HistoricalChristian.Faith

Book of Enoch on the Nephilim

Dates: c. 300 BC Summary: 1 Enoch gives the fullest early statement of the angelic reading. The "sons of God" are the Watchers — two hundred angels under Semjaza who descend on Mount Hermon, take human wives, and beget giants of monstrous height. The text adds a distinctive twist that no strictly Sethite reading can: when the giants die, the spirits that come out of their bodies become the evil spirits (demons) that afflict humanity until the final judgment.

Claims & evidence

The Watchers descend, take wives, and beget giants

And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: 'Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children.' … And they were in all two hundred; who descended in the days of Jared on the summit of Mount Hermon … And they became pregnant, and they bare great giants, whose height was three thousand ells: Who consumed all the acquisitions of men.

— 1 Enoch, Chapters 6-8, 15, 16, ccel.org. The "sons of God" are explicitly heavenly angels who father a race of devouring giants.

The giants' spirits become evil spirits upon the earth

And now, the giants, who are produced from the spirits and flesh, shall be called evil spirits upon the earth, and on the earth shall be their dwelling. Evil spirits have proceeded from their bodies; because they are born from men and from the holy Watchers is their beginning and primal origin; they shall be evil spirits on earth, and evil spirits shall they be called.

— 1 Enoch, Chapters 6-8, 15, 16, ccel.org. This demonological etiology — demons as the disembodied spirits of dead giants — is unique to the supernatural tradition and is echoed in later Jewish and Christian writers.

The archangels intervene and the Watchers are bound

And they have gone to the daughters of men upon the earth, and have slept with the women, and have defiled themselves … And the women have borne giants, and the whole earth has thereby been filled with blood and unrighteousness.

— 1 Enoch, Chapters 9-11, ccel.org. Michael, Uriel, Raphael and Gabriel bring the case before God, who orders the Watchers bound and their giant sons destroyed.

Notes

• This is the fountainhead of the angelic/Watcher reading: the sons of God are unambiguously angels, not the line of Seth.
• The Watchers' forbidden arts. Between the descent and the demonology, chapter 8 has the Watchers teach humanity a syllabus of forbidden arts — Azazel metallurgy and cosmetics, and, by name, "Baraqijal (taught) astrology, Kokabel the constellations… Sariel the course of the moon." This is the Second-Temple root of the patristic claim that astrology was not discovered but taught by the fallen angels — weighed on the astrology doctrine's fallen-angels argument (assessment: contested).
• A close cousin text, the Book of Giants — preserved in Aramaic among the Dead Sea Scrolls — takes up the same Watcher-and-giants story from the giants' own side and names Gilgamesh and Humbaba among them.
• The claim that demons originate from dead giants is a hallmark of the supernatural tradition and decisively rules out a purely human (Sethite) interpretation — 1 Enoch 15 is the source text for the reading weighed on the are the unclean spirits the dead Nephilim? argument (assessment: contested).
• Transmission: widely used in the earliest Church, 1 Enoch lost credit in the fourth century and — after a last allusion by George Syncellus (c. 810) — dropped from view in the West, surviving as Scripture only in the Ethiopian (Ge'ez) tradition. James Bruce brought manuscripts back from Abyssinia in 1773, and a Greek fragment of chapters 1–32 later surfaced at Akhmîm, Egypt — the recovery behind the modern text. Whether its early use ever amounted to canonical Scripture is weighed on the canonicity argument page. — "Book of Henoch," Catholic Encyclopedia.