19 July 2023
You've probably heard of the Period of Silence, that four centuries between the Prophet Malachi and the birth of Christ. It was when Old Testament religion basically died out, to be replaced with Judaism. Judaism is simply Pharisaism. The Bible doesn't say much about those centuries, but it was when Persia went to war with Greece. And after that provocation, there arose a genius ruler named Alexander the Great who conquered territory like never before. In 323 BC, he found no resistance from the small community of Hebrew people in and around Jerusalem and didn't destroy anything with his war-making abilities.
Instead, he destroyed the Hebrew culture by introducing Hellenism. The Hebrews were seduced by this philosophical orientation. The Sadducees became secular; they had been approaching it for quite some time. But the Pharisees embraced the reasoning of the Greek philosophers for which Alexander was a devoted evangelist. The Hebrews rejected the overt pagan cultural elements, but were sucked in by the abstract logic and reasoning. In just the three centuries between Alexander and Jesus, the Hebrew mysticism of Old Testament religion completely died.
In some scholarly materials you might read, that Period of Silence and decline of faith is the bulk of what is also called the Second Temple Era, starting around 500 BC. Only a small portion of Hebrew people returned to Jerusalem; the majority stayed behind in Babylon. It took a while, but the returnees finally built their Temple. From the writings of Ezra and Nehemiah, we learn that just a few years is all it took for these frankly poverty-stricken folks to completely forget the Law of Moses. It's why they were poor. A century later, Malachi makes it clear that Jehovah had had enough of their falling away.
What followed was a very dark time. While it's not as if no good thing comes out of the Second Temple Era, it's for sure an awful lot of bad does. Thanks to Alexander's conquests stretching all the way down to Egypt, and then sweeping back north across the Mesopotamian Valley, we ended up with two very large communities of Hebrew scholarship, one in Alexandria and the other still in Babylon. They competed, arrogantly sniping at each other, and dismissing each other's work.
It serves no purpose to say either was worse than the other. Both cranked out some really awful stuff. We can thank Babylon for the bulk of what eventually became the Talmud (reinterpreting the Law of Moses via human logic), and the Alexandrians for a rather wild syncretism. Both took Hellenism in different directions.
This is the period of time when the various volumes of the Books of Enoch were produced. Jews refused to treat it as Scripture. It claimed to be the narrative from Enoch, the seventh generation born from Adam and Eve. There's no doubt that the book we have today by that name includes a smattering of oral legends that probably survived from Enoch's day. Jude quotes from Enoch the man, not Enoch the book. That stupid book also includes a lot of fanciful garbage that was stolen from pagan religions. Giants that were 450 feet tall, eating everything in sight?
There is a high probability that the Essenes were a primary source for the Books of Enoch. It reflects a large amount of their excessive asceticism. The book says some demon taught mankind how to use weapons and how to make war. That's almost straight up an Essene doctrine, as they were very big on harshly controlling one's temper and never carried weapons except when they expected to face robbers. Well, I'd be sorry to tell them that Cain and Abel knew about sacrificing animals, and the first use of weapons for violence appears to be Cain's murder of his brother, well before Genesis 6. And then there was Lamech, also well before that demon was supposed to have taught men to make war.
Essenes were also heavy into eschatology and the belief in secret knowledge being recovered because they lived in the End Times. This was a very popular myth leading up to the time of Christ. Jesus made sarcastic references to Essene doctrines and similar popular nonsense about the Day of the Messiah coming to change the political landscape.
Someone stuck Enoch's name on that stuff. They knew it was a lie when they did so. That's what makes it mostly trash. Stop and think about it. Moses met with God for some 40 days on top of Mount Sinai. During that time, you would normally expect that Moses spent at least part of that time asking God about some of the oral lore of the Hebrew people. After what Moses went through, he most certainly should have done so. He had forty years of Egyptian education in Pharaoh's courts, and then another forty years getting a matching education from Jethro about his Abrahamic roots from Mesopotamia. What could Moses take from all of that? What was worth saving and sharing with God's people? If he's going to prophesy and teach the people, he needed some divine editorial work on what was in his head.
He didn't include anything from Enoch, just a few words about him. Wherever that mass of narrative came from when it was first published around 300 BC, it wasn't part of what God told Moses to include in his writings. If you surveyed that Second Temple Era literature, you'd recognize that Enoch was just like a bunch of other crap that was leading people away from the religion of Moses.
It is utterly impossible to evaluate the contents of even the best parts of the Books of Enoch. They are wholly unreliable. We already know that there was a wide range of oral stuff that Jews knew about in Jesus' day. A little of it leaks into the New Testament. But they made up a lot of garbage, and kept doing that up through recent history, adding more and more crap to their Talmud. It was just whatever they dreamed up from their own minds, but none of it was from the Holy Spirit. But whatever you want to make of the Books of Enoch, both Jews and Christians refused to include that stuff in their canonical works of Scripture.
Go ahead and read it; there are copies online for free. There are several good summaries if you don't have the time. I'm rather disappointed that Heiser put so much stock in it, when no one else does, except flakes who don't actually serve the Lord. But go ahead and read it if you like. Just know that I will never take it seriously.
The Books of Enoch came from the Second Temple Era, a time rife with paganizing influences.
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