for the sinners, but for the righteous “there shall be forgiveness of sins, and every mercy and peace and forbearance: there shall be salvation unto them, a goodly light” (1 En. 3:6). This is the introduction that sets up the agenda: at the judgment the cause of evil shall be revealed and retributive justice will be applied.
The rest of the book explores the way in which evil entered the world, and how God, who still has full control of his creation, has already made arrangements to deal with those who do evil. As a consequence, at the news of a judgment the Watchers trembled. The Watchers are the sons of God, the angels, who lusted after the daughters of men. The entrance of evil into the world, however, is told by two contrasting stories. According to one version, Semjaza, who was the leader of the angels, convinces 200 angels to join him and have children with daughters of men. They are aware, of course, that the plan carries a penalty. Still, they come down to earth and take women for wives, knowing that by doing it they were defiling themselves. To their wives they taught “charms and enchantments, and the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants. And they became pregnant, and they bare great giants, whose height was three thousand ells” (1 En. 7:1-2). The description would indicate the introduction of magical healing arts by plants, roots and charms. The giants, for their part, soon consumed all the resources available and, when they could no longer find food for themselves, they devoured mankind. Not satisfied, they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another, and drink the blood. “Then the earth laid accusation against the lawless ones” (1 En. 7:3-6). That the earth accuses the wrongs being done on it reflects the story of Abel’s blood calling for justice from the ground on which it fell (Gen. 4:10).
According to the other version of the appearance of evil, Azazel “taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals (of the earth) and the art of working with them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly and all coloring tinctures. And there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and they were led astray, and became corrupt in all their ways” (En. 8:1-2). In this account, the problem was the introduction of the tools for making women more beautiful and the tools for the warfare that resulted from men desiring them. One cannot avoid remembering Helen and the Trojan War. In this way, the Book of the Watchers assigns the origin of evil among human beings to angels who defiled themselves with the daughters of men, something alluded to in the story of the flood in Genesis. Now God has to deal with angels who have defiled themselves, and humans who have acquired arts that cause them to sin. The move in this direction sets up a theme that became a major concern of apocalyptic writings.
The last thing one should require of mythical stories is that they be consistent. Thus in the remainder of the The Book of the Watchers one finds inconsistencies, but that should not be surprising. Since the Watchers under the leadership of Semjaza have killed all human beings, Michael, Uriel, Rafael and Gabriel in heaven hear the cry of the souls of the dead saying, “Bring our cause before the Most High” (1 En. 9:3). To bring up the cause of the dead, these good angels address God with a list of titles reminiscent of those used by the Greek successors of Alexander the Great: “Lord of lords, God of gods, King of kings (and God of the ages), the throne of thy glory (stands) unto all the generations of the ages, and Thy name holy and glorious and blessed unto all the ages.” This manner of address reveals a new universal, imperial understanding of God. The complaint of the souls of the dead is that Azazel has “revealed the eternal secrets which were (preserved) in heaven, which men were striving to learn.” And Semjaza and his associates “have gone to the daughters of men upon the earth, and have slept with the women, and have defiled themselves, and have revealed to them all kinds of sins. And the women have borne giants, and the whole earth has thereby been filled with blood and unrighteousness” (1 En. 9:6-9).
In response to the complaint of the dead, God sends Gabriel to “proceed against the bastards so that the sons of the Watchers will kill each other in battle;” as a result, their hope to have eternal life [five hundred years] will not come to pass. God then sends Uriel to the son of Lamech with a message for Noah that the end is approaching with a deluge that will destroy the earth. He is to hide himself and save himself and his seed for all future generations. God also sends Rafael to bind Azazel and cast him into an opening in the desert and to cover the hole with big rocks. There he will be kept until the judgment, when he will be cast into the fire (this prefigures the fortunes of the dragon in the book of Revelation). Rafael is also told to heal the earth from the corruption brought about by the secrets revealed by Azazel, so that all sins are ascribed to him. Finally, God sends Michael to bind Semjaza and his associates. “Let them see their sons killing themselves. Then take them to the valleys of the earth for seventy generations till the day of their judgment. Then they shall be led off to the abyss of fire, the torment and prison where they shall be for ever. Any others who are condemned shall join them there so that all the spirits of the reprobate and the children of the Watchers are destroyed.” Michael then is to destroy all wrong from the earth and let righteousness and truth flourish again in it with truth and joy for evermore (1 En. 10 – 11). It became popular in apocalyptic books to follow the lead of First Enoch and have the wicked taken to a place to wait until the time comes for them to be thrown into the fire, and to extend the geography of the earth to mythological locations that are appropriate for the eternal punishment of the wicked.
This section of the book describes the punishment God has already established for the Watchers who brought about sin to earth. This, however, is their first “judgment.” Together with all mankind, they will also have to stand at the final judgment. The time between the two judgments is said to last seventy generations, that is the time between the life of Enoch and the writing of the Book of the Watchers. The seventy years of exile referred to by Jeremiah had caused Zechariah to wonder about its fulfillment. In the post-exilic chapters of Isaiah and in Ezra, about 444 B.C.E., Cyrus, the Persian, is identified as the Lord’s anointed who will finally restore the fortunes of Israel, after the non-establishment of the Davidic dynasty with Zerubbabel. In the Book of the Watchers, the messianic establishment of justice and peace must wait seventy generations, rather than years. It is not quite clear, however, when their counting starts. Evidently, messianic expectations have had many revivals with the passage of time, even to our own days. The ways in which they are related in time to previous events varies according to different agendas. Still, in all of them the judgment or judgments occupy central stage.
Chapters 12 to 16 have Enoch in conversation with the Watchers who ask him to plead their cause to the Most High so that they may return to heaven. Enoch takes up their cause and pleads with God on their behalf, but God rejects their appeals. In the process, one reads that the Giants are now evil spirits (1 En. 15:8) who cause havoc among men and women until the time when the Watchers will face their final judgment (1 En. 16:1). While mediating on their behalf, Enoch is informed that though when they were in heaven the Watchers had learned many secrets, they actually learned only “worthless ones” (1 En. 16:2). Thus, their indiscretions on earth did not cause a major upheaval in heaven. Still, what they taught human beings had been the cause of much wickedness; therefore, they will not have peace until the judgment.
In chapters 17 to 36, Enoch is given a guided tour of the universe. The tour starts in the West where fire receives the sun as it sets down and the mouths of the rivers and the waters of the deep are found. Also there he is shown the foundations and the cornerstone of the earth. Beyond is a place with no firmament and no earth or water beneath. An angel informs Enoch that this is the prison of the stars that disobeyed God and are waiting till their consummation at the judgment after 10,000 years. The spirit of the children born of the cohabitation of Watchers and women are not there. They are defiling mankind in different ways (1 En. 17 – 19; 21:5). At the center of a great mountain range with seven mountains, Enoch sees the highest mountain which, Michael informs him, is the throne of “the Holy Great One, the Lord of Glory, the Eternal King.” There is found the “fragrant tree no mortal is permitted to touch till the great judgment.… It shall be given to the righteous and holy. Its fruit shall be for food to the elect: it shall be transplanted to the holy place, to the temple of the Lord, the Eternal King” (1 En. 25:3-5). That the tree whose fruit
