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Hermeneia
1 Enoch 2: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 37-82
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648 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2011
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June 24, 2026
I did not foresee that I would be reading a commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch against rising fears over AI and the data centers that power them — not to mention questions about the intentions of the techlords who wield disproportionate control over our brave new world. You may not see a connection between an ancient apocalypse and rumors of a new apocalypse, but we don’t change half so much as our tools do. In our ineradicable humanness we find that the ancient is ever new again, and that our past echoes our future.
The second and final volume of this commentary covers 1 Enoch 37-82, comprising the Book of the Parables and the Book of the Luminaries. The entire work, vanished from Jewish and European eyes until its “rediscovery” by the Scottish explorer James Bruce in 1773, is less a single monograph than it is an anonymous collection of books written, edited, and redacted together over the three centuries preceding the birth of Jesus. The thread that binds them is Enoch, the “seventh from Adam” who, according to Genesis 5:24, “walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.” From this enigmatic seed grew a forest of traditions about Enoch’s journeys through the cosmos and revelations of things to come, the most influential of which traditions are preserved most fully in the Ethiopian Bible as 1 Enoch.
I found this volume of the commentary just as masterly as the first, though George W. E. Nickelsburg of the University of Iowa limits his contribution to the Book of the Parables, likely the youngest strata of 1 Enoch as the only section not found in the fragments of Qumran. For the much older Book of the Luminaries, Nickelsburg enlists the services of James C. VanderKam of Notre Dame, a man equally at home in Second Temple literature and equally willing to engage in the meticulous textual criticism that I find so appealing even as the rest of the audience dozes off. These commentaries are organized so well that you can easily skip the criticism, but why are you reading a critical commentary if you’re going to skip the good stuff?
As for the content of 1 Enoch itself, I’m not about to tell you that it predicted the coming of AI, as cool as that would be. What I will tell you is that the Book of the Parables is one of the “books of jealous wrath and rage and…trepidation and consternation” on those who leverage technology to oppress. Picking up themes from the Book of the Watchers, Enoch foretells judgment on two classes of beings: the kings and the mighty who persecute the righteous, and the fallen angels who revealed (among other corrupting knowledge) the forbidden tech that enables this persecution: metallurgy. Whether filling coffers or providing weapons of war, the working of metal is the demonic secret that unleashed a technological Armageddon on the human race.
Given our own grappling with AI, I’m fascinated by this window into the psychology of a people who felt helpless and hopeless beneath the weight of technological innovations that accrued as power in the wrong hands. In the worldview of ancient sectarian Jews, the solution was divine whiplash when the “Son of Man” comes in strength to right all wrong. This one, who acts with all the authority of the “Head of Days,” will eradicate the metallic sources of power: “And in those days none will save himself either by gold or silver…there will not be iron for war…copper will be of no use, and tin will be reckoned as nothing, and lead will not be desired.” In dark valleys of fiery judgement, Nickelsburg writes, “The iron and bronze that represented the power and violence of the kings and the mighty are now forged into massive chains that will bind the demons who had revealed their secrets. Thus, in the hiddenness of this other world, Enoch sees the events that assure the coming impotence of the mighty and those who have supported them.”
Dependence on such divine intervention was, naturally, the first reaction of a people whose thoughts were shaped by conceptions of a deity whose authority was singular, universal, and irresistible. This strain of thought drives the Book of the Luminaries, which foregoes fulmination against oppressors in favor of a calm vision of the way in which angelic powers obediently shepherd the sun, moon, and stars through a series of gates on each horizon in fulfillment of God’s ordained 364-day year. If the Parables asserts that the disorderly “kings and mighty” will find that they cannot escape the final assertion of God’s order, the Luminaries confirms that the very predictability of the cosmos is a sign that “despite a dangerous and chaotic world of experience, order pervades the universe, the Almighty is in control, and the divine will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
The Book of 1 Enoch seems alien in many ways: “Unfortunately, reading an apocalypse, like reading a Pauline epistle, involves reading someone else’s communication. The author and the audience took many things for granted to which we are not privy, and they used code words whose referents were easily understandable to them but not to us.” Yet, even if expressed in terms alien to modern thought, 1 Enoch’s fear of technological dominance and yearning for justice is as contemporary as social media: “The havoc wreaked by the kings and the mighty was the painful wound that hurt the most and that the author sought to heal.”
Our forbidden secret is, of course, AI. No less a personage than Pope Leo XIV has weighed in with his 2026 encyclical Magnifica Huminatas, noting in the third chapter on technology and dominance that “as with every major technological shift, AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data.” The authors of 1 Enoch experienced this exact same dynamic in the output of the mines, the data centers of the ancient world, that powered the violence of the kings and the mighty. The old is new again; the future echoes in the past. We are not likely to avoid abuses of power, perhaps quite terrible, in the age of AI. However, the kings and the mighty who control our digital mines, and who might be tempted to leverage that control against the powerless, might take note that justice has a way of coming around just as surely as the sun rises, the moon sets, and the stars look down from their courses on the fallen pretensions of man.
The second and final volume of this commentary covers 1 Enoch 37-82, comprising the Book of the Parables and the Book of the Luminaries. The entire work, vanished from Jewish and European eyes until its “rediscovery” by the Scottish explorer James Bruce in 1773, is less a single monograph than it is an anonymous collection of books written, edited, and redacted together over the three centuries preceding the birth of Jesus. The thread that binds them is Enoch, the “seventh from Adam” who, according to Genesis 5:24, “walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.” From this enigmatic seed grew a forest of traditions about Enoch’s journeys through the cosmos and revelations of things to come, the most influential of which traditions are preserved most fully in the Ethiopian Bible as 1 Enoch.
I found this volume of the commentary just as masterly as the first, though George W. E. Nickelsburg of the University of Iowa limits his contribution to the Book of the Parables, likely the youngest strata of 1 Enoch as the only section not found in the fragments of Qumran. For the much older Book of the Luminaries, Nickelsburg enlists the services of James C. VanderKam of Notre Dame, a man equally at home in Second Temple literature and equally willing to engage in the meticulous textual criticism that I find so appealing even as the rest of the audience dozes off. These commentaries are organized so well that you can easily skip the criticism, but why are you reading a critical commentary if you’re going to skip the good stuff?
As for the content of 1 Enoch itself, I’m not about to tell you that it predicted the coming of AI, as cool as that would be. What I will tell you is that the Book of the Parables is one of the “books of jealous wrath and rage and…trepidation and consternation” on those who leverage technology to oppress. Picking up themes from the Book of the Watchers, Enoch foretells judgment on two classes of beings: the kings and the mighty who persecute the righteous, and the fallen angels who revealed (among other corrupting knowledge) the forbidden tech that enables this persecution: metallurgy. Whether filling coffers or providing weapons of war, the working of metal is the demonic secret that unleashed a technological Armageddon on the human race.
Given our own grappling with AI, I’m fascinated by this window into the psychology of a people who felt helpless and hopeless beneath the weight of technological innovations that accrued as power in the wrong hands. In the worldview of ancient sectarian Jews, the solution was divine whiplash when the “Son of Man” comes in strength to right all wrong. This one, who acts with all the authority of the “Head of Days,” will eradicate the metallic sources of power: “And in those days none will save himself either by gold or silver…there will not be iron for war…copper will be of no use, and tin will be reckoned as nothing, and lead will not be desired.” In dark valleys of fiery judgement, Nickelsburg writes, “The iron and bronze that represented the power and violence of the kings and the mighty are now forged into massive chains that will bind the demons who had revealed their secrets. Thus, in the hiddenness of this other world, Enoch sees the events that assure the coming impotence of the mighty and those who have supported them.”
Dependence on such divine intervention was, naturally, the first reaction of a people whose thoughts were shaped by conceptions of a deity whose authority was singular, universal, and irresistible. This strain of thought drives the Book of the Luminaries, which foregoes fulmination against oppressors in favor of a calm vision of the way in which angelic powers obediently shepherd the sun, moon, and stars through a series of gates on each horizon in fulfillment of God’s ordained 364-day year. If the Parables asserts that the disorderly “kings and mighty” will find that they cannot escape the final assertion of God’s order, the Luminaries confirms that the very predictability of the cosmos is a sign that “despite a dangerous and chaotic world of experience, order pervades the universe, the Almighty is in control, and the divine will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
The Book of 1 Enoch seems alien in many ways: “Unfortunately, reading an apocalypse, like reading a Pauline epistle, involves reading someone else’s communication. The author and the audience took many things for granted to which we are not privy, and they used code words whose referents were easily understandable to them but not to us.” Yet, even if expressed in terms alien to modern thought, 1 Enoch’s fear of technological dominance and yearning for justice is as contemporary as social media: “The havoc wreaked by the kings and the mighty was the painful wound that hurt the most and that the author sought to heal.”
Our forbidden secret is, of course, AI. No less a personage than Pope Leo XIV has weighed in with his 2026 encyclical Magnifica Huminatas, noting in the third chapter on technology and dominance that “as with every major technological shift, AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data.” The authors of 1 Enoch experienced this exact same dynamic in the output of the mines, the data centers of the ancient world, that powered the violence of the kings and the mighty. The old is new again; the future echoes in the past. We are not likely to avoid abuses of power, perhaps quite terrible, in the age of AI. However, the kings and the mighty who control our digital mines, and who might be tempted to leverage that control against the powerless, might take note that justice has a way of coming around just as surely as the sun rises, the moon sets, and the stars look down from their courses on the fallen pretensions of man.
June 18, 2025
[March 24, 2016] This volume didn't float my boat the way vol 1 did. I don't think it's Nickelsburg's fault in the case of his commentary on the Book of the Parables; I just found that particular section of 1 Enoch not especially interesting. The Book of the Luminaries is more up my alley, but VanderKam occassionally paid tedious attention to textual issues that I personally didn't feel were particularly important. Again, probably a personal issue and not a reflection on the book, which others may find excellent.
[June 18, 2025, edit:] So I read this book nearly ten years ago, and my feelings about the Book of the Parables and the Book of the Luminaries have not changed very much. This is a personal issue. I have just always been more interested in ancient cosmology than soteriology. It is true that the Parables contain cosmological sections but I just didn’t find them as interesting as the cosmology in the Book of the Watchers, which has a sustained vision of Enoch from chapters 12-36 as he tours heaven and earth.
I realized after reading the commentary through once that I really didn’t have a clear memory of the main points of Nickelsburg's commentary. So I decided to read it through a second time. I often find that on a second reading I pay more careful attention, which was definitely the case in this instance. I discovered, for example, that I had neglected to take *any* notes on my first reading, which is really inexcusable. The first thing I noted on my second reading was Nickelsburg's notice that the parables alternate eschatological and cosmological material but not as explicitly as chapters 1-5. I think this explains part of my general disinterest in the Book of the Parables compared to other parts of 1 Enoch, and also the N.T. Now, I'm a great fan of eschatology, Revelation being my favorite N.T. book, but I find the eschatology in the Parables tedious. Basically it just repeats over and over that the kings and the mighty will be judged on the Great Day. The notices of the vindication of the righteous were more interesting, especially the passages which seem to presage a bodily resurrection in 51.1-5 and 61.5.
Another thing which may have made the Parables tedious for me are the numerous interpolations. Surely the book would flow better if we had access to the uninterpolated original in the original order (Nickelsburg rearranges several verses into what he thinks is the original order). In the introduction Nickelsburg reconstructs what he thinks may be close to the original form of the Parables: 37-54.6; 56.1-59.3; 60.11-23; 61.1-63.12; 64.1-2(?); 65.6-8(?); 67.4-7(?); 69.2-12(?); 69.26-29; 70.1-2. And indeed this reconstruction does seem to work better!
As was the case ten years ago I preferred the Book of the Luminaries to the Parables. The main problem with reading the Book of the Luminaries is figuring out how his descriptions of the luminaries conform (or don’t conform) to how the luminaries actually behave. VanderKam is to be commended for sitting in on a physics class on descriptive astronomy in preparation for writing this book and consulting with graduate students in order to understand this important and sometimes confusing issue. It is impossible to understand ancient astronomy without a handle on how the luminaries actually behave. I sometimes found myself getting confused; for example, when the Book of the Luminaries divided the waxing and waning of the moon into 14 parts each, I found myself thinking that a lunar month lasted 28 days. I had totally forgotten about the day the moon is new and has no light, bringing the total to 29 days. This is still 0.54 days shy of the actual length of a month, but, still, this was pretty close for ancient cosmology.
In my review of ten years ago I complained about VanderKam's attention to textual details. This was a really unfair criticism. The reason VanderKam pays attention to these details is that we actually have Aramaic portions of the Book of the Luminaries. Nickelsburg can’t do the same for the Parables because we have no other text for them other than the Ethiopic. Even at that, since we only have about 30% of the Book of the Luminaries in Aramaic, VanderKam was only able to draw comparisons for the portions we have an Aramaic text available. Since I don’t know Aramaic, my eyes tended to cross over at those points of the discussion. I made it vow to myself that on my second reading I would pay more attention to these points.
A word must be said about the excellent translation by Nickelsburg and VanderKam. I much prefer it to Ann Nyland's translation. Unlike Nyland, Nickelsburg and VanderKam format the verse as verse and the prose as prose. They have a translation based on the commentary as a separate volume, and I highly recommend having it hand as you work through the commentary, so you don’t have to keep flipping through the commentary to look up references to different parts of 1 Enoch (this is a particular problem if, for example, vol. 2 references a passage in vol. 1). I also recommend having vol.1 handy as you work through vol. 2, since vol. 2 frequently refers back to vol. 1. The only problem I had looking up a reference was when VanderKam referenced 1 Enoch 91.16. I couldn’t find 91.16 in Nickelsburg’s translation. Maybe he moved it someplace I couldn’t find. In any case it wasn’t a huge problem because I found it in R. H. Charles's translation which is freely available on the internet.
[June 18, 2025, edit:] So I read this book nearly ten years ago, and my feelings about the Book of the Parables and the Book of the Luminaries have not changed very much. This is a personal issue. I have just always been more interested in ancient cosmology than soteriology. It is true that the Parables contain cosmological sections but I just didn’t find them as interesting as the cosmology in the Book of the Watchers, which has a sustained vision of Enoch from chapters 12-36 as he tours heaven and earth.
I realized after reading the commentary through once that I really didn’t have a clear memory of the main points of Nickelsburg's commentary. So I decided to read it through a second time. I often find that on a second reading I pay more careful attention, which was definitely the case in this instance. I discovered, for example, that I had neglected to take *any* notes on my first reading, which is really inexcusable. The first thing I noted on my second reading was Nickelsburg's notice that the parables alternate eschatological and cosmological material but not as explicitly as chapters 1-5. I think this explains part of my general disinterest in the Book of the Parables compared to other parts of 1 Enoch, and also the N.T. Now, I'm a great fan of eschatology, Revelation being my favorite N.T. book, but I find the eschatology in the Parables tedious. Basically it just repeats over and over that the kings and the mighty will be judged on the Great Day. The notices of the vindication of the righteous were more interesting, especially the passages which seem to presage a bodily resurrection in 51.1-5 and 61.5.
Another thing which may have made the Parables tedious for me are the numerous interpolations. Surely the book would flow better if we had access to the uninterpolated original in the original order (Nickelsburg rearranges several verses into what he thinks is the original order). In the introduction Nickelsburg reconstructs what he thinks may be close to the original form of the Parables: 37-54.6; 56.1-59.3; 60.11-23; 61.1-63.12; 64.1-2(?); 65.6-8(?); 67.4-7(?); 69.2-12(?); 69.26-29; 70.1-2. And indeed this reconstruction does seem to work better!
As was the case ten years ago I preferred the Book of the Luminaries to the Parables. The main problem with reading the Book of the Luminaries is figuring out how his descriptions of the luminaries conform (or don’t conform) to how the luminaries actually behave. VanderKam is to be commended for sitting in on a physics class on descriptive astronomy in preparation for writing this book and consulting with graduate students in order to understand this important and sometimes confusing issue. It is impossible to understand ancient astronomy without a handle on how the luminaries actually behave. I sometimes found myself getting confused; for example, when the Book of the Luminaries divided the waxing and waning of the moon into 14 parts each, I found myself thinking that a lunar month lasted 28 days. I had totally forgotten about the day the moon is new and has no light, bringing the total to 29 days. This is still 0.54 days shy of the actual length of a month, but, still, this was pretty close for ancient cosmology.
In my review of ten years ago I complained about VanderKam's attention to textual details. This was a really unfair criticism. The reason VanderKam pays attention to these details is that we actually have Aramaic portions of the Book of the Luminaries. Nickelsburg can’t do the same for the Parables because we have no other text for them other than the Ethiopic. Even at that, since we only have about 30% of the Book of the Luminaries in Aramaic, VanderKam was only able to draw comparisons for the portions we have an Aramaic text available. Since I don’t know Aramaic, my eyes tended to cross over at those points of the discussion. I made it vow to myself that on my second reading I would pay more attention to these points.
A word must be said about the excellent translation by Nickelsburg and VanderKam. I much prefer it to Ann Nyland's translation. Unlike Nyland, Nickelsburg and VanderKam format the verse as verse and the prose as prose. They have a translation based on the commentary as a separate volume, and I highly recommend having it hand as you work through the commentary, so you don’t have to keep flipping through the commentary to look up references to different parts of 1 Enoch (this is a particular problem if, for example, vol. 2 references a passage in vol. 1). I also recommend having vol.1 handy as you work through vol. 2, since vol. 2 frequently refers back to vol. 1. The only problem I had looking up a reference was when VanderKam referenced 1 Enoch 91.16. I couldn’t find 91.16 in Nickelsburg’s translation. Maybe he moved it someplace I couldn’t find. In any case it wasn’t a huge problem because I found it in R. H. Charles's translation which is freely available on the internet.
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