The Book of Enoch
Angels called the Watchers come down to marry human women, teach them metals and spells, and father giants. Most Bibles dropped the book. Ethiopia kept it whole.
And the angels, the children of heaven, saw them and desired them, and said to one another: “Come, let us choose wives for ourselves from the children of men, and beget children for ourselves.”
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About this book
Why read it
The Book of Enoch is the account of Enoch, the man in Genesis who 'walked with God, and was not'. It tells of the Watchers, angels who leave heaven for human wives and father a race of giants; of Enoch carried through the heavens and the ends of the earth; of the courses of the sun and moon; and of a coming judgment. The press starts with the Book of the Watchers in Ge'ez, word by word, with the older Greek shown alongside wherever the two differ. The Ge'ez is not readable yet beyond the taste below; support it and it will be. The Greek of chapters 1 to 36 is free to read now in our Book of the Watchers.
The lore
It was written in Aramaic by Jews between about the 3rd and 1st centuries BC; fragments turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was translated into Greek, quoted in the New Testament letter of Jude, and then fell out of use almost everywhere. Ethiopia translated it into Ge'ez and kept it in its Bible, and only there did the whole book survive. In 1773 the Scottish traveller James Bruce brought copies to Europe.
What’s juicy
The Watchers' leader teaches people to make swords and mirrors and to paint their eyes; another teaches spells and the cutting of roots. The book blames the corruption of the world on this forbidden knowledge.
Why pressing it matters
Making an interlinear The Book of Enoch is real work: freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, The Watchers gets made, and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
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