Is the Book of Enoch in the Bible? Which Bibles include it
Only one Christian canon includes the Book of Enoch: the Tewahedo Bible of Ethiopia and Eritrea, in 108 chapters. Why others don't, and why Jude quotes it.
The short answer
Not in most Bibles. The Book of Enoch, also called 1 Enoch, is not in the Hebrew Bible or in Protestant, Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Bibles, and it was never part of the 1611 King James Apocrypha. It is scripture for the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo churches and for Beta Israel, the Ethiopian Jewish community, and Ethiopian Bibles include it in 108 chapters. The New Testament's Letter of Jude quotes it directly, in Jude 14–15.
In this guide
Enoch gets a few verses in Genesis. He “walked with God, and he was not found, for God took him” (Genesis 5:24), and a whole book carrying his name has been read, copied and argued over for more than two thousand years. Whether the Book of Enoch is in the Bible depends on whose Bible you open: the Tewahedo churches of Ethiopia and Eritrea read it as scripture, and nearly every other tradition does not.
- 108chapters in the Book of Enoch
- 1 of 5canons we count that include it: the Ethiopian
- Jude 14–15the verses of the New Testament that quote it
Which Bibles include the Book of Enoch?
Only the Bibles of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo churches include the Book of Enoch, as part of the Old Testament. Beta Israel, the Ethiopian Jewish community, also counts it as scripture. Every other major Jewish and Christian canon leaves it out.
| Tradition | Is the Book of Enoch in its Bible? |
|---|---|
| Judaism (the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh) | No |
| Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jews) | Yes |
| Protestant (66 books) | No |
| Anglican and Lutheran Bibles with the Apocrypha | No |
| Catholic (73 books) | No |
| Eastern Orthodox: Greek, Russian, Georgian | No |
| Armenian Apostolic, Coptic Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox | No |
| Church of the East | No |
| Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo | Yes |
So the answer to “is the Book of Enoch in the Catholic Bible” or “in the Orthodox Bible” is no, with one distinction worth keeping. “Orthodox” covers two families of churches. The Eastern Orthodox churches do not include Enoch; the Orthodox Bible guide has what they do include. The Oriental Orthodox family includes both the Ethiopian and Eritrean churches, which do, and the Coptic, Armenian and Syriac churches, which do not.
The King James Bible is a no as well, even in its original form. The 1611 edition printed 14 books of Apocrypha between the testaments, from 1 and 2 Esdras to 1 and 2 Maccabees, and Enoch was not among them. Our guide to how many books are in the Bible sets out what each tradition does include.
The Book of Enoch in the Ethiopian Bible
In the Ethiopian Bible, Enoch is an Old Testament book like any other. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church’s own list of its 46 Old Testament books puts Enoch 14th, straight after Jubilees, which follows 1 and 2 Chronicles. For the Tewahedo churches, whose history goes back to the fourth century, it is not a lost book or a curiosity: it is part of the Old Testament they read.
It is also the church through which the book survives whole. The complete text exists only in Ge’ez, the language in which the Ethiopian church still celebrates its services. Everywhere else the Book of Enoch survives in pieces: Aramaic fragments among the Dead Sea Scrolls, Greek fragments, two short Latin passages and a Coptic fragment. Any complete translation rests on Ge’ez manuscripts. The traveler James Bruce brought three Ge’ez copies to Europe in 1773, and Richard Laurence published the first English translation in 1821.
Enoch is one of six books that, among the five canons we count, only the Ethiopian has. The best known of the others is Jubilees:
| Book | Protestant | Catholic | With Apocrypha | Orthodox | Ethiopian | What it’s known for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jubilees | — | — | — | — | 50 | Genesis retold, and the calendar behind it |
| Enoch | — | — | — | — | 108 | Watchers, giants, and a tour of heaven |
The other four are 4 Baruch and the three books of Meqabyan, which share a name with Maccabees but are different books. The Ethiopian Bible guide goes through all of them, and explains why the church counts its Bible as 81 books.
What is the Book of Enoch about?
The Book of Enoch is a collection of five shorter works, written in Aramaic or Hebrew and gathered under the name of Enoch, the father of Methuselah and great-grandfather of Noah. Scholars call it 1 Enoch, to tell it apart from two other books that carry his name.
| Section | Chapters | What it contains |
|---|---|---|
| The Book of the Watchers | 1–36 | Angels who come down to earth and father giants; Enoch pleads for them, then is taken through heaven and to the ends of the earth |
| The Book of Parables | 37–71 | Visions of the final judgment and of a figure called the Elect One and the Son of Man |
| The Astronomical Book | 72–82 | The courses of the sun, moon and stars, shown to Enoch by the angel Uriel, and a year of 364 days |
| The Dream Visions | 83–90 | Two dreams: the flood, then the history of Israel told with animals, the faithful as sheep |
| The Epistle of Enoch | 91–108 | Enoch’s last counsel to his children, the Apocalypse of Weeks, woes on sinners, and the birth of Noah |
Scholars date the oldest parts, the Book of the Watchers and the Astronomical Book, to the third century BC or earlier, and the Dream Visions to about 163–142 BC. The Parables are the latest and the most debated, often placed around 100 BC and by some scholars much later. They are also the one section missing from Qumran, where eleven Aramaic fragments of the book were found in Cave 4.
The best-known story is the first. Chapter 6 opens much as Genesis 6:1–2 does, with daughters born to men and heavenly beings who desire them, and then names what Genesis leaves unnamed: two hundred angels, the Watchers, who come down on Mount Hermon, take human wives and father giants. One of them, Azazel, teaches people to make swords, knives and shields.
1 Enoch, 2 Enoch and 3 Enoch
Three books carry Enoch’s name, and only the first is the Book of Enoch in the Ethiopian Bible. 2 Enoch, also called Slavonic Enoch or the Secrets of Enoch, survives in full only in Church Slavonic. 3 Enoch is a Hebrew work whose final form probably dates to the fifth or sixth century AD. Neither is part of any Jewish or Christian canon.
Why does Jude quote the Book of Enoch?
Jude quotes the Book of Enoch as a prophecy of judgment on the ungodly people his letter warns about, and he names Enoch as the prophet. Jude 14–15 is where the New Testament quotes the book directly, citing “Enoch, the seventh from Adam”:
About these also Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying, “Behold, the Lord came with ten thousands of his holy ones, to execute judgment on all, and to convict all the ungodly of all their works of ungodliness which they have done in an ungodly way, and of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.”
Jude 14–15, World English Bible
The words correspond to 1 Enoch 1:9, the last verse of the book’s first chapter, and a parallel to that verse turns up in one of the Aramaic scrolls from Qumran (4Q204). “The seventh from Adam” is also how the Book of Enoch itself describes him.
What the quotation proves is where traditions part. Tertullian, writing around AD 200, called the book divinely inspired and took Jude’s use of it as evidence that it was genuine. Augustine granted that “Enoch, the seventh from Adam, left some divine writings”, because Jude says so, but kept the book outside the canon, since “it was impossible to ascertain whether these were his genuine writings.” The Ethiopian and Eritrean churches read the whole book as scripture.
Why is the Book of Enoch not in the Bible?
The Book of Enoch is not in most Bibles because it was never part of the Jewish scriptures the early church inherited: it is in neither the Hebrew Bible nor the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament. Outside Ethiopia and Eritrea, the churches that settled their lists of Old Testament books did not add it.
It was not for lack of readers. Copies were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, the early Christian Epistle of Barnabas quotes it as scripture, and Athenagoras, Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian treated it the same way. The doubts were there from early on, too. Tertullian himself noted that it was “not received by some, because it is not admitted into the Jewish canon either.” Augustine added that it had not been among the scriptures “preserved in the temple of the Hebrew people by the diligence of successive priests”, and that “their antiquity brought them under suspicion.” By the fifth century Enoch was mostly excluded from Christian canons, and the ninth-century list known as the Stichometry of Nicephorus counts it among the Old Testament apocrypha.
So the Book of Enoch was not removed from the Bible. Most traditions simply never received it into theirs. That is a different story from the Apocrypha, which early Protestant Bibles printed and later ones dropped; were books removed from the Bible? tells that one.
Apocrypha or pseudepigrapha?
In Protestant and Anglican Bibles, “the Apocrypha” means a fixed set of books, and Enoch is not among them. Scholars often class it with the pseudepigrapha, writings that “purport to be written by noted authorities”, here a figure from Genesis, while noting that Ethiopian Bibles include it. Our guide to the deuterocanonical books and the Apocrypha covers the books the Apocrypha does contain.
How long is the Book of Enoch?
The Book of Enoch has 108 chapters, and by our count R. H. Charles’s English translation, as printed in the 1917 edition, runs to about 37,000 words. That is close to the length of Genesis, which has 35,642 words in the World English Bible and 38,262 in the King James Version. Read silently at the average adult pace of 238 words a minute, it takes about 2 hours 35 minutes, or a little over 3 hours at a relaxed 200.
Its chapters are short. They average about 340 words, a little over half an average chapter of the Protestant Bible (631 words in the World English Bible), so 108 chapters is less reading than it sounds:
- One chapter a day: 108 days, about three and a half months.
- Two a day: 54 days, under two months.
- Four a day: 27 days, at six or seven minutes an evening.
Within the Ethiopian canon as we count it, Enoch is the second-longest book by chapters, after the Psalms with 151, and holds 108 of the 1,564 chapters we count for that canon, about 7%. Our word count covers the translation itself, without Charles’s headings and verse numbers, and keeps the words he marks as uncertain or supplied. Other English versions will differ a little, as Bible translations do.
Reading the Book of Enoch for yourself
You do not need to belong to the Ethiopian church to read the Book of Enoch, and a few things make it easier going.
- Read Genesis 5:18–24 and 6:1–4 first. They hold all that Genesis says about this Enoch and the story of God’s sons and the Nephilim, and the book’s sixth chapter reads almost as a retelling of the second passage.
- Choose a translation. Laurence’s translation and Charles’s 1917 edition are both free to read on Project Gutenberg. The Ethiopian church has not authorized an English translation of its Bible, as an Ethiopian Orthodox writer points out, so any English Enoch is an unofficial one.
- Start with the Book of the Watchers. Chapters 1–36 hold the stories most people mean when they mention Enoch, and they read well on their own.
- Let the Astronomical Book go quickly. Chapters 72–82 track the sun and moon through the portals of heaven, and W. O. E. Oesterley’s introduction to the 1917 edition calls the book, until chapter 80, “uninteresting in the extreme”. Skimming it costs nothing.
At four short chapters an evening, the whole Book of Enoch fits inside a month.
Questions people ask
Is the Book of Enoch in the Catholic Bible?
No. The Catholic Bible's 73 books include seven that Protestant Bibles leave out, among them Tobit, Judith and Sirach, but Enoch is not one of them. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910 calls it "the so-called apocryphal Book of Henoch", using apocryphal as Catholic writers do, for a book outside the canon.
Is the Book of Enoch in the King James Bible?
No. A King James Bible today usually has 66 books, and the original 1611 edition, which printed 14 books of Apocrypha between the testaments, did not include Enoch either. That section ran from 1 and 2 Esdras through Tobit, Judith, Wisdom and Sirach to 1 and 2 Maccabees. The first English translation of Enoch was not published until 1821.
Is the Book of Enoch part of the Apocrypha?
Not in the sense Protestant and Anglican Bibles use the word. There, the Apocrypha is a fixed set, the 14 books printed between the testaments in the 1611 King James Bible, and Enoch is not among them. Scholars often list Enoch with the pseudepigrapha, writings attributed to a famous figure of the past, while noting that Ethiopian Bibles include it.
Do Orthodox Christians accept the Book of Enoch?
It depends on the church. The Eastern Orthodox churches, Greek, Russian and Georgian among them, do not include it in their Bibles. In the Oriental Orthodox family, the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo churches read it as Old Testament scripture, while the Coptic, Armenian and Syriac churches, which belong to the same family, do not.
Is the Book of Enoch in the Jewish Bible?
No. It is not part of the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, and most Jewish movements do not treat it as scripture. Many copies were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, which suggests it was widely read in the Second Temple period, but later rabbis regarded it with suspicion. The exception is Beta Israel, the Ethiopian Jewish community, whose canon includes it.
Sources
- Book of Enoch, Wikipedia
- Biblical canon, Wikipedia: the table of books by tradition
- Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church: the canonical books of the Bible
- Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, Wikipedia
- Reception of the Book of Enoch in premodernity, Wikipedia
- Augustine, The City of God, Book XV, chapter 23 (New Advent)
- Anthony Maas, Henoch, Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), New Advent
- Biblical apocrypha, Wikipedia
- Pseudepigrapha, Wikipedia
- 2 Enoch, Wikipedia
- 3 Enoch, Wikipedia
- Henok Elias, Aksum Review of Books: FAQ on the Ethiopian Bible
- R. H. Charles, The Book of Enoch (SPCK, 1917), with an introduction by W. O. E. Oesterley, Project Gutenberg
- Richard Laurence, The Book of Enoch the Prophet, translated from an Ethiopic manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Project Gutenberg
- Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047.
- World English Bible, verse-per-line edition (public domain), eBible.org
- King James Version, verse-per-line edition (public domain), eBible.org
