A collection of Jewish traditions and writings composed between the 4th-1st Cent BC but claiming to be revelations received by Enoch (of Gen 5:21-24) in heavenly visions and interpreted to him by angels. These were then, supposedly, recounted to his son Methuselah who recorded them to help the chosen righteous who would live in the end times.
1 Enoch is composed of 108 chapters, the total being about the length of the book of Isaiah. The contents vary in style and form, ranging from pastiches of OT texts to pronouncements on issues relevant to the time cast in the form of Torah (e.g., the debate over whether the solar or lunar calendar was the divinely ordained one that gripped the Jewish community in the 2nd Cent BC) to narratives, e.g., recounting the primordial rebellion by disobedient angels such as reflected in Gen 6:1-4 and subsequent chapters, to Ezekiel-like accounts of the author/s' journeys to the edges of the earth's disk.
All in all, the book provides a vivid picture of the kind of religious and cultic concerns of Judaism in the post-exilic centuries just before the advent of Christ as the Jewish community navigate their way across all the new and criss-crossing intellectual and cultural streams in a world then newly globalized first under the Greeks and then the Romans. It is not surprising then that the community at Qumran should value and quote from the work so often. It is quite clear that both Jesus and the early Christians knew 1 Enoch and alluded to it. The Son of Man tradition that Jesus applied to himself may not have originated with 1 Enoch but they were certainly an important part of it. Jude in particular is known for his allusions to—verging on quotations of—1 Enoch. Tertullian quoted from it, and so did Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria and Origen. 1 Enoch seemed particularly important to the Ethiopian Church and the work was preserved in its entirely in an ancient Ethiopian translation (of which a large number of manuscripts are known) of a Greek translation of Aramaic originals which are attested in the Dead Sea Scrolls associated with Qumran.
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