Welcome to General Chat - GAW Community Area
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The Book of 1 Enoch expands on the account in the Bible, especially 1 Enoch chapters 6–11, part of what scholars call the Book of Watchers (chapters 1–36 of 1 Enoch). As noted above, it records that two hundred Watchers descended to the summit of Mount Hermon in the days of Jared, the great-great-grandfather of Noah, i and swore a mutual oath to carry out their plan to satisfy their desire for mortal women. Hermon sits on the border between Israel, Syria, and Lebanon, and it’s the highest peak in the Levant. When the Hebrews arrived in Canaan, the native Amorites called the mountain “Sirion” or “Senir,”[10] although there is evidence that an older name for the mountain was something like “Harnam.” The Amorite Story of Aqhat, dated to the time of the judges in Israel, calls Aqhat’s father Daniel the “man of Rapiu” (the singular form of “Rephaim”), “the hero,” and the “Harnamite,” which is probably a reference to the mountain.[11] “Hermon” appears to be a deliberate twisting of the Amorite name to connect the mountain to the Hebrew word kherem, which means “ban”—as in “devoted to destruction,” a term applied to people and things declared off-limits by God.
The Book of Watchers makes the case for God’s punishment of the rebellious angels. The offspring of their forbidden unions with human women drove creation to the brink of destruction. First Enoch 7:2–5 describes three generations of monstrous descendants—first “great giants,” then Nephilim, and then Elioud, a Greek word that means “gods of glory.” Apparently, the author of Enoch understood the terms in Genesis 6—Nephilim (or “giants”), gibborim (“mighty men”), and anshei hashem (“men of renown” or, more accurately, “men of the Name”)—to refer to three successive generations of giants rather than the same group.[12]
Whether our pre-Flood ancestors contended with one generation of giants or three, the effect was the same: It was believed that the half-divine monsters nearly drove humanity to extinction. The Book of Watchers describes the giants as insatiable, devouring first the product of human labor, then humans, and then birds, beasts, and fish. When even that didn’t satisfy their hunger, they turned on each other. And if posing a threat to the existence of all life on earth wasn’t bad enough, Enoch underscores the wickedness of the giants by noting that they “drank the blood,” presumably of the creatures they consumed.[13] This was taboo. God told Noah and Moses that this was forbidden because the blood was the life,[14] a prohibition that was part of the Law given to Moses at Sinai.[15]
But the transgression of the Watchers was more than just violating a taboo against interspecies sex and burdening mankind with the threat of destruction at the hands of their monstrous offspring. The text of Enoch, which influenced Jewish thought about the rebellious Watchers down to the time of Jesus and the apostles, makes clear that the other half of their plot was the dissemination of forbidden knowledge—deadly secrets that humanity was not meant to know.
[1] Jaap Doedens, The Sons of God in Genesis 6:1–4 (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 250–252.
[2] 1 Enoch 6:1–7. George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, 1 Enoch: The Hermeneia Translation(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012).
[3] Ibid.
[4] For example, see Matthew 18:9; Mark 9:43; James 3:6; and Luke 16:19–24.
[5] 2 Peter 2:6–10.
[6] Jude 6–7.
[7] Sharon K. Gilbert and Derek P. Gilbert, Veneration (Crane, MO: Defender Publishing, 2019), pp. 9–37.
[8] Amar Annus, “Are There Greek Rephaim? On the Etymology of Greek Meropes and Titanes.” Ugarit-Forschungen 31 (1999).
[9] Ibid.
[10] Deuteronomy 3:9.
[11] Klaas Spronk, Beatific Afterlife in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East (Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker, 1986), pp. 168–169.
[12] George W. E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 1–36; 81–108 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), p. 184.
[13] 1 Enoch 7:2–5.
[14] Genesis 9:4.
[15] Leviticus 7:26–27, 17:10–14, 19:26; Deuteronomy 12:16, 23; 15:23; 1 Samuel 14:33–34. See also Acts 15:28–29.
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