the flood, the Watchers were drawn to human women. It adds a new detail. The Watchers, it says, changed into the shape of men and appeared to the women. The children born were giants. Reuben uses the story to warn his sons about desire and self-control.

Modern readers have noticed what this retelling changes. 1 Enoch places the fault with the Watchers, who plan the deed and swear an oath. The Testament of Reuben turns the story toward the women and toward human behavior. Scholars read this as a sign of the book’s moral aims and of attitudes of its time. A careful paper reports this shift plainly and names the passage, without treating one retelling as the whole tradition.

Josephus was a Jewish historian who wrote in Greek in Rome in the late first century CE. In his Antiquities of the Jews, book 1, he retells Genesis 6. He says that many angels of God joined with women and had sons who were proud and unjust. He adds that the stories told of them are like what the Greeks tell of their giants. Noah, he says, urged them to change, and then left the land.

Josephus writes for Greek and Roman readers, so he links the story to their own giant tales. That shows two things. He reads the sons of God as angels, as 1 Enoch does. And he expects his readers to find such a story believable. William Whiston’s English translation of 1737 made Josephus widely read in English.

Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish thinker of the early first century CE, took another path. In his short work On the Giants, he reads Genesis 6 as allegory: a story whose details stand for spiritual ideas. What philosophers call spirits, he says, Moses calls angels. Some souls rise toward God; others sink into the body’s pleasures. For Philo the passage teaches about the soul’s choices. He does not treat it mainly as history.

The church fathers are the early Christian writers whose works shaped later teaching. Justin Martyr wrote in Rome around the 150s CE. In chapter 5 of his Second Apology, a defense of Christians addressed to Roman readers, he retells Genesis 6. God, he says, gave angels the care of people and of things under heaven. But the angels broke that charge. They loved human women and had children, and those children, he says, are the ones called demons.

Justin goes on to say these beings led people into fear and into offering sacrifices. He uses the story to explain the gods of the Roman world. That is close to the path of 1 Enoch, which links the giants to evil spirits. Stuckenbruck, in The Myth of Rebellious Angels (2014), and Archie T. Wright, in The Origin of Evil Spirits (2005), both study how this link between the Watchers and evil spirits grew in early Jewish writings.

Irenaeus of Lyon, writing Against Heresies around 180 CE, also mentions angels who sinned by mixing with humankind before the flood. Neither writer presents this as a new idea. Both assume their readers know it. That fits what the English translations in the Ante-Nicene Fathers series (1885–87) show: in the second century, the angel reading was the common one among Christian writers.

Tertullian was a Christian writer in Carthage, in North Africa, around 200 CE. In On the Apparel of Women, book 1, he writes about the angels who came down to women. He says, following 1 Enoch, that they brought people knowledge of metals, dyes and ornaments. He uses this to argue for simple dress.

In chapter 3 of that book, he stops to defend his source. He knows that some Christians do not accept the Scripture of Enoch, as he calls it, because it is not in the Jewish canon. He answers in three ways. Noah, he says, could have kept Enoch’s writings through the flood. The book speaks of Christ, so Christians should not set it aside. And Jude, an apostle, cites Enoch as a witness.

Tertullian’s defense is useful because it shows a debate in progress. By 200 CE, the book’s place was already questioned. Its canon status, whether it belonged in Scripture, was not settled among Christians. Tertullian argued for it. Others argued against it. The Ethiopian church, in time, kept it. Most other churches did not.

Julius Africanus was a Christian scholar who wrote a history of the world, the Chronography, finished in the early 200s CE. The full work is lost. Pieces survive because later writers quoted them, especially the Byzantine chronicler George Syncellus, around 800 CE. The Ante-Nicene Fathers series gives these fragments in English.

In one fragment, Africanus notes that some copies of Genesis read angels of God in Genesis 6:2. He offers a different reading. The sons of God, he says, are the descendants of Seth, called righteous. The daughters of men are from the line of Cain. This is the Sethite view. He does allow that, if angels are meant, they would be the ones who taught magic and other arts.

The Sethite view draws on Genesis itself. Genesis 4 lists Cain’s family, and Genesis 5 lists Seth’s. Genesis 4:26 says that in Seth’s day people began to call on the name of the LORD. Readers who hold the Sethite view see Genesis 6 as the mixing of these two lines. Readers who hold the angel view answer that sons of God names heavenly beings elsewhere, as in Job 1:6.

Augustine was bishop of Hippo, in North Africa. He wrote The City of God over many years, finishing it in the 420s CE. In book 15, chapter 23, he takes up Genesis 6. He admits that many people report spirits troubling women, and he does not simply deny such reports. But he concludes that the sons of God in Genesis were men of Seth’s line, who fell from goodness by marrying outside it.

Augustine also speaks about Enoch’s book. He grants that Enoch wrote some things by divine inspiration, since Jude says so. But he says the writings under Enoch’s name are left out of the canon because they are too old and their origin cannot be proven. In this way he sets 1 Enoch aside without calling Jude wrong.

Augustine’s influence was very large in the western church. In the Greek-speaking east, John Chrysostom also preached against the angel reading. After them, the Sethite view became the main Christian reading for many centuries. Many Christian readers still hold it today, and others have returned to the angel reading. Both have long histories, and the dates in the table below show how the balance shifted.

A targum is an Aramaic translation of Scripture, read in synagogues where many people spoke Aramaic. Targum Onqelos, the standard targum of the Torah, renders Genesis 6:2 as the sons of the great ones. That choice moves the verse away from angels. It points instead to powerful human men.

Genesis Rabbah is a rabbinic commentary on Genesis, compiled in the land of Israel around the 400s CE. In chapter 26 it records the view of Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai, a second-century teacher. He read sons of God as sons of judges, and he strongly rejected calling them sons of God in the sense of heavenly beings. Scholars call this the royal view: the sin was the misuse of power by rulers.

Not every Jewish source took this path. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, a later Aramaic translation whose final form most scholars date well after Onqelos, adds a line at Genesis 6:4. It says that Shemhazai and Azael fell from heaven and were on the earth in those days. These are close to the names of Watcher leaders in 1 Enoch. So older traditions about the Watchers lived on in some Jewish writings, even after the rabbis’ main reading turned away from them.

Outside Ethiopia, 1 Enoch slowly dropped out of use. Only pieces survived: quotations in George Syncellus around 800 CE, and a Greek copy of chapters 1–32 found at Akhmim in Egypt in 1886–87. The whole book survived in Ge'ez, the classical language of Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church keeps 1 Enoch in its canon, as does the Eritrean Orthodox church. There it was copied, read and honored for centuries.

In 1773 the Scottish traveler James Bruce brought Ge’ez copies of 1 Enoch back to Europe. Richard Laurence published the first English translation in 1821. R. H. Charles published his translation in 1893 and a revised one in 1912. The 1917 edition of Charles’s work, used in this course, carried the book to many English readers.

The story took one more turn in the twentieth century. Aramaic fragments of 1 Enoch were found at Qumran, and J. T. Milik published them in 1976. They showed that parts of the book were read in Aramaic before the time of Jesus. So a book that Europeans once knew only from Ethiopia turned out to be an early Jewish work, kept whole by an African church.

The texts in this chapter show a pattern. Early Jewish writings and second-century Christians used the Watchers story widely. By the 400s CE, both the rabbis and leading church writers had turned to other readings. Yet the story never fully vanished. It lived on in Ethiopia, in Byzantine chronicles and in later Jewish tales.

Annette Yoshiko Reed studies this history in Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity (2005). She argues against a simple account in which Jews rejected the story and Christians kept it. Instead, she traces how both communities used it, argued over it and set it aside at different times and for different reasons. The story’s changes, in her reading, track how each community was defining itself.

Other researchers add to the picture. Loren T. Stuckenbruck, in The Myth of Rebellious Angels (2014), studies how the story shaped Jewish and early Christian thinking about evil spirits. The Qumran finds and new translations then brought the story back into scholarly view in the twentieth century. This whole field of study is called reception history: following a text through the readers who received it.

In 1976 the writer Zecharia Sitchin published The 12th Planet. He claimed that Sumerian tablets describe the Anunnaki as beings from a hidden planet called Nibiru who came to earth and shaped humankind. His books helped spread ancient-astronaut theory: the claim that visitors from space, remembered as gods, shaped early human history. Some later writers tied this to the Nephilim of Genesis 6.

The tablets themselves are written in cuneiform, wedge-shaped signs pressed into clay. Specialists who read them find the Anunnaki as a group of gods of heaven and the underworld, not as space travelers. Nibiru, in Babylonian texts, names a heavenly body seen in the sky and linked with the god Marduk. Michael Heiser, trained in ancient Semitic languages, was one of several scholars who answered Sitchin in detail. He posted his answers online so readers could compare them with the tablets.

Real scholarship does compare the Watchers with Mesopotamian texts. Amar Annus, in On the Origin of Watchers (2010), argues that 1 Enoch’s teaching Watchers echo Mesopotamian traditions of the apkallu, wise sages who brought skills to humankind. That is a claim about how texts borrow from other texts, and it can be checked against both. The test for any claim is the same: does it match what the documents say?

A popular claim says giants built the pyramids of Egypt. Start with the facts. The Great Pyramid at Giza was built for the king Khufu, around 2560 BCE. Archaeologists have excavated the town, bakeries and tombs of the Egyptian workers who built the Giza pyramids. Genesis never mentions a pyramid. Neither does 1 Enoch, Jubilees, Josephus or any church father in this chapter.

Where the Bible does speak of tall peoples, it places them in Canaan and nearby. Numbers 13 names the Anakim at Hebron. Deuteronomy 2–3 mentions the Rephaim, and says the bed of Og, king of Bashan, measured nine cubits long. A careful paper states what these texts say and where they set their stories. It does not add places the texts never name.

Even the Bible’s most famous giant shows why checking manuscripts matters. The Masoretic Text, the standard Hebrew text, gives Goliath’s height as six cubits and a span, about nine and a half feet. A Dead Sea Scroll of Samuel and the Septuagint give four cubits and a span, about six and a half feet. A cubit was about eighteen inches. Careful readers compare the witnesses before repeating a number.

Every capstone starts with a research question: the single question your paper sets out to answer. Some questions are too big, such as What is the unseen realm? Others cannot be answered from texts at all, such as Are angels real? A strong question points to specific passages, has more than one serious answer, and can be argued from evidence a reader can check.

Compare two versions. Weak: What did ancient people think about giants? Strong: Who are the sons of God in Genesis 6:1–4? The second names a passage, has at least three well-known readings, and lets you gather evidence from Genesis, 1 Enoch, the New Testament and later interpreters. The limits of a question are called its scope. A narrow scope lets you go deep.

Your answer to the question is your thesis: one sentence you will defend. In this course a thesis is about what a text says or how a reader interprets it, not about what anyone should believe. The Dead Sea Scroll reading of Deuteronomy 32:8 is older than the Masoretic reading is a thesis you can test. The Bible is true or false is not, and it is not the work of this paper.

Question one: Who are the sons of God in Genesis 6? 1 Enoch, Jubilees and Josephus read them as heavenly beings. Julius Africanus and Augustine read them as Seth’s line, and Genesis Rabbah as judges or nobles. Question two: What does Deuteronomy 32:8 say in the oldest copies? The Masoretic Text reads sons of Israel, while a Dead Sea Scroll reads sons of God.

Question three: Is 1 Peter 3:19 about the Watchers? The verse says Christ preached to the spirits in prison, who disobeyed in the days of Noah. Many modern commentators read these as the imprisoned angels of Genesis 6, as 1 Enoch describes them. Others read the verse as Christ speaking through Noah to the people of his day, or as a message to the dead.

Question four: What did Jesus do at Caesarea Philippi, at the foot of Mount Hermon? Heiser, in Reversing Hermon (2017), traced a motif, a repeated image or theme, from 1 Enoch’s Hermon to Matthew 16. Other readers see the setting as simply where the scene took place. Question five: Where do demons come from in 1 Enoch and in the Gospels? 1 Enoch 15 answers; the Gospels do not say. Whichever you pick, write down the key passages before you read any commentary.

Genesis 6:1–4 is only four verses long. It says the sons of God saw that human daughters were beautiful and took wives, and it mentions the Nephilim and the mighty men of old. It does not name the sons of God, explain where they came from or tell what happened next. Every reader has to fill in something.

1 Enoch fills in a great deal. It is a collection of Jewish writings, with its oldest parts dating to the 200s BCE or earlier. Aramaic fragments of it were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Its first part, the Book of the Watchers (chapters 1–36), tells that two hundred Watchers, angels of heaven, came down on the summit of Mount Hermon, led by Semjaza, and bound themselves by an oath.

For a capstone, 1 Enoch is evidence of interpretation. It shows how some Jewish writers read Genesis 6 in the centuries before Jesus. Nickelsburg’s commentary, 1 Enoch 1 (2001), studies chapters 6–11 as one of the earliest expansions of Genesis 6, and many researchers agree it is a key early witness. 1 Enoch is part of the Bible only in the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox churches. Other traditions read it as an ancient book outside Scripture.

Deuteronomy 32:8 describes God dividing the nations and setting their borders. The Masoretic Text says he set them according to the number of the sons of Israel. The King James Version follows it. But a Dead Sea Scroll copy of Deuteronomy, known as 4QDeut-j, reads sons of God. Many Septuagint manuscripts read angels of God, and some read sons of God.

Comparing such witnesses to find the most likely original wording is called textual criticism. Many textual critics judge sons of God to be the older reading. They think later scribes likely changed it to avoid any hint of other heavenly beings sharing in God’s rule. Several modern translations now print sons of God in this verse, with a note.

Researchers who accept that reading still build different pictures on it. Mark S. Smith, in The Origins of Biblical Monotheism (2001), reads verses 8–9 as a trace of an older view in which the Most High and the LORD were once distinct. Heiser, in The Unseen Realm (2015), reads them as one God who placed the nations under lesser heavenly beings and kept Israel for himself. Readers who prefer the Masoretic reading link the verse instead to the seventy nations of Genesis 10.

Three short New Testament passages matter for the Watchers question. 2 Peter 2:4 says God did not spare the angels who sinned but held them in chains of darkness for judgment. The Greek verb there is built on Tartarus, the name Greek writers gave to the deepest prison of the underworld. Jude 6 says angels who left their proper dwelling are kept in chains under darkness.

Jude 14–15 goes further. It says that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied that the Lord comes with ten thousands of his holy ones to judge. These words closely match 1 Enoch 1:9, and researchers broadly agree on the link. Richard Bauckham’s commentary, Jude, 2 Peter (1983), studies how Jude draws on 1 Enoch. Readers differ over what the quotation means: some say Jude treated the book as authoritative, others that he quoted a text his readers valued, as Paul once quoted Greek poets.

These passages matter for 1 Peter 3:19. If 2 Peter and Jude speak of sinning angels held in chains, then the spirits in prison of 1 Peter could be the same beings. Many modern commentators read it that way, and some read Christ’s preaching as a proclamation of victory over them. Other readers hold that 1 Peter speaks of Christ speaking through Noah, and the link to Jude is a separate question.

Mount Hermon is the tallest mountain in the region, on the northern edge of ancient Israel. 1 Enoch 6 places the Watchers’ descent on its summit. At its foot lay the town of Caesarea Philippi, known for a cave shrine to the Greek god Pan. Matthew 16:13–18 sets a famous scene there. Jesus asks his disciples who he is, and Peter answers that he is the Christ.

Jesus then speaks of building his church, and says the gates of hell, in Greek the gates of Hades, will not prevail against it. In Reversing Hermon (2017), Heiser argued that the setting was chosen on purpose. Near a mountain linked with rebellion in 1 Enoch and a shrine to another god, Jesus announces a new community that the powers of death cannot hold back. He also thought the high mountain of the Transfiguration, in the next chapter, was Hermon.

Other readers weigh this differently. An old Christian tradition places the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, in Galilee. Many scholars read the gates of Hades as the power of death in general, without a link to the Watchers. A capstone on this question should state each reading in full, then show where Matthew’s text supports it and where it is silent.

A fair paper states an argument so well that the person who made it would agree with the summary. Some call this the charitable reading: presenting a view at its strongest before you weigh it. That means giving a researcher’s main texts, reasons and conclusion, not a weaker version that is easy to knock down. The capstone asks you to do this for at least two researchers.

Here is an example for Genesis 6. Nickelsburg, in his 1 Enoch commentary (2001), reads 1 Enoch 6–11 as an early expansion of Genesis 6:1–4 that uses the story to speak about violence and evil in its own day. Heiser, in The Unseen Realm (2015), argues that sons of God names heavenly beings, as in Job 1:6 and 38:7. He places the passage in a wider biblical theme of heavenly rebellion.

Notice what the example does. It names each source and year. It uses verbs like reads and argues, which keep each idea attached to its author. It gives the evidence, so readers can check it. It does not quote either book, because modern books are under copyright; it puts their ideas in your own words, and that is the right way to handle them.

A capstone must also present the main readings you do not hold. For Genesis 6, the Sethite view is the best known in Christian history. Julius Africanus offered it in the early 200s, and Augustine, in The City of God 15.23 around 420 CE, made it the leading reading. The sons of God are the godly line of Seth and the daughters of men the line of Cain. The sin was a mixing of faithful and unfaithful families.

Jewish tradition offers another reading. Genesis Rabbah 26, a rabbinic commentary compiled around the 400s CE, records the view that the sons of God were sons of judges. Targum Onqelos, an Aramaic translation, reads sons of the great ones. This is often called the royal view: the sin was powerful men taking whomever they wished.

Each reading has reasons. The Sethite view fits Genesis 4–5, where Cain’s and Seth’s lines are listed. The royal view fits the ancient practice of calling rulers sons of a god. The angel reading fits Job and 1 Enoch. A fair paper states each reading’s best evidence, then weighs them, using the same criteria for all.

Once the readings are stated, weigh them. Four questions help. How old are the witnesses for each reading? How well does each reading fit the passage’s own context? How early do other readers support it? And how much of the evidence does it explain without strain? A reading that explains more evidence, more simply, has a stronger case.

Apply these to Genesis 6. The heavenly-beings reading has early witnesses: 1 Enoch, parts of which date to the 200s BCE or earlier, and the Septuagint tradition that renders Nephilim as giants. The Sethite view appears later, in Christian writers such as Julius Africanus and Augustine. Supporters of the Sethite view answer that it fits the family lists in Genesis 4–5 and avoids reading angels as able to marry.

Weighing is not the same as deciding what is true about God or the unseen world. It is a judgment about which reading best explains a text. Your conclusion can be firm, measured or open: the evidence favors, the evidence is divided, or more study is needed. Each can be a strong conclusion if it follows honestly from what you have shown.

A clear paper follows a simple order. The introduction states the question and your thesis. The body presents the key passages and what they say. Next come the readings: at least two researchers’, such as Reed and Stuckenbruck on the Watchers’ later history, each with its evidence. Then the weighing. Last, the conclusion restates the thesis and says how firmly the evidence supports it.

A strong paper includes a counterargument: the best case against your thesis, answered fairly. If you argue that 1 Peter 3:19 refers to the Watchers, give the strongest case for the Noah reading, then explain why you still hold your view, or why the question stays open. Readers trust a writer who faces the hard evidence.

Every citation names the text and the translation. Write Genesis 6:4, King James Version (1611), or 1 Enoch 6:6, R. H. Charles (1917), or Reed, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity (2005), paraphrased. Quote only public-domain translations exactly, and mark everything else as a paraphrase. Never invent a page number, quotation or statistic.

Your audience may include classmates who are Christian, Jewish, of another faith or of none. Some may hold one of the readings you present; some may never have heard of any of them. A good presentation lets all of them follow the evidence. It uses neutral language: words that report a view without mocking it or pushing the listener to adopt it.

Attribution does most of the work. Say Nickelsburg reads, Augustine read, Genesis Rabbah records, 1 Enoch tells. Avoid we for any faith, and avoid telling listeners what they should believe. Show the key passages on screen with their translation, so everyone reads the same words. Speak slowly, and keep each slide to one idea.

Questions from the audience are part of the work. If someone disagrees, thank them and ask which text or witness they would weigh differently. That turns a disagreement into a shared look at the evidence. Showing respectful disagreement suits this subject: the texts are old, the readings are many, and careful people still reach different conclusions.