Enoch

A man came in asking for the Book of Enoch, which he said he had been trying to find for a year. Which one was he looking for, the Slavonic or the Amharic? There were three, he maintained, the third being in Hebrew and of medieval origin, but he wanted the Amharic, or Ethiopian, the other two being, in his opinion, spurious. Of course, they are all "spurious" in the sense that none of them could possibly have been written by that ante-diluvian Enoch. But the Ethiopian BOE is quoted in the Epistle of Jude, (1:14).

Well, I had the Ethiopian BOE at home, in the R. H. Charles translation, but I didn't think we had it in the library. However, I thought he might find it in the Sacred Text Archive . I showed him our Old Testament Pseudepigraphia, which had the Ethiopian BOE in a more recent translation in volume one, and he was satisfied.

Enoch has the distinction, like Elijah in the Old Testament, of having been bodily taken up to heaven, (as was Our Lord Jesus Christ, though unlike Our Lord, he and Elijah did not see death). "And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him", (Gen. 5:24). He is to Noah in an earlier epoch as Elijah was to Moses. His book is included in the Ethiopian Coptic canon, and is in the spirit of the apocalyptic books, Daniel, Ezekiel and Zachariah. Some hold that he was Hermes Trismegistus, or Thoth of the Egyptians.

The Elizabethan Dr. John Dee obtained a system of "Enochian Magic" by conversation with "angels", and I have a curious book dating from 1977, The Book of Knowledge: The Keys of Enoch, by J. J. Hurtak, which is more or less along the lines of the Urantia Book, with Enoch as a sort of Blavatskian Ascended Master. But these sorts of what the Church calls, "private revelations", will unhinge you.

No, all we've got is, "And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him", a bare scrap recorded by the author of Genesis at a date which is itself lost to us in time. The Ethiopian BOE can tell us who the Post-Exilic Jews thought he was.

Should I by the Grace of God pass through the Pearly Gates, and enter the Heavenly Library, I hope that I may discover the truth about the Prophet Enoch.