Jewish scripture occasionally refers to supernatural beings, like angels, like seraphim, like cherubim, like demons, but it doesn't really, or the watchers is another one. Is that the jinn? No. That's different. That's Islam?
Yeah, that comes along. That's about 600 years after. Beck Lover somewhere is like, f*** Julian. Yeah, no, the jinn are a separate thing. They're good and bad jinn.
They're not even this sort of. category. But so you have these things mentioned in the Old Testament, but they're never really explained.
And so within this 400 year period between the Old and the New Testament, the Jews are like, okay, what do we think of this? How are we to understand these supernatural beings that are created by God that exist in some sort of parallel world in the unseen realm, and they're interacting with one another. They have different forms and functions.
So one of the issues is that we often refer to a bunch of these things as angels. Angel is not what the thing is. It's what the thing does. So malach in the Hebrew or angelos in the Greek means messenger.
So it is not a description of its ontology, what it is. It's a description of what it does. Got it. These are supernatural beings who go and they communicate messages to people. They're in some sort of relation in terms of their supernaturalness to other creatures like the seraphim and like the cherubim, who are supernatural divine throne guardians, which was a concept that was not foreign to the ancient world.
You have Lamassu, which are the winged bulls with the human heads in Babylon, and you have sphinxes in Egyptian and Hellenistic culture. These were just concepts that existed within the ancient world. The gods have throne guardians. And within biblical Judaism, these are the seraphim, and they are the cherubim. So sometimes you'll see those memes, the biblically accurate angels.
Yeah. Those are cherubim. That's what they are. It's not actually an angel.
It's kind of a misnomer in terms. But I get it, because we kind of broad brush with all these categories. The Book of Enoch is part of the literature that's trying to explain that. What on earth is this?
Actually, if you go back to my WesleyHuff.com, I do, so every Monday I do these posts that I call Manuscript Monday. So if you go back to the homepage, yeah, click that, scroll down, and you'll see the blog post. Keep going, keep going.
Right there. So Biblically Accurate Angels. So I actually explain some of these.
If you go down, go up, right there. So like angels, seraphim, cherubim. And then how these are portrayed. And I particularly go through the manuscripts and how both Christian and Jewish interpretation of them reflects them differently. But these are these characters which the Book of Enoch is trying to make sense of, along with demons.
And so the way that they go about that is by capitalizing on the events that happen immediately before Genesis chapter 6 and the biblical flood. Where you have the great-grandfather of Noah, Enoch, as this character. who is explaining some of these fallen angels or beings.
Genesis chapter 6 says that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were pleasing to the eyes and slept with them, and that these created men of renown. And that's the word nephilim. Ah, there it is. So the trickiness of this is that in ancient Judaism, when it's translated into other languages, nephilim is almost exclusively translated as giants.
But the word etymologically in Hebrew, nephal, literally means to fall. So there's this whole narrative within ancient Judaism of these things are fallen angels. And so but that's not the same thing necessarily in ancient Judaism as demons, and that's where it gets complicated. Okay.
So I'm just reading the background here so people have it. The Nephilim let me pull this over here so it's on the screen. The Nephilim are mysterious beings or people in the Bible traditionally imagined as being of great size and strength.
The origins of the Nephilim are disputed. Some, including the author of the book of Enoch, view them as the offspring of fallen angels and humans. Others view them as descendants of Seth and Cain. The reference to them is Genesis 6, 1-4.
But the passage is ambiguous, and the identity of the Nephilim is disputed according to the Numbers 13, 33. 10 of the 12 spies report the existence of Nephilim in Canaan. prior to the conquest by the Israelites, a similar or identical biblical Hebrew term read as Nephilim by some scholars or as the word fallen by others appears in the Ezekiel 32, 27, and is also mentioned in the Deuterocanonical books, Judas 16, 6, Sirach 16, 7, Baruch 3, 26 to 28, and Wisdom 14, 6. Yeah. So let me read that for us.
When men began to multiply in the face of the land, the daughters of the people of Israel, the daughters of the people of Israel, of them were born. The sons of God saw that the daughters of men were attractive, and they took as their wives any they chose. Then Yahweh said, My spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh. His days shall be 120 years. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came into the daughters of men, and they bore children to them.
These were mighty men who were of old, men of renown." So that's literally what the Hebrew says. And so... Um, it's not like the Wikipedia article accurately says, it's not entirely clear what's going on there, but Enoch is part of the Jewish conversation and trying to flesh this out. But, and particularly in the book of the watchers, which is the oldest book. Um, and so that's what Enoch is. Now, part of the confusion about the book of Enoch is because the book of Enoch is never considered scripture by the Jews, but ends up in the Ethiopian Bible. And part of the Ethiopian Bible. Yeah. So the Ethiopian church has, is like a, is a wing of, you know, you have these different sort of overarching denominations of Christendom. You have today Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, Coptic, Roman Catholic, and then the Ethiopian church. And the Ethiopian church, we know that around the fourth century, missionaries from Syria went down to what then was referred to as the kingdom of Aksum, which is in modern day Ethiopia, and they brought with them a whole host of literature. And part of this literature was New Testament books in Greek and the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which at that point was finalized. And the Ethiopian church took all of this literature, which included literature that... nobody considered scripture at the time, and they appear to have just been non-discretionary and included everything. So all of the debates that were happening in the Latin West and the Greek East about what was and wasn't scripture, they looked at that and they said, we're not really interested in that. We'll just take everything. So in being non-discretionary, they end up just canonizing everything, which leaves them with a canon of scripture that is completely unique. and includes books like Enoch, which the ancient Jews and every ancient Christian didn't believe. Well, actually, I should preface that. There were a couple of early Christians who said, we think this could be scripture, but then they accept when, you know, all the debates happen that, okay, those are pretty good reasons. We're not going to accept it in the end. And so I don't know where the idea came from, but there is definitely a prevailing myth on the internet that the Ethiopian Bible is the oldest Bible. And that's not true. In fact, the oldest copy of the Ethiopian Bible, which is full in terms of a Genesis to Revelation copy, is 14th century. So it's a long, long time after. But there's a lot of talk online about Enoch, and particularly the copy of Enoch that is in the Ethiopian Bible, and that, oh, well, that's actually reflective of the original Bible because the Ethiopian Bible is the oldest. I don't know how that myth started. It's patently untrue. But what ends up being what we call the Book of Enoch, ends up in its final form in the Ethiopic canon.