The Book of the Prophet Enoch, Revealed

Ol’ Fuzzy is one day late. Please forgive me for getting too busy to do my blogging. Not making excuses, but Ol’ Fuzzy used too much data on his phone and it got too slow to blog. don’t worry, the new data rate kicks in tomorrow. Besides, I can use the WiFi at Frog Quarters today.

Let’s look at what is actually written in the Book of the Prophet Enoch. First let me give some caveats. There are three books that are pushed by scholastic scholars as books of Enoch. If you are a proponent of modern scholasticism you won’t like what I have to say about it. Scholastics have a tendency to reinterpret everything so they can say something about it that is outrageous enough to be shocking to their peers. This gets them cred among the other agnostics and atheists of academia. But it also produces many falsehoods that get passed off as “new and improved truth.”

In the case of the Book of the Prophet Enoch, the only English language translation was produced by a scholastic, and he felt the need to prove his cerebrial superiority by changing the wording of many familiar passages that had been quoted in the other books of the Bible. Any philologist (a lover of words) will see the places where the wording of quotations was changed, and understand the original wording as it should have been rendered into English.

Most Scholastics claim that books of the Bible that identify their author are lying. They believe this proves the superiority of their intelligence over the unwashed masses (that’s us) who think that if it says so and so wrote the book it is true. But the logical contradiction of their claims escapes them. If the book is legitimately Biblical, it must be true. If the book says something patently false, it can’t be true. If the book is not true, it can’t be Biblical. No wonder most Scholastics quit serving God and become egoists.

The Book of the Prophet Enoch is arbitrarily divided into 108 chapters, and further, those chapters are separated into five main sections. The first section covering chapters 1 through 36 covers Enoch’s spiritual journeys as a shamanistic priest of the Most High God. Enoch meets four Archangels who guide and protect him in a tour of the realm of the spirit. He becomes acquainted with the angels who had been tasked by God to oversee human society that turned from God to found their own hybrid human dynasties.

Chapter one opens with Enoch’s prophecy of the coming judgment of all creation. This is the passage quoted by Jesus and so many of the Jewish leaders in the first century AD. Chapters 6 to 11 deal with the “watchers” (Sexton Charles’s word for the angels assigned to oversee humans), and names the leasers of the rebellion against God’s perfect plan for humanity. These watchers not only led some of the women into concubinage, they also taught evil spiritual practices that led humanity to a cycle of self destruction. Chapter twelve begins the strange passage that retells of the watchers’ begging Enoch to intercede for them to God and the answer God gives in the negative. Enoch is quite astute in his observation of their wretched condition after their fall from grace. These beings had been in the glorious presence of God, without the filter of dreams or visions. Their disobedience was an act of rejection of His persons. In chapter fifteen, God told them they have no excuse, that is why there is no forgiveness for them, especially after they acted so destructively toward humanity. He told Enoch to say to them, “You should intercede for men, and not men for you.”

Chapter seventeen begins the journeys Enoch took through the spiritual realm guided by the Archangels Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and alternately Uriel or Phanuel. He visits the whole of the spiritual realm from “bottom” to “top.” The glorious scene in the throne room of God is identical to the vision Isaiah had in Isaiah chapter six. The journey leads through each layer of the spiritual realm including cardinal points that correspond to the directions on Earth. Read these passages for yourself.

Starting with Chapter thirty-seven, Enoch begins to teach in parabolic form. He waxes poetic in some of these passages, and others are plain prose. Sexton Charles’s translation frustrates me with the way he changed the titles and names of God from the traditional ones we read in the King James Version to show off his intellect. One example that sticks in my craw: The Lord of Hosts is rendered “the Lord of Spirits” in 38:2 and everywhere else it appears. As a clergyman of the Church of England, Charles had to know of the traditional rendering of the title, yet he chose to confuse the issue because he wanted to be smarter than all those who went before. When people become used to a title or name being rendered in a certain way, to render it differently confuses them on the identity of the One being named or whether it is a new title. It would have been much more prudent to use traditional renderings for these titles and names.

In Chapter forty-six, Enoch describes his meeting with Jesus Christ before He was incarnate. These passages about the preincarnate Christ are the reason the Jewish scribes excluded The Book of the Prophet Enoch from the Hebrew scriptures. Reading these passages is like reading one of the Gospels. The title “Son of Man” used by by God referring to Ezekiel and by Jesus Christ for Himself was first revealed in this chapter. One of the most famous quotations from the Book of the Prophet Enoch is 46:1 “And there I saw One who was like the Ancient of Days, and His head was white like wool, and with Him was another person whose face looked like a man, and His face was full of grace, like one of the the holy angels.” When Stephen was stoned, he quoted this passage in front of the Sanhedrin, and that’s why they condemned him to die, attributing to Jesus the Person Who met Enoch in Heaven.

I will go into more quotations from the Book of the Prophet Enoch in tomorrow’s post. I am too wordy already today. So tomorrow is Revealed, Part Two.