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What is the Book of Enoch? Was it written by the great-grandfather of Noah? And why is it quoted in the New Testament but not found in our Bible? Let's talk about that.
You know, the longest and only unambiguous quotation in the biblical Epistle of Jude is not from the Old Testament, but rather from the non-biblical Book of First Enoch. What is First Enoch? Should it be in our Bibles? And why would you quote it?
To start, though, let me say that what we now call the Book of Enoch is a compilation of a number of writings that most likely existed independently but eventually got pulled together in one document. Although it's much more ancient, the only existing full copy we have of First Enoch is a 15th-century manuscript written in a version of Ethiopic. Fragments of different sections in Coptic, Greek, Latin, and Aramaic all exist, although only contained portions of the whole document.
While the author of the book is attributed to Enoch, the Enoch of Genesis and the great-grandfather of Noah, the writing itself probably doesn't go older than the 400s BC, and some sections of it actually come after the time of Jesus.
Now, it's true that during the Hellenistic period of Judaism, starting about 200 years before Jesus, many ancient biblical characters became the subject of extra-biblical and apocryphal literature. These documents are what we now refer to as the pseudepigrapha, "pseudo" meaning false in Greek, and "graphic" meaning writing in Greek. The pseudepigrapha, therefore, is a collection of early Jewish literature that often have attributed authors that we know today were not the original authors.
From what we do have, we can trace the earliest portions of what we call First Enoch to both Aramaic writing and style. Both the use of language and the language used represent the community of those who were coming back from Israel immediately after the Babylonian exile. It also contains themes from this time and advocates a solar calendar in opposition to the lunar calendar, which is what happened during the time due to the influence of Greek mathematics on timekeeping. Not to mention that First Enoch bears no markers of having a Paleo-Hebrew origination or predecessor, which we do see for the books of the Old Testament.
Enoch also makes allusions to content we find in the Book of Daniel, Jeremiah, and Isaiah. It even appears to paraphrase Deuteronomy 33, Numbers 24, and then mentions Mount Sinai, which wouldn't have existed in the function that it did in the Old Testament in Enoch's day. If we can't date Enoch any earlier than two or three hundred years before Jesus, that's a long way off from any pre-flood time period.
What the Book of Enoch represents is a collection of literature about Enoch, the time period following up to the biblical flood, and particularly end-time theories that are all pieced together and put together by different authors. But where Enoch is useful is the picture it gives us concerning what Jews believed about supernatural beings, what we would describe as angels and demons, in the time leading up to Jesus. And it also gives gives us interesting snippets into the streams of interpretation concerning how Jews were thinking about concepts like the Messiah prior to the New Testament itself. It may not be as ancient as the pre-flood era, but that doesn't mean that its contents don't give us insights into the theological conversations happening during an important time of history and for those reading the Old Testament, and particularly the Genesis narrative.
So, why does Jude quote it? Well, I think one thing is clear: Jews at the time read sections of what we now refer to as Enoch but never considered it scripture. Nonetheless, the book doesn't have to be inspired to be useful. Enoch appears to be both common enough for Jude to quote it in his epistle, assuming his audience knew what he was talking about, and that the stories within contain kernels of truth the Jude is willing to draw from. If he were alive today, he might quote from a news source like the New York Times or a well-known piece of literature like something that C.S. Lewis or Shakespeare wrote. If he did do that in that type of hypothetical situation, it wouldn't mean that those sources would be inspired scripture, but instead a relevant, well-recognized source to draw from or reference.
So, should Enoch be in our Bibles? I think the answer to that question is pretty clearly no. We know when it was written, and to a large degree why it was written, and neither of those answers of those two questions give us any indication that it had a level of authority of scripture in ancient Israel or in the New Testament period when Jude was quoting it. However, if you want to learn more about what scripture is and why we can have confidence that what we do have in our Bibles are the right books, then click that subscribe button and check out the rest of the videos and content on my channel.