Book of Enoch mentioned by Jude

My son has blogged on this subject at: http://paroikosmissionarykid.blogspot.com/

 

I don't think stating that Enoch is the authentic writer of the book in his name impinges on inerrancy one bit.

 

Good blog post. Too bad he doesn't cite or interact with Grudem's article on the 1 Peter passage.

 

Then we agree. :thumbsup:

 

Don't know how he missed that. He's usually very thorough.

 

{This post is offered to sink the idea that 1 Enoch and Jude are both citing the same "oral tradition" and therefore Jude is not citing 1 Enoch; this faulty conclusion is made by not taking into account that Jude, as it turns out, was a veritable Book of Enoch enthusiast, evidenced by the fact he cites or alludes to the contents of that book no less that seven times...}

There are at least 7 places in his letter in which Jude, through the inspiration of God, either quotes directly or refers to 1 Enoch (aka The Book of Enoch, or Ethiopic Enoch):

1. First, Jude calls Enoch a prophet, despite the fact no explicit prophecy (though some see an implicit prophecy in Methuselah's name) and no book of the prophecies of Enoch can be found in our 66-book Bible common in Western Christendom. However, Jude alone, among the 40 or so writers in the Bible (common in Western Christendom) seems aware of this fact. But the Book of Enoch is replete with references to "prophecies of Enoch", so we can see Jude agrees with the Book of Enoch on this point. Enoch is to be numbered among the prophets.
2. Jude 1:6 refers to, "angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling". This is a reference to Enoch 6:6, "They were in all two hundred; who descended in the days of Jared on the summit of Mount Hermon, and they called it Mount Hermon, because they had sworn and bound themselves by mutual imprecations upon it."
3. Further, Jude 1:6, relates these were angels which, "he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day" We see this outlined for us later in the book in Enoch 10:12, "Bind them fast for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth, till the day of their judgement and of their consummation, till the judgement that is for ever and ever is consummated. In those days they shall be led off to the abyss of fire: and to the torment and the prison in which they shall be confined for ever."
4. Jude also tells us in verse 6, the angels are bound, "...until the judgment of the great day", which is also described in Enoch 54:6, "Michael, and Gabriel, and Raphael, and Phanuel shall take hold of them on that great day, and cast them on that day into the burning furnace, that the Lord of Spirits may take vengeance on them for their unrighteousness in becoming subject to Satan and leading astray those who dwell on the earth."
5. In Jude 1:7, the apostle says the sin of these angels was sexual immorality and that Sodom's sin was of the same class as those angels, "Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh" (NASB); the sexual nature of the angels' sin is corroborated in Enoch 7:1, "All the others together with them took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they began to go in unto them and to defile themselves with them"
6. Then there's Jude 1:14 which oddly calculates Enoch was the 7th from Adam, "It was also about these men that Enoch, in the seventh generation from Adam, prophesied". But to reckon it this way, Adam's generation has to be counted too; Enoch 60:8, reckons the generations in the identical fashion where Noah says, "where my grandfather was taken up, the seventh from Adam"
7. Finally, Jude 1:14-15 caps it off by quoting The Book of Enoch directly as being the source of a prophecy regarding the 2nd-coming of Jesus Christ, "Behold, the Lord came with many thousands of His holy ones, to execute judgment upon all, and to convict all the ungodly of all their ungodly deeds which they have done in an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him." This quote can be found in Enoch 1:9, "Behold! He cometh with ten thousands of His holy ones to execute judgement upon all, and to destroy all the ungodly: and to convict all flesh of all the works of their ungodliness which they have ungodly committed, and of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him."

For those keeping score, Jude alludes to and/or quotes from not just Enoch 1:9, but also from Enoch 6:6, Enoch 7:1, Enoch 10:12, Enoch 54:6, and Enoch 60:8. Besides this, the Epistle of Jude confirms the underlying thesis of the Book of Enoch, that Enoch is to be numbered among the prophets.

P.S. There may be other references I have missed.

Copyright © 2006-2012, R.I. Burns
All rights reserved

 

Lets see, God inspired various writers to record God's Word. Sometimes these writers based what they wrote on the writings of others. Some of these source documents were also inspired, i.e. Matthew referring to OT writings. But at other times, the inspired writers referred to writings not in our list of books thought to be inspired.

But once an inspired writer records the "truths" from other sources, then whether or not those other sources were inspired originally, but only were true, then those snippets become inspired. Thus there is no reason to claim Enoch is inspired, but only to claim those portions included in Jude were true. Ditto for Moses possibly using sources, whether oral or written, when he wrote/compiled Genesis.

Many commentaries exist, and although they are not inspired, they present truths contained in God's inspired word. If we view Enoch as presenting commentary on Genesis and other OT books, then it is perfectly reasonable to find "truths" in the Book of Enoch. And these truths then could reasonable be mentioned by later inspired writers, such as Jude, Peter, and John.

 

You appear to be wanting to interact with me on the content of my son's blog post on Jude and Enoch. Sorry, but he's much more up on that than I am, and I don't have time to do the research necessary to interact with your post. I suggest you interact with Paul directly on his blog. He would welcome your input.

Also, no need for such a large font size. It looks like shouting! :type:

 

I misunderstood. I thought you were getting into the conversation.

Apologies. I wanted the formatting to be visible so people could exploit the embedded hyper-links.

Unfortunately, unlike other fora, the BB does not let you go back and edit your older posts after a certain period of time has elapsed, or I would go into it and drop it down a peg.

 

Naw, just a proud father linking to an article of interest. Sometimes I'll make just one post like that so I can follow the thread through the updates.

No problem. God bless. :wavey:

 

File under items of interest...

Perhaps some of you have noticed this passage in 1 Peter 3:18-20, which seems to allude to the similar events in the Book of Enoch:

18Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: 19By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison; 20Which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water.

These are spirits who sinned before the flood of Noah's day. There are a couple of oddities in the Greek text. For instance there is a seemingly out-of-place clause in "by which also", has to be taken into account by translators. The KJV makes this out to be Christ being made alive in the Spirit "also" preached in that state. Another curiosity about this clause was sugested by J. Rendall Harris. Per Harris, he theorized that the Greek had been corrupted due to a copyists error in which the original reading which was EN O KAI ENOX ("in which also Enoch") became EN O KAI ("in which also") when ENOX was dropped due to a copyists error becasue of the similarity of look and sound of the two parts in the Greek. The following are a couple of translations which attempted to account for Harris' theory.

From J. Goodspeed's New Testament: an American Translation of 1923:

18For Christ himself died once for all, for sin, an upright man for unrighteous men, to bring us to God, and was physically put to death, but he was made alive in the Spirit. 19In it Enoch went and preached even to those spirits that were in prison, 20who had once been disobedient, when in Noah's time God in his patience waited for the ark to be made ready, in which a few people, eight in all, were brought safely through the water.

From the Moffatt, New Translation of 1926:

18Christ himself died for sins, once for all, a just man for unjust men, that he might bring us near to God; in the flesh he was put to death but he came to life in the Spirit. 19(It was in the Spirit that Enoch also went and preached to the imprisoned spirits 20 who had disobeyed at the time when God's patience held out during the construction of the ark in the days of Noah — the ark by which only a few souls, eight in all, were brought safely through the water.)

Given that there is no text in existence with this variation, I thought this was an interesting bit of errata, that's all.

 

From The Book of Enoch: Messianic Prophecy Edition.

 

1 Pet 3:18-20 never hints that demons were disobedient in Noah's day, and natural indication of both this passage and Genesis 6 is that men were disobedient. The 1 Pet passage thus refers to the (human) spirits in Peter's day who were actually still embodied and sinning in the day of Noah. In fact it was the great flood that disembodied these spirits. Also, since Christ is not really bound by time, he could have preached to the spirits through Noah when the spirits were still embodied in their human flesh.

 

So, Christ preached to the men who died before the flood? Why not the men who died after that? Why the preference?

 

18Christ ...being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: 19By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison; 20Which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water. (1 Peter 3:19)

God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment. (2 Peter 2:4)

You don't see a connection between Peter's epistles in these verses. Do you have an explanation for the apparent puzzle presented in 2 Peter 2:4, when were angels ever bound?

 

So that those who were destroyed might be without excuse.

 

Yes, the chains of darkness is metaphorical for the realm of the earth. They are here for a time until their ultimate destruction. After being free to roam the universe, being confined to the area of our atmospheric earth must seem like chains of darkness indeed!

 

So your exegesis of 2 Pe. 2:4. has the earth as hell?

 

As you're probably aware, the text doesn't say "hell" but actually has a verb that is not elsewhere used in the NT, meaning to cast someone to Tartarus, and in fact this term is not unrelated to earth in the literature and would be a very fitting metaphorical choice to describe what I have said Peter is describing, namely, that God confined the bad angels to the atmospheric earth until the day of their impending doom.

 

So are we living in Tartarus or under it?