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2nd Enoch: The Secrets of Enoch

Mar 23, 2024
Our topic tonight is a book called what scholars call second Enoch which has a subtitle um the

secrets

of Enoch um there are three numbered books of Enoch, so we previously explored one that is usually called first Enoch, which is part of the Ethiopian Canon . The Ethiopian Orthodox are viable and therefore this first Book of Enoch is just a Book of Enoch, but anyway, scholars sometimes call it the Ethiopian Enoch or Ethiopian, um, but even though there is a first Enoch and a second Enoch and actually a third Enoch unlike other biblical books such as the first and second Kings or the first and second chronicles, which are actually just two parts of the same book.
2nd enoch the secrets of enoch
The reason they are divided is that ancient scrolls could only be a certain length, so if you have a double length book like kings, you divide it into two halves, so First Kings and Second Kings, in contrast to a book like that, these books of Enoch Scholars have simply assigned completely unrelated books, each of which claims that Enoch is an author number and are essentially assigned numbers. numbers in terms of their prominence and actually it turns out probably the order in which they are composed, but certainly the second one here really has no relation to the first and the third, so let's look at each of these as a brief overview, for what the first is as we say we had a complete lecture on this, it is originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic, we do not know because the complete text only Surat five is in the guessed language, which is an Ethiopian language and that translation, however , some parts were composed in either.
2nd enoch the secrets of enoch

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2nd enoch the secrets of enoch...

Hebrew or Aramaic already in the year three or two hundred BC. C. the second could have been a mixture of Hebrew Iraq just as Daniel the second we are talking about tonight survives only in complete form in the language known as Old In Church Slavonic, that text purports to be a translation from the Greek and is probably a translation of a lost Greek original, although the Greek original may well be a translation of an additionally lost Hebrew original and possibly that first text was written in the first century. of the Common Era, the first century AD. and then there's a third Book of Enoch, as I say, which is in Hebrew, but just because it's in Hebrew doesn't mean it's earlier, people continue to speak Hebrew, rabbis write in Hebrew to this day, so it's probably later than the 2nd century or perhaps even later and one of the ways we can tell that it is later is that it contains loanwords from Latin and Greek, so the author this author may have known certainly wrote the first book and the third book. the author may know the first, maybe the second, probably the first, but in any case, the second, as I say, has no relation to the first and the third in terms of the author did not know the other two, okay , then all three. of these books are pseudopigraphical, that is, as we talk about them, it means that they claim to have been written by the biblical character Enoch, but in reality they were written thousands of years later by another person who put a little star there because the third Book of Enoch claims to have been written by Enoch but then redacted in its current form by a rabbi in the 1st or 2nd century CE, either way these texts fall into a large category of writings where ancient authors attempted to claim the authority of an Ivan . even older figure, so I have these two volumes, like I said, I used to go to the library in high school and look through them and when I became an adult I was able to buy them and so I could use the first volume. to read here about the text that is included for today, so let's look at some of the examples of what these types of pseudopographical texts are, most of these date back to the second temple period, especially the late second temple period, or the first and second third. centuries, in other words, the period of time after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and that is why the texture has titles such as the life of Adam and Eve, the Testaments of the 12 Patriarchs, the Apocalypse of Elijah, the Treatise of Shem, the Odes of Solomon and then there are for example, a collection of more Psalms of David So, overall, in other words, what has happened here is that the authors are expanding the biblical stories, so the story of Adam and Eve is actually very short in Genesis, only taking up a couple of chapters at most. and now the person has written more details of his lives and so on for this expanded text or Testaments of the 12 Patriarchs, so essentially all of the 12 tribes of Israel here can give their opinion and give a blessing and so on. present their Testament, so we normally don't get to hear what Ishashar or Manasseh had to say about anything in particular and now all of these are included as authoritative pronouncements of these legendary figures from the book of Genesis, in the same way that you know that Elijah He's an old important prophet from the Old Testament and here he's having an apocalypse or an apocalyptic revelation.
2nd enoch the secrets of enoch
Hashem is the son of Adam, Solomon, David, are the famous kings, etc., so there is a practice here that we have called pseudopographics. There is also a practice that has more legitimacy. In the rabbinic Jewish tradition called midrash, which is a type of biblical interpretation and is common in the Talmud, the word midrash means textual study or interpretation. Christians use the word exegesis to study the interpretation of Scripture, so the practice may include expanding biblical narratives to consider. questions that are unclear or absent in the original, so because the ancient texts in Genesis do not clarify certain things about, say, the modern interpretation or even the later ancient interpretation of Jewish law, they do not clarify anything, a times the story has expanded.
2nd enoch the secrets of enoch
To explain more about those types of questions, rewriting also allows ancient texts to speak to more contemporary issues, and for example, I mentioned that the third Enoch, this third in this tradition, claims to be a redaction by Rabbi Ishmael, who was from the 2nd century. Rabbi who is founder of one of the schools of midrash and that became a kind of important school of this practice, so in a sense these texts we sometimes call pseudopigrapha, but in some cases they could also fit broadly into this practice from midrash. Okay, so who was Enoch? So, Enoch, why is he important enough for various authors to claim they were him or write halfway about him or something?
So Enoch is the English version of the Hebrew and therefore Enoch is an important enough character. in the Latter-day Saint tradition, so in my own Church traditions, I grew up hearing a very old American pronunciation of this, so we say Enoch and a lot of people when they hear me say that it drives them crazy, but it also works . makes it very difficult for me to say Enoch, which is the most common pronunciation in English, like I say in Hebrew, which is kind of like that, so anyway Enoch we're going to try to say who this guy was, so it comes from What I call the Bible spawn section, so they make fun of this in an episode of The Simpsons, so Homer, who thinks he's dying because he ate poisonous sushi, pulls out the Bible, which turns out to be a recorded book read by Larry King and then Larry King starts reading the Bible and says so and so begets Phineas and Phineas begets ebushua and Homer starts fast forwarding through this part abusha would give us a name and Amos begets you ti fast forward a little more amariah began a Tote hoped to beget Shalom and so on, in other words, you have to fast forward through all these beginnings that are happening in these long lists that occur at the beginning of the Old Testament and that are so boring to let people read them, so what? are these things then the book of Generations is a hypothetical source text of the Torah or the pentateuch the first five books of the Bible, including the first book Genesis, then the genealogical lists found in Genesis chapter 5 and also chapter 11 are used by the whole The editor or redactor of the Torah connects different stories written by different authors in Genesis to create a coherent narrative and, as a result, making a lineage from that essentially connects the story of Adam and Eve with the story of Cain and Abel to the history of NOAA. to the story of Abraham, etc., which gives the whole text a sort of almost historical feel, although the text is not a story, so the separate genealogies, if you remove them, actually fit together, so Scholars believe it has originally been part of an independent source that has been labeled the book of generations, so here is a portion of the beginning of the book of generations in chapter five of Genesis.
This is the list of the descendants of Adam when God created humans, he made them in the likeness of God, male and female, he created them and blessed them and called them humans when they were created, when Adam had lived 130 years, he became father of a son in His likeness after His image and named him Seth, so this is after Kane allowed the right. and thus the days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were 800 years and he had other Sons and Daughters, thus all the days that Adam lived were 930 years and he died when Seth had lived 105 years, he became the father of Enosh and Set.
He lived after the birth of Enos 807 years and had other sons and daughters, thus all the days of Seth were 912 years and he died when Anash had lived 90 years and became the father of Canaan Kenan Enósh lived after the birth of Kina in 815 years and had other sons and daughters, so all of Enosh's days were 905 years and he died, etc., so you can see why the Simpsons are making fun of this. This has been going on for a long time in the Bible, so this is the formula of generations and this. This is how we get the kind of family tree that takes us from Adam and Eve to Noah and their three sons Shem Ham and Japheth, so the Genesis 5 text uses the same repetitive formula for all generations from Adam to Noah.
The patriarch lives terms of how long each one lasts. of them lived not counting Enoch, whose ages range from Lameck, who died at the very young age of 777, to Methuselah, who died at the age of 969, so Methuselah is very famous when people have such an ancient phrase ancient as Methuselah so he is the person who lived the longest in the Bible and that is what he is mainly famous for because we don't know any other details about him and other than that in the book of generations so I want to see as much the flood myth as well as the myths of this time period before the flood, the antediluvian Golden Age, as well as the idea, as we have seen in a whole conference when we had the conference on the flood myth, as well as that is not historical , there is actually no historical basis for any of the antediluvian stories or characters in Genesis, why is it like that in the book of generations?
That text is written thousands of years after what the characters would have supposedly lived and there is no mention of any of their names in any other text. we draw additional biblical sources and then even in the Bible, when we take the older prophets, the writings older than the Torah, those prophets also do not know these names and they do not mention them, they do not talk about them, so we have talked. about that, like I said in the whole lecture about the flood myth, so where do these stories come from? The biblical stories of the flood were written no earlier than the 8th century and more likely the 7th century BC.
C., there is another story of the flood that we have talked about in the Epic of Gilgamesh it was written about 1400 years before and the Sumerians also created lists of kings and the list of kings begins with mythological leaders who are said to have a hope of absolutely huge life. The lists of kings are very similar to these lists of spawns that we have in the book of generations. and so the Sumerian king lists begin with eight kings who reign before the flood, the Sumerian anti-luvian kings are actually much longer, absurdly longer than the rains in the book of generations, although in reality living a thousand years is also a time you are living a thousand years I suppose you could also live 28 to 43,000 years, so they vary between 28,800 years and 43,200 years, so the total rainfall for all these eight Kings when added together is 241,200 years , so it is a long period of time as far as the ancient Sumerians are concerned.
Before the Flood and then after the flood, their kings still live a long time, but the duration decreases very quickly and therefore they start to rain like 1500 years and then they slow down. and reduce it to 300 years and finally as they get closer and closer to actual history, the people are reigning for a realistic human time period, so in the modern era humans look at the history thatWe have, we have this increasingly technological scientific economic development. kind of things that you can do, we can do right now everything that we're doing here on YouTube, all these live streams and all that, the phones that we all rely on for everything, none of this was and we know that this was actually conceivable when I was born, so they didn't really have these kinds of devices in Star Trek or you know, the original Star Trek or, um, The Jetsons when I was born, I mean, they had some of the ideas. but not all of these ideas, so in the mid-20th century, although science fiction like Star Trek continued to imagine that the future would inevitably follow those trend lines, so, for example, there was a 1939 World's Fair in New York and its The whole theme was the World of Tomorrow and everything that you know that was becoming modern started to become more modern and more Ultra Modern and things were going to continue along those trend lines just as everything was.
We would move forward and achieve a kind of technological utopia like the one they have in Star Trek. The ancient view is absolutely different, so the modern view is in direct contrast to the ancient view. The ancients generally believe that the past had been much better, so they looked. They went back in time and imagined or remembered a golden age when life was much simpler, when food was abundant and easy to get, when all men were more heroic, people in general were more virtuous and everyone lived longer and so on. successively and the Golden Age. The myth is very common in all cultures.
Just one example where it's expressed very visually is in the Book of Daniel, where Nebuchadnezzar has a dream and he dreams of this giant statue and the statue has a head of gold, you know, shoulders of silver. bronze legs of iron and then feet that are intermixed with iron and clay and that represents the ages of man until the days of Daniel and so the idea is that there was once a golden age, not a silver age, an Age of Bronze, an iron age and now they lived in a time where everything was just mud and iron mixed with clay and that's why things were neither pristine nor golden nor wonderful nor strong like iron, they were, it was a mess and So this is a vision of decline, which is generally how things were seen well, and as a result, these lists of kings, like the Sumerian king list or the book of generations, these lists of heroes and demigods whose life expectancy decreases from incredibly long to more reasonable human. ages of that forms a bridge, a mythological or pseudohistorical bridge between the Divine Kingdom, the Golden Age and then the Mortal present, and that is why the authors of Genesis take that understanding of the past that was common between Mesopotamia and the Sumerians. then the different Semitic peoples, the Akkadians, the Babylonians, etc., that worldview spread throughout the Near East and the writings within that worldview are the Israelite authors who are trying to place their own narrative, their own identity stories sacred within that generally understood context that it was.
It occurs to them that it was created in Mesopotamia and then they try to trace their own ancestors back to that Golden Age that they now call Paradise or Eden in the Hebrew narrative, so when you add up all those numbers in the book. of generations since Genesis and for centuries Christians and Jews have done this, they have read these numbers literally and so you can see in these charts that it starts here with Adam and then it goes Seth Enos Kanan Mahalia Jared Enoch Methuselah mcnoa and then you can watch the flood and you can see how quickly they start to subside.
After the flood, it finally came to Abraham, who in the end only lives 175 years, so the first little part here, the red part, is how long before they have children and then the gray part is how long do they live? after having your first child? So you can see how that goes and for centuries, as I say, Christians have added up all those numbers and seen how they would overlap when making a chart like this. but mainly they were doing this to try to create a chronology or fabricate a chronology to find the date of a literal creation and so they will end up adding up all the estimates and things like that from having put the Bible. put together the various stories that try to, um, try to look at Clues and add all the numbers together and you'll get something like 4000 BC.
C. or some other year like that, um, so I'm going to suggest that this is completely Not a worthwhile practice anyway and also flies in the face of ancient, historical and even medieval ideas about science and interpretation of the Scriptures. It is a modern, literalist interpretation of Scripture that attempts to reject science. In his book that actually addresses the literal meaning of Genesis, the 4th century Christian thinker Augustine, again one of these greatest thinkers in Christian history, writes: "Usually even a non-Christian knows something about the Earth, the heavens and the other elements of it." world about the movement and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions about the predictable eclipses of the Sun and Moon the cycle of the years and the seasons about the type of animals areas of bushes and so on and this knowledge sustains it as being of some reason and experience, in other words, what he is saying here is that it doesn't matter if you are a Christian or not, people can know a lot about natural things, both astronomy and also the weather and the calendar. seasons and biology and all those kinds of things that are scientific, so people can know that it has nothing to do with religion now it is a shameful and dangerous thing for an infidel, for a non-Christian, to listen to a Christian, a Christian which presumes to make sense of the Holy Scriptures by saying nonsense on these topics and we should take all means to avoid such an embarrassing situation if they find a wrong Christian in a field that they themselves know wow! and listen to him maintain his foolish opinions about our books on others.
In other words, if you hear a Christian say that the world is only 6,000 years old when everyone knows, thanks to basic science, that it is over 4 billion years old, this is going to be horrible and embarrassing and it's also going to be discredit Christians so how are non-Christians to believe these books when they talk about religious matters? Augustine says when they think that their pages are full of falsehoods about facts that they themselves have learned through experience in the light of reason, in other words, We know what science tells us and now this Christian is telling us nonsense and that will make us people think the Scriptures are full of errors, so Augustine concludes that if your reading of the Scriptures conflicts with what at the time was called natural philosophy, which we now call science, then you are clearly misunderstanding the Scriptures. and furthermore, it suggests that you are also blaspheming, so Augustine suggests that you should read the text meaningfully rather than always literally, and so on in antiquity, uh, and into the Middle Ages.
There has always been a hierarchy of responsible interpretation of Scripture, so yes, you can read it at first as literal and thus assume that that happened, but it may turn out that it didn't happen in any case, that's just the lowest and least important form of do it. the text can be written, the next thing is to read it as an allegory and then we saw how Philo of Alexandria learned Jewish, uh, Jewish scholar philosopher in the first century of the common era, when he speaks in the Old Testament, he speaks of the hands of God Oh, God. blow or something like that says it's obviously an allegory we know that God doesn't have hands and God doesn't have uh he doesn't breathe God is not physical that kind of thing uh like so he doesn't ignore the literal we We have to look at the allegorical like what the ancients Jews and Christians say, but the most important thing is what is the text that tells us what is the moral of this story, the tropological interpretation and finally, the most important thing is the anagogical interpretation, reasoning upwards, how does it all work?
This text points us to God, the source of the truth of light, etc., since we have solid scientific models as I say that date the Earth at 4.5 4 billion years give or take 0.5 billion years, so all those literal readings positing a young Earth Approximately 6,000 years old are all false, by the way, they are also refuted by the disciplines of history, archaeology, literary criticism, etc., okay, so there are implications interesting for these numbers. We can say that they have no value in determining age. of the world, but they have interesting implications within themselves because partly because there is a rapid decline in longevity in that era close to the flood, so you can see where the flood is here and then on the other side where all the little bars short are so essentially right there, according to Genesis, the way we have it in its current form, Noah is actually still alive when Abram is born in Chaldea and when Abram Abram now changes his name to Abraham is one hundred years old.
Shem, the son of Noah, the seventh great-grandfather of Abraham. great-great-great-grandfather is still alive along with his son his our facts about his son Selah and Eber, they are all still alive and Shem even survives Abraham according to Genesis okay why are there no bible stories about Abram leaving? with Noah, if the Bible indicates that Abram and Noah were alive at the same time, you know, shouldn't there be a story? Wouldn't Abraham go visit Noah? The answer is that the stories of Abraham come from different authors than those in the book of generations. Whoever wrote the Abraham stories had no idea that Noah was supposed to still be alive in Abraham's day, in fact one of them had a definite time limit on how long humans were allowed to be alive and it's just a just over 100 years. and so on, they would not have agreed that Noah or anyone else, Adam or anyone else had lived that long, so what has happened is that different sources have been combined and now they are all read together as Genesis and as the Bible and so the implications of the stories do not work, they are internal internal contradictions, later authors, however, who have access to the composite text, in other words, we can all read Genesis as it is, they and we have read the edited Genesis together from the way it is.
It's today, and as a result, they've written stories about young Abram interacting with Noah, so, for example, we did a whole lecture on the book of Jasher. I call it the book of jashar. This is a medieval Jewish midrash on the Genesis story, so it is expanding Genesis. and it has a long story of Abram after he flees the land of Shinar, you know where the Tower of Babel is and his father Tara has all these idols, etc. Abram flees and goes and lives with Noah and Shem for a while. as they help teach him and so on so that it becomes a common rabbinic midrish, uh, this idea of ​​that happening, so, with all that background about Genesis and anti-Delivian patriots in general, so I want to see us now what Does the Bible tell us about Enoch in particular?
So Enoch here on this chart is this little stubby one so you can see how long all the anti-Delivian patriarchs live in Enoch. It is only 65 years that he fathers Methuselah and then 300 years. and not so with respect to Enoch's father, Jared, we read in Genesis 5 when Jared had lived 162 years, he became the father of Enoch. Jared lived after the birth of Enoch 800 years and had other Sons and Daughters, therefore all the days of Jared were 962 years. and he died and then regarding Enoch we read that when Enoch had lived 65 years he became the father of Methuselah.
Enoch walked with God after the birth of Methuselah 300 years and had other sons and daughters, therefore all of Enoch's days were 365 years. Enoch walked with God so he no longer existed because God took him away. This is one of the few variations in the book of generations. All the others have the same formula, but all we know from Genesis about Enoch is that he lived much less time. time that the rest of the anti-flood Patriarchs he cites walked with God and three that God took him, however, this is actually plausible is simply a euphemism for him dying of misfortune rather than old age, so God took him away could simply mean he had an accident. fell, God took him or something like that, however, readers have generally not come to that conclusion, rather they are intrigued by these phrases, he walked with God, God took him and prefer to offer interpretations and extrapolations that They are much more exciting.
That's right, the translators of the 3rd century BC. C. who translated the original text of the Hebrew Bible from the Old Testament into Greek, the translators of the Septuagint used the Greek word uh metatimi uh to translate that phrase God took him away and that verb has the sense of moving from one. place to another um in the King James Version. I think this translates as translate, which is also strange, but in many ways it means that essentially the usage there translates not from one language to another, but from one space to another, which we might call transporting like a transporter as in the Federation or as inStar Trek, the same sense of this idea that God is moving from one place to another is found in the book of Sirach from the 3rd century BC.
C., also known as ecclesiasticus, which is said to speak of Enoch. A couple places one of them that says Enoch, please the Lord and it was taken as an example of repentance for all generations, so we also have here a medieval manuscript that represents Enoch being taken to heaven by God, he is ascending essentially Jacob's Ladder. ladder between heaven and earth, so the Apocalypse generally did not cease in the second temple period of Judaism, although most of the books did not make it into anyone's canon, some of them like the book of Daniel did, but most of them did not become like We saw especially disinterested Hebrew candidates in the later books that were incorporated into the Greek Septuagint and that became part of the Canon of the Orthodox and Catholic churches.
Protestants also rejected them and called them Apocrypha, however they sometimes look at the Apocrypha, so the most common style of Revelation evolved away from the kind of direct poetry, kind of visions found in the original Isaiah, anyway , there are later Isaiahs that are later apocalyptic continuators of Isaiah within the book of Isaiah, but the original prophet Isaiah essentially um write complaints and denounce the king and so on, he would do that or the people in general um in the form of poetry and talk about visions apocalyptic visions tend to take it as a step or a step further away from God, so as monotheism develops and evolves within Judaism, it becomes less common to feel that you can see God face to face and instead it is usually through Angelic Messengers as we have in the Book. of Daniel, the last written book that entered the Hebrew Canon, so, as we saw in a previous lecture, the First Book of Enoch or Enoch was now called first Enoch, the Ethiopian Enoch fits very, very well into this new apocalyptic prophecy . there are all kinds of angelic visitations and visions of heaven and so on when Enoch is taken to heaven and this other book, second Enoch, follows exactly the same genre, so the word apocalypse comes from the Greek word apocalypsos me, which means to reveal, which is the same as Revelation, which is why we are removing the veil from the apocalypses, comes in response to previous unfulfilled prophecies and also the failures of the previous Deuteronomic response to the problem of evil, so Jeremiah and Deuteronomy and all these types of texts, the texts of the deuteronomic historian, Joshua Judges.
King Samuel and so on, the implication of all that very directly is that Israel is punished when it turns away from the one God and stops keeping the Commandments and instead introduces foreign customs and brings in polytheism, paganism and begins to worship all the neighbors. gods of the Philistines and the Moabites and so on, the Midianites, that all stopped in the second temple period, the people are now monotheistic and yet they continue to suffer, first under Persian rule, where they are essentially a poor Judah and fighter. um Yahoo, as it was called in the Persian period, is a small poor province of the Persian Empire, the footprint of Jerusalem contracted significantly from the time period when Judo was an independent kingdom to this time period as a Persian province and the same. thing under the Hellenistic kings, the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids of Syria, Mesopotamia, and although the people are not keeping these promises, they are not being rewarded in the way that all the biblical books before this promised they would and So how do we explain that?
Well, they have new ideas for understanding the cosmos that they are gleaning from the Persians. They have a very powerful world religion called Zoroastrianism that has ideas about cosmic dualism, a great spiritual God fighting an evil god. and finally at the end of the world he will defeat there will be saviors of the world people who will report the ideas of a Jewish Messiah and also the Zoroastrians predict that the world this imperfect world will be destroyed and there will be a new world created that will be a restoration of paradise Paradise is even a Persian loanword, so it actually comes from Persian, so in these Persian ideas that are being talked about now, the second Enoch fits into the category of an apocalypse as well as being a pseudopographical medium. -hurry, the story component of the text is quite brief and most of the text covers a vision of Enoch as the angels escort him through the ten heavens, where he meets God face to face and learns all the

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of the universe and the end.
The sections are after he returns, the teachings temporarily returning to Earth, the last teachings he gives to his children and then a kind of succession, the priestly succession of his son Methuselah and then, this is how the text goes, as I said more or less at the beginning of this second Enoch survives in Old Church Slavonic and there are actually 20 manuscripts and fragments that are in Old Church Slavonic, but there is no complete text in that language, there is only um and there is no fragments, I think that even in Greek or Hebrew the only thing we have are fragments in Egyptian Coptic, so Silvan was current in the 9th century AD.
C. when Byzantine Greek missionaries were Christianizing Bulgaria, so Bulgaria is right outside of Thrace, so very, very close. to Constantinople, this is how close the Greeks called barbarians anyway, but how close the Bulgarian people were to the Byzantine Empire and the missionaries created the Cyrillic alphabet, which is a variation of which the Slavic peoples still use today. Ancient or medieval language The early medieval language continued to be used as a liturgical language, so the priest translated all religious text into Slavic, although the Slavic vernaculars continued to evolve to eventually form Bulgarian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Russian, etc. . All the words became different languages, but the religious language continued to be static, so it was used for a long time in the same way that Latin continued to be used even as Italian, French, and Spanish evolved.
Well, the second Enoch has a rather uncertain outlook. provenance, so there could have been a Hebrew original from the late first century CE, but it does not survive; There could have been a Greek version that is a translation of that or it could have been composed in Greek with the place where the person was. very serious about writing with Hebrew, so they are writing in Greek, but writing it sounds like it is a Hebrew original. What we do have is um, very long, uh, long, uh, I should say a long version and a short version. I have two short versions there anyway. we have short Slavic versions and long Slavic versions, but it is not clear which is the original, so there is an original Slavic version that claims to be a translation from the Greek and it seems that that is the most likely case because we also have, as I say these fragments Coptic Egyptians it seems unlikely that anyone translated them directly from Slavic into Coptic; it's more likely that they are people from Egypt or that they got a Greek version that they translated, but in any case, we don't really know.
I know, um, uh, for sure, what's going on with this most likely scenario is that there's probably a, um, for sure, a Greek version that's probably from the first century, maybe based on a Hebrew version, so let's see. the content of the second Enoch, so the first 22 chapters Enoch is carried through the ten heavens by two angel guides, followed by chapters 23 to 37 spending time in the tenth heaven where Enoch actually sees God face to face and has visions of the future and learns the secrets of nature, then Enoch is sent. He returns to Earth for a brief period of time which he uses to give a lot of ethical teachings to his children and then there is this little ending at the end of the last few chapters called the Exaltation of Melchizedek which essentially describes the priestly succession so that the The priest after Enoch is his son Methuselah and then it goes on to a character called Melchizedek who we will explain and then in the long version there is also a final chapter that tells a very brief summary of the story of the flood, so I'm pulling this from my volumes here from James Charlesworth's Old Testament pseudopigraphy, so all the quotes are actually from Anderson's translation of the longer version of the J manuscript, so let's look at the text, so this is the preface to the story of Enoch The Lord took him to heaven there was a wise man and a great Craftsman whom the Lord took and loved him so much that he could see the highest Kingdoms and the wisest and greatest and inconceivable and immutable kingdom of Almighty God and the most station wonderful, glorious, bright and many-eyed of the servants of the Lord and of all the immovable throne of the Lord and of all the ranks and organization of the disembodied armies and of all the indescribable composition of the multitude of singing elements of the army of the cherubs and of the light without measures to be an eyewitness um so in the next part the angelic visitors come at that time said Enoch said here when uh 165 years were complete for me so this is in his voice I Enoch fire begat me son Methuselah and after that I lived 200 years I completed all the years of my life 365 years in the first month on the assigned day of the first month I was in my house alone and I lay down in my bed sleeping and while I was sleeping a great anguish came into me heart and I was crying with my eyes in a dream and I could not understand what this anguish was or what could be happening to me then two enormous men appeared to me like I had never seen on Earth and I have a description of these two men these angels Their faces were like the bright sun Their eyes were like lighted lamps Fire came out of their mouths Their clothing was varied singing Their wings shone brighter than gold Their hands were whiter than snow After these angels tell Enoch do not be afraid they explained to you that the purpose of his visit is to take him to heaven Enoch gives some hasty instructions to his children wait for me I'll be right back don't worry I don't know what this kind of thing is going on and then the Angels lift him up on their wings, carry him above the clouds and into the Ether, placing it in the first heaven, so let's see what each of these Heavens are like, so you normally know how many Heavens there are, so this idea that there are normally ten heavens.
I think the most common phrase is seven heavens and seven hemins. It would be what you would expect in the normal, say Ptolemaic Cosmos, which is familiar to everyone in the Roman Empire, so the Earth is a sphere as it was known in Antiquity and the Middle Ages and is surrounded by seven celestial spheres, each one of which is where the planets are and planets simply originally meant simply all moving objects in the sky, so the sun and the moon are also planets in the original conception of what a planet is, so the orbits are the moon Mercury Venus Sun Mars uh Jupiter and Saturn and then the stars are in the outermost areas, so normally they would be what you would consider to be the seven seven heavens uh In Enoch here there are 10 10 Heavens, so it's a Different cosmos and in fact what everyone is in each Heaven is something unexpected or unexpected for me, so it will not be interesting to show it, so in the first heaven Enoch sees Angels ruling. the movements of the planets and the weather um this is actually some of this is similar to what God is talking about from the Whirlwind in the Book of Job where God talks about keeping the snow in a great storehouse so he can use it when it snows. comes and so on so they placed me in the first heaven and showed me a vast ocean much larger than the earth's ocean um this is the idea of ​​Mesopotamian cosmology that above the sky there is a firmament like a force field and that field of force is preventing a larger Cosmic ocean from flooding the Earth and God opens the firmament opens the force field to cause the universal flood then when it reaches the first Heaven there is an ocean that is much larger than the Earth's ocean so they showed me the 200 Angels who govern the stars and the Celestial combinations and fly with their wings and circle all the planets and there I perceived the treasures of snow and ice and the angels who keep their terrible stores so that all the snow and ice and all of that has been prefabricated in a factory up there and is in a warehouse ready to go when God wants to make a snow storm, the treasure of the clouds from which they come and go so that all the clouds remain. in their different warehouses and corrals when you needed a cloud, you let it come out, it traveled all over the earth and then returned to the warehouse and so on and those men picked me up and took me to the second heaven and showed me and I saw a Darkness greater than darkness Earthly and there I perceived prisoners in custody hanging waiting for judgment without measure and those angels had the appearance of the Darkness itself more than the Earthly darkness and without ceasing they made people cry all day in such a strange way and if you had been waiting even asDante, where hell is a completely different kind of place, maybe in the underworld and heaven there are a lot of good places that get better and better, etc., in this case it seems like hell is in heaven. um cosmology of the second Enoch, meanwhile, in the third heaven, Enoch actually sees the Garden of Eden, so he went up to the third heaven, he says, then I looked down and I saw a paradise and that place is inconceivably pleasant and I saw the trees. in full bloom and in their midst was the Tree of Life, this tree that is central to the story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis in the place where the Lord rests when he goes to Paradise, therefore, the Garden of Eden does not is on Earth, but it is up in the third heaven, which the angels tell Enoch has been prepared for the righteous as an eternal inheritance, so in other words, people when they are righteous when they die, they are going to go to live up here in the third heaven in paradise, which is actually the same Paradise as Eden, but interestingly, as you go and explore the rest of the third heaven, it also includes a very frightening place with all kinds of torture and torments reserved for the wicked, so the third heaven.
Heaven is essentially the eternal resting place for righteous and wicked humans. The fourth Heaven returns us to a kind of cosmological realm with the orbits of the Sun and Moon and the great Gates that God created to be an annual horror. Logue then the men led me away to the west of the sky and showed me six large open Gates corresponding to the Circuit of the Eastern Gates in front of them, where the sun sets according to the number of days 365 and a quarter. God's very crazy number he came up with um. so the text also goes through two very obscure calendar systems, one lunar and one solar, there's a lot of other stuff I'm pulling out.
These descriptions are actually very long. I'm just bringing out a couple of interesting things. From each habit like this for the fifth Heaven Enoch sees countless armies of giants whose faces are downcast and asks the two physicists two angels who guide him who are these people the Angels answer these are the Grigory who 200 myriads of them turned away from the Lord along with their prince Satan, so Satan is a pretty obvious name there and similar to all of them are those who came down as prisoners on the train who are in the second heaven imprisoned in a great darkness, in other words, unlike many visions of Heaven there.
They are heavenly prisons in the second, fourth and fifth heavens of the ten heavens and this includes hell here where Satan and all the gregoria who are called here, all the fallen angels of the higher ranks and those of lower rank. They are down in the second heaven, then the sixth and seventh heaven, the sixth heaven contains seven groups of angels who spend all their time carefully studying the movement of the stars and planets, the second Enoch, I believe is somewhat interested in astrology . Think that as part of this, the seventh heaven contains, quote, all the fiery armies of the great archangels and the incorporeal incorporeal forces and the dominions and the origins and the authorities and the cherubim and the seraphim and the many-eyed thrones and so on.
Thrones and dominions. and so on, these are all different levels of Archangels and angelology that are evolving in the second temple period as angelology is being worked out so that when he reaches the edge of the seventh heaven, Enoch can see the Throne of God. in the tenth heaven and now meets the Archangel Gabriel, traditionally the Herald of Heaven, who takes him beyond the eighth Heaven, which is called the changer of seasons, and takes him beyond the ninth Heaven, which is called where find the heavenly houses of Him. The twelve zodiacs are again, he is interested in astrology here and it probably brings him directly to the tenth heaven which is called aravoth, so in the tenth heaven Enoch says that I saw the face of the Lord like burning iron . in a fire and taken out and emits sparks and is incandescent, so even I saw the face of the Lord, but the faith of the face of the Lord should not be spoken of, it is so wonderful and extremely amazing and extremely terrifying, and who should I realize? of the incomprehensible being of the Lord and of his face so strange and indescribable and how many are his commandments and his multiple voice and the Throne of the Lord supremely great and not made with hands and the choir stalls? around him and the armies of cherubim and seraphim and their never silent songs and the Lord summoned one of his archangels rev oil by name is one I had never heard of before, who was quicker in wisdom than the other archangels and which records all the Acts, so the historian Angel and the Lord said to Reverend Royal: take the books out of my storerooms and find a pen to write quickly and give it to Enoch and let him read the books, so now in the next section in chapters 23-37, Enoch.
It teaches about the great secrets of God, including everything related to the heavens, the movements of the Sun, the Moon, the planets, the calendar, the elements, the weather, languages, music and really everything related to life human that it is appropriate to learn in quotes, in quotes, to grasp where we are. We're back then, so we have those first 22 chapters that take us through the ten heavens and we have this very long section where, having seen God face to face, Enoch is now learning all these different secrets of nature. . I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that, um, but because this would go on too long if I did, but there's also interesting stuff in there, then we get to the part where Enoch returns to Earth to preach, so the Lord has an angel of ice who cools Enoch's faith. so that mortals can look at him again without being burned, then there is an idea that is in the pentateuch that when Moses sees God, he cannot be seen properly again, so it is veiled to Moses and in exactly the same way as Enix's face is here. temporarily put in the refrigerator here so that the Flames he has now become have become like Angels.
Other people on Earth will still be able to see it. The two original angels they returned to are assigned to return to Enoch. to Earth where his children have been faithfully waiting for him, a month or so has passed. Enoch gives a very long speech beginning, pay attention my children, and he begins by recounting some of these heavenly wonders that he has seen before moving on to a whole long set of moral teachings um, one of them really caught my attention as the first list , has a list, in reality it has two different lists of Beatitudes, one, blessed are the and cursed are the, but essentially happy are the same as blessed are the that is why I want to share with you these that I found interesting happy is the person who refers to the name of the Lord and who serves before his face always and who organizes his gifts with fear offerings of life and who in this life lives and dies correctly happy Is he who executes just judgment not by payment but by justice without waiting nothing as a result and the result will be that trial without favoritism will follow?
Blessed is he who clothes the naked with His cloak and gives his bread to the hungry; happy is he who judges the orphan and the widow with justice and helps anyone who has been treated unjustly, happy is he who deviates from the secular path of this vain world and walk along straight paths and live that life that has no end. Blessed is he who sows the right seed so that his harvest may be sevenfold, blessed is he who is the truth to be able to speak the truth to his neighbor, blessed is he who has compassion on his lips and sweetness in his heart, blessed is he who understands . all the works of the Lord performed by the Lord and glorify him, although the teachings of the Beatitudes in saying happy is that he or blessed is he, blessed is he who does this, it is obviously very associated with Jesus and while you can find some themes common here about orphans and widows and so on, um, however, none of the Beatitudes of Enoch depend directly on any New Testament text, in fact, none of the teachings of the second Enoch come from any New Testament text, so there is in this general arched tradition, you know.
In about 20 manuscripts there are some Christian glosses, which means that a Christian scholar has added things like Christian ideas and pasted them in there, but they are only in individual manuscripts, so the translator here Anderson argues that they are very obvious interpolations and so , when you look at the tradition as a whole, he says, quote, there's no distinctively Christian idea in the book, which is interesting because obviously what it shows is that if this is a non-Christian Jewish writer from the first century CE, you can see that there are a lot of overlapping ideas anyway with what first century Jewish Christians are writing about, including what Jesus is talking about.
Here's an example that doesn't seem very particularly Christian, so Enoch talks about animal sacrifice as an example, so he who acts. illegally with the soul of an animal acts illegally with his own soul because a person brings one of the clean animals to make a sacrifice because of sin so that he can have healing for his soul if he brings it to the sacrifice of clean animals and birds and grain , then there is healing for that person and he will heal his soul, so obviously animal sacrifice was very central to Jewish religious practice during the simple second temple period, in other words, anytime up to the year 70, when the Romans destroyed the temple, but it's not part of Christianity at all, so this is the kind of thing that wouldn't be included in any kind of Christian text and, in reality, probably wouldn't have been part of, say, a rabbinic text. really after the destruction of the temple when sacrifices are no longer even possible, so it would be very unusual if the author here was a Christian or even a later observant rabbinical Jew, observant Jew, okay, so after Enoch gave all those long speeches of uh and Commandments and instructions and so on to his children, we get this end of his narrative, when Enoch had spoken to his people, the Lord sent Darkness to the Earth and it became dark and covered the men who They were standing and talking to Enoch and Then the Angels rushed in and grabbed Enoch and took him to the highest heaven where the Lord received him and made him stand before his face for eternity.
Then the darkness was removed from the earth and it became light and the people looked but could not. find out how they took Enoch and glorified God and found a scroll with the invisible God inscribed on it and then they all went home, so all they know is that there's a big cloud of smoke or whatever, Enoch disappears and all that is left is a scroll that says the invisible God and meanwhile Enoch's reward is that he can stand in the face of God forever and that's it, anyway, it doesn't sound great in a literal sense, but Yes in a Platonic spiritual sense, it would be uh. that's the ideal, okay, that takes us through this guide to the ten heavens, the secrets, the books, taking the books out of God's library, and finally, these ethical teachings for his son, which takes us to this exaltation of the text of Melchizedek.
After Enoch is taken to heaven, his son Methuselah is appointed priest in his place. Methuselah lives his entire long life and then at the end of his life he decides to pass on or is ordered to pass on his priestly office to Noah's younger brother around a guy who doesn't exist in the Bible but is an additional character we now know here on the second Enoch, so nearby he has a wife called supanim and she has been sterile, which is why it is a very frequent problem in biblical texts where women have reached old age. and has never had children, she and her husband are also not having sexual relations, yet she miraculously conceives and therefore he was essentially having an immaculate conception and birth and she gives birth to a boy named Melchizedek the Archangel Michael and our Then Melchizedek becomes a priest after being around, so Michael takes Melchizedek to Eden, which as you know from this book is actually not on Earth, it is in the third heaven and while he is there in Paradise, Melchizedek can survive the flood and that kind. gives him an origin story, so where is this very obscure character, Melchizedek from the Book of Genesis, a person who is a priest of Salem, a person to whom Abraham actually tithes, a person who Abraham considers to be a spiritual authority, where does this guy come from? so the answer anyway there are many answers the answer that people write in midrish the answer to the book of the second Enoch is he is an otherwise unknown immaculately conceived grandson of the great-grandson of Methuselah, great-great-grandson of Enoch, so this text is interesting text and it has an interesting survival if it was written by a Christian, the author has done a remarkably good job, probably too good, of avoiding anachronisms by including obvious Christian thought in his Old Testament setting and I will just say for example, this It's something, it's afeat that Joseph Smith, for example, in his writing of the Book of Mormon that takes place in Old Testament times, is not even remotely capable of doing this, he immediately introduces anachronisms and has all kinds of contemporary Christian doctrines that are going back in time. time of the destruction of Jerusalem, the time of Zedekiah and his Zechariah or whatever, the times when, when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem, this guy does a great job, if so, that's why most people think it's not so in other words, this person who is a Jewish writer probably from the first century who just has a lot of interests in common with other second temple Jews, including the early Christian Jews, so the fiscal cosmology is quite only.
I think it is different from standard Christian Ptolemaic. cosmology, angelology is also a little different from, say, the angelology that exists in the other Book of Enoch and in other texts and that may explain why this text was not continued to be copied in either Hebrew or Greek, so if there were a Hebrew original and certainly there probably was a Greek original, why don't they continue? They don't continue when people don't use the book and have no purpose in copying it, which also begs the question of why. So do so many manuscripts survive in Old Church Slavonic?
Who is busy reading this in the Slavic language? a priest called bogamill and that simply means willed by God in the ancient Slavic church in Bulgaria of the 10th century, then the dualism of bogamel saw God is quite monotheistic is a has a God is a higher being who has created the infinite God because the creator of a spiritual world but he has an eldest son, Satan, beer as the lesser creator of the material world, the defective material world around us, so one of the ideas of Gnosticism is that the spiritual realm is the highest realm and true and this material realm is Where is all the affliction and sin and Michael is?
He has a very august government as the second son of God, the sick younger brother of Satan, who is eventually sent to Earth and takes human form as Jesus in the bogamill understanding of this and then Jesus is. adopted as the only begotten son of God, so there are adoptionists as well as neonostics and dualists, so there are a lot of interesting cosmological overlaps with the Enoch text we just read, so the second Enoch is uncompromisingly monotheistic and not mentions Jesus. important roles for Michael and Satan IL and also includes its own kind of war in heaven narrative which I didn't read for you, but it's there anyway and is placed as we saw the rebel angels in the second and fifth heavens and Yes. vi, so the Boga Mills continued to influence the Cathars, although I don't know if they pushed for these ideas to reach the Cathars in the west and we gave a whole lecture on the Cathars, but both sexes were persecuted by the Cathars in the west.
Catholics and Orthodox Christians in the East were eradicated starting in the 15th century, so they no longer exist. Interestingly, I think there are some interesting parallels and echoes with the modern version of the story of Enoch, as Joseph Smith wrote. his had his own revision of the Bible and wrote his own story of Enoch. It portrays Enoch as a very powerful prophet who works amazing miracles, from what we read in the Joseph Smith Bible Revision, it is also called the Joseph Smith Bible Translation or the Inspired Version. of the Bible in some cases and so great was the faith of Enoch that he spoke the word of the Lord and the Earth trembled and the mountains fled even according to their order and the rivers of water were diverted from their course and the roar of the lions was heard from the desert and all the nations feared greatly.
So powerful was Enoch's word and so great was the power of the language that God had given him, so he has power. Words, Words of power that he's using to move mountains and so on. forward and the Giants of the earth, so in Genesis we read that there are giants in the anti-flood times, so the Giants on the earth also kept their distance and came out with a curse on all the people who fought against God and From there onward there were wars and bloodshed among them, but the Lord came and dwelt with his people and they dwelt in righteousness and the fear of the Lord was upon all nations, so great was the glory of the Lord that was upon his people. and the Lord blessed. the land and they were blessed in the mountains and in the high places and they flourished and it came to pass that in his days he built a city and it was called the city of Holiness, even Zion, so Enoch tells the city to build a story, sorry , a story about the building of a city and that's the same as Zion and as the story of Joseph Smith continues, Enoch, I'm sorry, the city of Enoch is so righteous that God ultimately not only takes Enoch to heaven , but to the entire city. city ​​of Enoch and then there is the idea, as people were literal apocalyptics, that there would come the second coming of Christ and the destruction of the world and when that happens and the New Jerusalem is built, also the city of Enoch would return and take its place as a suburb or part of the New Jerusalem, etc., so the story inspired many peoples in the different traditional Latter-day Saint churches, including the strangites, the LDS church in Utah, and our own Community of Christ, to create cooperatives so that as if they could be agricultural cooperatives where people work together sharing agricultural tools, helping each other with the harvest, etc., they are often called orders of Enoch and that would be the name, the company would be called order of Enoch . and so on, and they also inspired later people to produce types of social charities, things like orphanages, nursing homes, senior centers, hospitals, etc., our own and here in Toronto, let's see, the housing charity NATO social organization was founded half a century ago in the The same kind of tradition of trying to build Zionist or Enoch-like communities, communities that try to abolish poverty and suffering, etc., as described in the city of Enoch, where They had everything in common, so there were no poor people among them. and then the Lord called it Zion.
There is a strange echo in Mormonism. Maybe you've heard in Utah theology. In Utah LDS theology there is the idea that the pre-existing Jesus and the pre-existing Lucifer are both literal children of the heavenly father who offers competing plans of Salvation, the pre-existing plan of Jesus is chosen. Lucifer gets upset and has a rebellion and ends up being rejected by Archangel Michael and he and a third of the hosts of Heaven are expelled and Lucifer in his fallen form becomes Satan, so we saw that the Boga Mills also have this idea that Satan L and Michael are children of God and also participating in the same war in heaven, which is important because it is also important secondly.
Enoch, anyway, and interestingly, for Boga Mills Michael the pre-existing is the pre-existing Jesus and that's why he becomes Jesus, so that's not what happens, but Brigham Young had a peculiar doctrine in Utah that Michael the Archangel was the pre-existing Adam and that's why he became Adam, I think, and that or Anatomy is God anyway. I'm not quite sure how the God of the Atom Doctrine works, but essentially the idea is that Adam is the God of this world, etc. This is a doctrine that the Utah LDS church repudiated after the death of Brigham Young, although it is still understood by some of the Latter-day Saint sex fundamentalist polygamists in Utah and elsewhere, so this is a particularly interesting book and I hope you enjoyed it.
It's kind of a summary, since we've seen the second Book of Enoch or The Book of Enoch, the second for scholars, sometimes called the secrets of Enoch, sometimes called Slavic Enoch, um, so let's get to your questions, guys. . I'm going to get a A quick drink of water, oh yeah guys come on ask questions if we don't have too many questions. So, Nadav. Kravitz says: Why do you think the Genesis account says that God took Enoch? What do you think the original authors knew each other? So, I don't do it. I don't know I'm saying I'm suggesting it could have meant something as simple as there's a uh you know he died by accident in other words sometimes you'll have a phrase you know God takes someone before. his right time, so God took him before his time, so it could just mean that, um, but we could, I don't know what the meaning is, so it's a mystery and one of the reasons why it's one of the few, uh. things that we have outside of that list that are interesting the other one is um on the second list, the post flood list, there's a guy called payleg and he says and they called him payleg before the Earth was divided back in the day, either it is.
Of course what that means, you know, but it's just interesting and that's led to all kinds of crazy speculation, so if we're young Earth creationists, they'll say that, well, yeah, I'm sure there was a pangea or something, a supercontinent. but then on the day of Peleg the Earth split up and that happened just a few thousand years ago, you don't know, millions of whatever, millions and millions of years ago, thank you Wendy for your support, thank you Daryl, Scott, for your support, um, uh, D Parker. and Native also asked: could the second heavens of Enix 10 be the source of Paul's cosmology in Second Corinthians 2. where he says taken to the third heaven, taken to Paradise and heard words that cannot be spoken and that no man can to pronounce? interesting, I haven't read it so I'll have to look at it because the interesting thing that's happening here is that paradise is here in the third heaven and so that's not it, that's not something.
I have seen that, otherwise you have not heard these are the sources, so what do we have, which is 2 Corinthians 12? Oh well, no, it's not necessarily a source, it's a reference, so there is a parallel in Second Enix, so yeah, this. is listed as a parallel and also the Apocalypse of Moses, so this is an idea that's floating around and so, um, it's an interesting parallel and since then, um uh, scholars have not postulated that the second Enoch depends on Paul and it doesn't necessarily mean that Paul depends on this, it could be that these ideas are floating around, that that paradise is in the third heaven, uh, and I have to look at the Revelation of Moses to see what that Revelation of Moses 37 5 says.
That's interesting, so Leon asks if Joseph Smith Jr and Sydney Rigdon would have had access to Second Enoch in the 1830s and the answer is no, they didn't have that, so they had it in the 1830s. I don't think so. had something other than the Bible and the Apocrypha, they later got um, Joseph Smith later got the book of Jasher and some other books, but they wouldn't have been working off of that in the 1830s, so this is a Totally when he was mentioning all those things about Adam God and Michael and all that kind of stuff, this is all um uh totally uh coincidence, this is just Echoes and this has nothing to do with it and in fact, there's actually very little in general. is a strange parallel to the bogamels, the second main story of Enoch is completely unrelated and has almost nothing to do with Joseph Smith's story of Enoch.
The reason Joseph Smith's story of Enoch has a city is probably because there is a completely separate Enoch. tradition, the descendants of Cain in Genesis, who were the first to build cities and be craftsmen, etc., etc., there's probably confusion there, uh, and developer Kravitz also asks where this apocalyptic idea and this style of literature comes from . uh Angels that reveal and vindicate future Jewish Judaisms or Astrism uh James Tabor calls it the bad idea that took over the world it certainly becomes popular here um so I think it's evolving here it doesn't necessarily uh it doesn't necessarily have to be that way uh, like a direct influence, the strongest and most powerful culture at that time will be the Persian imperial culture, Mesopotamia and Persia together, which are going to influence Judaism more than Judaism influences them because Judaism is a much smaller little thing and not really that important at the time, so I guess I would suggest that kind of this whole elaboration idea of ​​angels and the end of the world and a cosmic battle between God and evil and even the ideas of saviors and so on.
It says that it is probably the source of all those who were not part of First Temple Judaism, the source of all that is most likely modesty, so it is Persian Zero-Astrism, it also comes from the Persians or the Mesopotamian Persians. um Daryl Scott asks how good the second Enoch has been. known throughout history, so I think it is not very well known, so we did not have, there are not many references to it, it is not like the first Enoch, which is quite well known by the New Testament writers, as I also say . It also doesn't survive in the original languages ​​of it or what the original languages ​​are probably and that's why we had to have all those question marks around the entire provenance slide, which is we don't really know the text, um, so it's possible. it's writtenoriginally in Old Church Slavonic, which seems surprisingly unlikely because all the ideas in it are very consistent with first-century Second Temple Judaism, that sort of thing, and have very little parallel in, say, native ancient Bulgarian culture, since you know, and so and so it seems that it is almost certainly a translation from a Greek original at the latest, but because we mention it so little and it has so little influence at the beginning, we don't know.
I would say not much, um laurentiu beerton says um, how has a Slavic community adopted a Gnostic view of Christianity? So there are all kinds of different reasons why in many cases, when you're in a um, let's say, when we're in a state that's at war with an economically, militarily, culturally powerful state, so The Bulgarian Empire, the first Bulgarian Empire, is essentially at war with rebelling and declaring its independence and power against the Byzantine Greek Roman Empire and therefore one of the things they need often still want to be part of a powerful world religion , so you adopt the Christian religion, but sometimes it makes sense to have your own opinion because if you have your own independent branch of Then you are no longer really subject to the Patriarch of Constantinople because you can say that guy is a heretic, we know the real kind of Christianity and that is why there are ideas floating around there, there is a sect called politicians who have been preserving the Gnostic Christianity that they transmit. some of his ideas apparently to the Bulgarians who create the bougamel type of church and so on.
It's probably very similar to the political dynamics at work with why all the German barbarians who take over the Latin West, they all conquer Italy and and Spain and Portugal and even North Africa and so on, what those countries that they conquer become, those of the Roman Empire, they do it as Christians, but they are Aryan Christians, so they have their own thing where their own part of Christianity is heretical from the point of view of Rome and the local Roman population, but that allows them to say, well, you guys don't know what you're talking about because we know better and that's why we win you over and that's how we probably get an independent interpretation. or sect of Christianity when it is necessary to confront a political rival like Constantinople. uh Michelangelo asks why do you think Enoch became such an important figure among mystics and alchemists with things like the Inakyan language or the Corpus hermeticum, for example, like Metatron.
As you mentioned with Metatron, Metatron as an angel is in the first Enoch and all the angelology is really elaborated in the first Enoch and so it is a tradition that goes hand in hand and the first Enoch is It is a much more popular and well-known text, so which I think popularizes Enoch as the important figure of the mystics and the alchemists. So once you're known for that whole First Book of Enoch thing, that's like putting your foot in that field, and the same thing, you know for Since Solomon becomes so important, then Solomon is also important to everyone. these kind of mystics and alchemists and even summoning demons and things like that because Solomon is said to have power over you, you know, he's learned all this wisdom and he has all this power over it, so Enoch is even a um, in a way he's even an earlier precursor more powerful than Solomon because he's this guy who lives before the flood, so even though this is an apocalypse that we just read as we saw, Enoch actually sees God face to face, that's not something that's happening otherwise, you know? the kind of publication, uh, post-Moses or certainly post-Babylonian captivity era, so Stephanie Ceresi asks based on that quote I have from the book of generations where it says about Payleg, where it says that he is, like this that his name was like that for the Earth. is divided in its day, could that simply mean that before there are borders and then maybe it is divided into territories absolutely when I was saying um, because in its day the Earth was divided and a modern interpretation has been that as the supercontinent of Pangea was divided? towards the Americas and the old world and the new world, that was definitely not the meaning of that because they had no idea about the new world, they had no idea about continental drift, that's a new scientific theory, um, just you know, just 150 years or something, I mean, it's a very, very new continental drift, so it didn't mean what I said, it's a modern interpretation and it could mean, as you say, in its time, the world was divided, so that could mean that it is divided. in different countries it could mean um, it could mean it probably means it's a very good potential interpretation is that that was when the story of the Tower of Babel is supposed to have taken place, so in his days the world was one, everyone was one. only language and after that they were divided, you know something like that, uh, but it could be the limits, it could be just in his days, the world was surveyed and suddenly he was able to farm his own plot of land, um, Donnie Lane Gringo asked if John would repeat if the second Enoch is in the apocrypha no it is not um it is that a different account of Enoch Enoch is not in the apocrypha uh Enoch is uh the first Enoch is um is uh in the is for most everyone is pseudopacrypha it's in the um Ethiopian uh Bible So the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox churches consider that to be part of the Old Testament, but it's not part of the Old Testament or the Apocrypha in um for Protestants, so it's published in that great book of pseudopigraphies that I am showing you.
Volume one is through the Selector if you have the first, second and third Enoch, but he does, it's not in the apocryphal books. Daryl Scott says, um, what's the angel in the picture on the screen right now? So actually, it's Metatron, actually Metatron, um. it's not in the second Enoch so I made that title screen before I had recently reread before I had recently reread the second Enoch so actually that should be um it should be illustrating the first Enoch or 30 Metatron that's Metatron , the angel who is not actually in second uh Enoch um uh nylon Diamond says uh I thought Enoch became Metatron or was it that first unique or second Enoch so that's the first Enoch or the third regular Enoch or it's um or it's a later tradition based on the first Enoch, it's not um So as you say, that's Metatron, it's not, the image is Metatron and I shouldn't post it because it's relevant to the Enoch tradition, but it's not, it's not part of the story of the second Enoch, asked David T.
What is the nature of Gregory under Samyaza, who swore on Mount Hermon to take human wives and successfully reproduced with those wives to create the Giants? So, yeah, this is a dark story, that exists in Genesis and therefore one of the One of the few stories we have about the pre-flood era is like you say the sun is, uh, the sons of God, however you want to put it, it's often interpreted here as Euro making Grigory, um, Enoch's middle name. for the angels who have rebelled against God who come to Earth and take human wives and then their children are the giants so probably the first accounts in Genesis are mythological and they're trying to explain um uh you. we know like the mythological or heroic era and so on, so there is an understanding, in ancient biblical mythology, that there are certain giants, the last of which is essentially like Goliath and therefore where they came from, and therefore That's the idea of ​​is that they're some kind of demigod, so it's the same kind of thing, you know, Goliath is a giant or portrayed as a giant, but it's also kind of a raid like a Homeric hero like Achilles, so that Achilles is half.
Half God and half human, and so, for monotheists, how do you explain half God, half human, and then the way this is explained here is to have Angels who are children of God or whatever? Angels, a different order of beings. Divine beings create. Demi Divine, you know, half human, half angel, uh, beings, etc., okay, so Michael Rogers asks, um, okay, Enoch is often read literally, uh, angelic visitors or extraterrestrial visitors, is this because it's very entertaining or if it's entertaining or it's largely cryptic in tone, um then. So these books have become very popular, uh, because, yeah, because they're so fantastic, right, and that's why people like it um, people like magic, people like, you know, people would like all kinds of these wild um um fan Fantastic fantasy. things that are happening and so, um, so I think, as you say, one of the ways that, um, you know, we've said that you know a certain number of people that you know identify as Jedi in England as their religion, do you?
TRUE? no, most of them you don't know, you don't know, they're not into this enough to believe it, but if it could, if it were true, I'm sure they would want it to be, um, so there are people for whom this because Because these books are old, they can live in a reality contrary to the facts, they can say that this has, you know, a kind of weight of authority and exists in the material world or something like that. That's probably why I want to say, but I think these texts are interesting because they teach us what they say about ancient and also medieval people, how they read these types of ancient texts and how they added to the stories, elaborated on the stories, etc. and it's a tradition that has really carried over to the present as we saw, even with the midrash of Joseph Smith or the restoration of new stories of Enoch, so I want to thank you for all those questions and thank you for participating in this conference.
I remind you to save the date for our next lectures, so on June 13th next week we will talk about why Josephus is important, two weeks later on June 27th we will talk about how Constantine changed history and then the following week . On the 4th of July we will talk about why Jesus was from Galilee, so thanks again.

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