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Is the Book of Enoch in the Bible?
Our own look at a common question, by David Dell. The background on this page is ours, not a summary of the book.
Short answer: not in most Bibles. The Book of Enoch (usually called 1 Enoch) isn't in the Jewish Bible, the Catholic Bible, the Eastern Orthodox Bible or Protestant Bibles such as the King James Version. It is part of the canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and of the Ethiopian Jewish community, Beta Israel. The longer answer explains why such an influential book ended up outside most canons, and why the New Testament still quotes it.
The Enoch of Genesis
The Enoch of the Bible gets only a few lines, but they're remarkable:
“And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.” Genesis 5:24 (KJV)
“By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him: for before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God.” Hebrews 11:5 (KJV)
A man who “walked with God” and didn't die invited later writers to imagine what he had seen. 1 Enoch is the largest of those works.
What 1 Enoch is
1 Enoch is a collection of several ancient Jewish writings gathered under Enoch's name. The best known is the opening section, the Book of the Watchers (chapters 1–36), which retells Genesis 6 as the story of rebel angels: “And they were in all two hundred; who descended in the days of Jared on the summit of Mount Hermon” (1 Enoch 6:6, tr. R.H. Charles). Western scholars generally date that section to the fourth or third century BC. A later section, the Book of Parables (chapters 37–71), is debated, partly because no copy of it was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Copies of the earlier sections were found in Aramaic in the caves at Qumran, so the book was read in Judea around the time of Jesus. The complete text survives only in Geʽez, the classical language of Ethiopia. The Scottish traveler James Bruce brought Geʽez copies to Europe in 1773, and Richard Laurence published the first English translation in 1821. (For what the book says about the Watchers themselves, see Who were the Watchers?)
Why isn't it in the Bible?
The plainest reason is that it was never part of the Hebrew Scriptures. The early Christian writer Tertullian, who actually defended 1 Enoch, admitted as much around AD 200: “the Scripture of Enoch… is not received by some, because it is not admitted into the Jewish canon either” (On the Apparel of Women I.3). Most of the church followed the Hebrew canon for its Old Testament, and 1 Enoch fell outside it. The Ethiopian church, which kept the book in its own canon, is the great exception.
A second reason is authorship. The book presents itself as the words of Enoch, the seventh from Adam, but its sections were composed many centuries later by unknown authors. That's why scholars classify it as pseudepigrapha, writing under an ancient name.
Why does Jude quote Enoch?
Here is the passage that keeps the question alive:
“And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.” Jude 1:14–15 (KJV)
Compare 1 Enoch 1:9 in R.H. Charles's translation: “And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of His holy ones To execute judgement upon all, And to destroy all the ungodly.” The match is close, and most scholars agree Jude is quoting the Enoch tradition directly.
Does a quotation make a book Scripture? Christians answer differently. Many Protestant and Catholic interpreters point out that the apostles quoted non-biblical sources without endorsing everything in them. Paul, for example, quotes Greek poets in Athens:
“For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.” Acts 17:28 (KJV)
On that view, Jude affirms that this particular prophecy is true, not that the whole book is inspired. The Ethiopian church draws the opposite conclusion and reads the book as Scripture. And some early writers, Tertullian among them, argued that Jude's quotation was a reason to accept it.
How to read it
For most Christians, 1 Enoch is best read the way you'd read Josephus: an ancient window into how Jews around the time of Jesus understood passages like Genesis 6, and the background to New Testament lines such as Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4 (see What happened to the fallen angels?). It's useful background to the debate over the sons of God in Genesis 6, but it isn't the final word on it.
Sources: Genesis 5:24; Hebrews 11:5; Jude 1:14–15; Acts 17:28 (KJV) · Book of Enoch · 1 Enoch, tr. R.H. Charles (1917) · Tertullian, On the Apparel of Women I.3 · Biblical canon