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The Jewish Book of 1 Enoch

First Enoch is the great pseudepigraphic apocalypse of Second Temple Judaism, the book the New Testament quotes as scripture and the tradition preserved while excluding it. This edition pairs George Henry Schodde's 1882 English translation from the Ethiopic, updated and lightly edited for modern readers, with a new foreword by Pinchas Shir and Eli Lizorkin-Eyzenberg that insists on the book's home: Jewish spiritual literature of the centuries around the turn of the era. The five sections are all here, the Book of the Watchers with its fallen angels and giant-born spirits of the flood, the Similitudes or Parables with their enthroned Son of man, the Astronomical Book on the heavenly luminaries and the gates of the year, the Book of Dreams with its beasts and the apocalyptic history they carry, and the Epistle of Enoch with its woes and its final vision of judgment. The foreword explains how the three Enochic books differ, why early Christians such as Irenaeus and Tertullian prized the work, and what it meant that it never entered the canon. Illustrations by Lyda Estrada accompany a text that can be read, as the editors urge, in one sitting.

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