The Book They Never Mentioned - An Introduction to The Book of Enoch for the Curious Evangelical
Like many of you, I grew up in a small Midwestern evangelical church where the Bible was the final word on everything. I can still picture my first Bible, a small white leather-bound King James Version with thin vellum pages, red letters for the words of Jesus, and a zipper around the edge. I read it to report my chapters in Sunday School, and I carried it with me to church every Sunday. We revered that King James Bible as God’s holy words to us, all sixty-six books of it.
It never occurred to me at the time that other Christians had books in their Bibles that weren’t in mine, nor that there were ancient writings referenced in the New Testament that weren’t included in my tidy little Bible. I didn’t discover that until decades later. It felt a little like finding out you have a cousin you’d never heard of. Shocking, unsettling, intriguing.
Setting the Stage - Enoch Shows Up in the New Testament
I first became aware of Enoch during one of my reading passes through the New Testament. Tucked near the very end, in the small fiery letter of the Epistle of Jude, is a reference to Enoch. It says, “Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied…”
First question: Who is Enoch? Jude then quotes a prophecy about the Lord coming with “ten thousands of his holy ones” to execute judgment. So, naturally, the next question is: Where is that prophecy in the Old Testament? Surely that’s where Jude is quoting from.
But it isn’t there. That prophecy does not appear anywhere in the Old Testament. Instead, the wording appears in an ancient Jewish text called the Book of Enoch.
Here is Jude’s passage: “Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his holy ones, to execute judgment upon all…” (Jude 14–15)
And here is the passage from Enoch: “Behold, He comes with ten thousands of His holy ones to execute judgment upon all…” (1 Enoch 1:9)
The wording is strikingly similar.
Jude treats Enoch as a known source. Not only a source familiar to his readers, but one worthy of quoting in a letter that would become part of the New Testament. He doesn’t introduce it. He doesn’t defend it. He simply cites it.
For a girl raised to believe the Bible was all of God’s words for us, presented in a neat, closed system from Genesis to Revelation, that realization was unnerving. But in the best possible way.
Instead of breaking my Christianity into something useless to be discarded, it broke it open in the most amazing and holy way. That little verse, and the questions it raised, eventually led me into a spiritual world far bigger than the one I imagined as that little church girl.
The Questions That Followed
That verse raised questions. Lots of questions. Where did this book come from? Why did Jude think it important enough to quote? What else did it say? Those questions sent me backwards. Back into Jewish history. Back into the spiritual imagination of the ancient world.
I began asking: What did the apostles read? What did Jews believe during the time of Jesus? What ideas were circulating in the early church? Did the apostles understand the spiritual world differently than I had been taught? And perhaps the most unsettling question of all: How much of my understanding had been shaped by two thousand years of church history?
Further Back - Enoch in the Old Testament
Long before Jude quotes him, Enoch appears briefly in the Book of Genesis. Just five verses. Genesis 5:21–24 tells us that Enoch was the seventh generation from Adam:
Adam → Seth → Enosh → Cainan→ Mahalaleel → Jared → Enoch.
Enoch was the son of Jared, the father of Methuselah, and the great-grandfather of Noah. So Enoch was born only a few generations after the creation of the world and only a few generations before the flood. What an interesting time to be alive!
Genesis also says something unusual about him. It says Enoch “walked with God.” And then, mysteriously: “He was not, for God took him.” That’s it. No death recorded. No burial. Just taken. Naturally, that also raises questions. Who was this man who did not die? What did he see? Where did he go? What did he know? Centuries before the time of Christ, Jewish writers attempted to explore those questions in a collection of writings now known as 1 Enoch.
What Is the Book of Enoch?
The Book of Enoch is not a single book but a collection of ancient Jewish writings composed roughly between the third century BC and the first century AD. It circulated widely in the Jewish world during the period historians call Second Temple Judaism.
While it was not included in the biblical canons of most Jewish or Christian traditions, it was preserved in full in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Fragments of several sections of Enoch were also discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls in the twentieth century, confirming that the text circulated in Jewish communities before the time of Christ. In other words, this isn’t medieval speculation. It is ancient literature that helped shape the spiritual worldview of the very people who wrote the New Testament.
Core Teachings - What Does Enoch Actually Say?
The Book of Enoch is dense and symbolic, but several themes dominate. It explores: the rebellion of angels, the structure of the cosmos, the coming judgment of evil, and a mysterious heavenly figure called the Son of Man.
The Rebellion of the Angels
Perhaps the most shocking part of Enoch, at least for a Protestant evangelical girl like me, is its expansion of the strange passage in the Book of Genesis chapter 6. Genesis briefly tells us that the “sons of God” saw that human women were beautiful and took them as wives. Many modern commentators interpret this as the descendants of Seth marrying the descendants of Cain. But Enoch presents a very different interpretation.
In Enoch, the “sons of God” are angels called Watchers, heavenly beings assigned authority by God who rebel against Him. According to the story, they descend to earth, take human wives, and teach humanity forbidden knowledge such as sorcery, warfare, and astrology. Basically, before humankind was ready to wield power responsibly, they brought us the power to destroy ourselves.
They also produce offspring. Not ordinary children. These children are described as giants, the Nephilim, beings of mixed heavenly and human origin. This story became a common explanation in ancient Jewish thought for the spread of violence and corruption in the early world. While it sounds so bizarre and fantastical when you first hear it, once you see it, it becomes difficult to ignore the echoes of this tradition throughout Scripture.
Giants in the Old Testament
The word Nephilim appears again in the Book of Numbers 13, when Israelite scouts report seeing giants in Canaan. They say the people there were so large that the Israelites felt “like grasshoppers” in comparison.
The Old Testament also mentions enormous figures such as King Og in the Book of Deuteronomy. His bed is described as roughly thirteen feet long, and ancient readers understood him to be among the last of the giant clans. It even says the bed was still in existence at the time of the writing and that readers could go see it.
Whether one reads these passages literally or symbolically, it’s clear that ancient readers believed they were encountering the remnants of something ancient and terrifying.
Echoes in the New Testament
Now return to the New Testament. Jude writes that angels “did not stay within their proper domain” but abandoned their position and are now kept in chains awaiting judgment. That description closely mirrors the story told in Enoch.
The apostle Peter the Apostle says something similar in 2 Peter 2. He writes that God did not spare the angels when they sinned but cast them into Tartarus, a term from Greek mythology describing a deep cosmic prison. It’s a striking word, and it appears nowhere else in the New Testament.
Even Paul the Apostle makes a puzzling reference in the First Epistle to the Corinthians while about head coverings. He writes that women should cover their heads during prayer “because of the angels.” That verse puzzled me for years. What could women’s hair possibly have to do with the angels? Some early Christian writers believed Paul was alluding to the ancient story of angels falling through desire for human women; the same story that is expanded in the Book of Enoch. Ah, now that finally makes sense!
The Origin of Demons
According to Enoch, when the giants eventually died, many during the flood, their spirits had nowhere to go. Not fully human, yet not fully angelic. Their spirits were said to roam the earth as unclean spirits, seeking bodies to inhabit. This idea became a common explanation in ancient Jewish thought for the origin of demons. In the Gospels, Jesus frequently casts out “unclean spirits,” a term familiar within that worldview. We’ll explore that topic much more in a later post.
A Structured Cosmos
Enoch also describes elaborate heavenly journeys. It speaks of multiple heavens, cosmic storehouses for winds and stars, and prisons prepared for rebellious spirits. The universe it describes is morally structured. Nothing escapes divine oversight. Judgment is certain. Evil is temporary. The righteous will be vindicated. This same cosmic worldview echoes throughout the New Testament, particularly in the language of spiritual powers and principalities.
The Son of Man
One of the most fascinating sections of Enoch describes a pre-existent heavenly figure called the Son of Man who will sit in judgment over the nations. When Jesus repeatedly refers to Himself as the “Son of Man,” He is drawing not only from the Book of Daniel chapter 7 but also from a broader Jewish apocalyptic tradition that included texts like Enoch. This does not mean Jesus endorsed Enoch as Scripture. But it does mean His audience likely understood the imagery.
Orthodox and Catholic Perspectives
In most Christian traditions today, including Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, the Book of Enoch is not considered canonical Scripture (with the Ethiopian Orthodox Church being a notable exception). Instead, it is viewed as an important piece of Second Temple Jewish literature. Some early Christian writers, such as Tertullian, spoke favorably about it. Others were more cautious. Most scholars today view Enoch as historically illuminating rather than doctrinally authoritative. It helps us understand how ancient Jews interpreted Genesis. It shows the development of angelology and demonology. And it provides context for the apocalyptic world into which Jesus was born.
Why Should Modern Evangelicals Care?
Here’s why I think this matters. Many of us were raised with a very flattened version of the biblical world. Despite our devotion to a holy book that is filled with supernatural and miraculous beings and events, we’ve come away with a sanitized, safe version of the spirit world. Angels were cherubs. Demons were cartoon villains. In fact, I still remember the little red devil coin bank that sat on our piano, cute, mischievous, harmless.
But the world of the Bible is not flat. It is vast. Understanding the spiritual imagination of ancient Judaism helps us see Christianity as the apostles understood it, as part of a much larger cosmic story. The Book of Enoch played a major role in shaping that worldview. Reading it doesn’t require accepting every detail as literal history. But it does restore a sense of awe. Heaven and earth overlap. Rebellion has layers. Judgment is real. History is filled with Divine intervention.
The Man Who Walked with God
Genesis gives us only this: Enoch walked with God. And he was not, for God took him. The Book of Enoch represents humanity’s attempt to explore the mystery surrounding that man. And, it provides an important background for how many ancient Jews understood the spiritual realities of our world, a world where angels, demons, and saints surround us. Whether one reads it as inspired, speculative, symbolic, or apocalyptic poetry, it reminds us that the ancient world understood something deeply: There is more going on than we see!
A Missouri girl with a tidy evangelical Bible might find that unsettling. Or she might find it an epiphany! Sometimes the faith we inherit grows not by shrinking the world to something we can grasp, but by discovering how vast it has always been.
The Bible did not fall from heaven, leather-bound and cross-referenced. It emerged from a living, breathing, spiritually electrified world. And if you’re curious about that world, the Book of Enoch is a fascinating place to begin.
Grace and light to you all.