Chapter 4

A Strange Thing in the Land: The Return of the Book of Enoch
PART 1

Certain visions once given to Moses were also "revealed to Joseph Smith the Prophet, in June 1830."¹ In December of the same year, "The Writings of Moses" were also revealed, comprising what are now chapters 2 to 8 of the book of Moses. (See the chapter headings.) This purports to be the translation of a real book originally written by Moses: "And now, Moses, my son, I will speak unto thee concerning this earth upon which thou standest; and thou shalt write the things which I shall speak.

"And in a day when the children of men shall esteem my words as naught and take many of them from the book which thou shalt write, behold, I will raise up another like unto thee; and they shall be had again among the children of men—among as many as shall believe." (Moses 1:40—41.)

In his writings Moses renewed the revelations and carried on the books of earlier prophets, according to our text, which also includes what the Prophet Joseph entitled "Extracts from the Prophecy of Enoch." Of this, B. H. Roberts explains: "It will be understood . . . that the 'Prophecy of Enoch' itself is found in the 'Writings of Moses,' and that in the text above [Moses, chapter 7] we have but a few extracts of the most prominent parts of 'Fnoch's Prophecy.'"²

What was given to the Church in 1830 was, then, not the whole book of Enoch, but only "a few extracts," a mere epitome, but one composed, as we shall see, with marvelous skill; five years later the Saints were still looking forward to a fuller text: "These things were all written in the book of Enoch, and are to be testified of in due time." (D&C 107:57.) The Enoch sections of the book of Moses were published in England in 1851 under the heading, "Extracts from the Prophecy of Enoch, containing also a Revelation of the Gospel unto our Father Adam, after He was driven out from the Garden of Eden."³

The revelation of Adam also went back to a written source, for, speaking of his ancestors, Enoch is reported as saying that, though they are dead, "nevertheless we know them, and cannot deny, and even the first of all we know, even Adam. For a book of remembrance we have written among us, according to the pattern given by the finger of God." (Moses 6:45—46.) Enoch, we learn, had this book of Adam, and read it to the people, and handed it on with his own writing in the corpus that Moses later edited and Joseph Smith finally translated: "Soon after the words of Enoch were given, the Lord gave the following commandment [December 1830]: 'Behold, I say unto you that it is not expedient in me that ye should translate any more until ye shall go to the Ohio.'" (D&C 37:1; italics added.)⁴

The excerpts from the works and days of Enoch found in the Pearl of Great Price supply us with the most valuable control yet on the bona fides of the Prophet. What has confused the issue all along in dealing with the Book of Mormon and the book of Abraham as translations is the question of the original documents. Almost all of the time and energy of the critics has been expended in vain attempts to show that Joseph Smith did not translate correctly from certain ancient manuscripts, or that such manuscripts did not exist. This has been a red herring, since nobody has been able to prove yet that Joseph Smith claimed to be translating from any specific known text. Moreover, the experts have strangely and stubbornly overlooked hundreds of passages from the Old and New Testaments that Joseph Smith translated in a way that does not agree with the translations of the scholars. Why don't they nail him on that? Because such a demonstration ends in proving nothing against the Prophet: manuscripts and translations of the Bible differ so widely, and so many baffling issues are being raised today about the nature of the original text, that there is no way of proving that any of his interpretations is completely out of the question. Always in these cases the discussion comes back to the original manuscripts.

But with the book of Enoch the question of an original manuscript never arises. Although chapters 2 through 8 of the book of Moses are entitled "The Writings of Moses," the Prophet nowhere indicates that he ever had the manuscript in his hands. Eighteen months earlier he recorded a revelation concerning John the Apostle, "translated from parchment, written and hid up by himself." (See D&C 7: heading.) ⁵ Since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we know that writing revelations on parchment and hiding them up in caves was standard practice among the ancient Saints, thereby confirming this remarkable passage of modern revelation. But even more significant is the idea that though Joseph Smith saw and "translated" the document in question, he never had it in his hands, and, for that matter, it may have long since ceased to exist. The whole thing, document and translation, was "given to Joseph Smith the Prophet, and Oliver Cowdery" by revelation "when they inquired through the Urim and Thummim." (D&C 7: heading; italics added.)

So it was with the book of Enoch, transmitted to us by Joseph as it was given to him. Though his work was far more demanding and probably required far more concentration and sheer mental effort than we can even imagine, that task did not include searching for a lost manuscript or working out a translation.

So we are forced back on the one and only really valid test of the authenticity of an ancient record, which does not depend on the writing materials used, nor the language in which it was written, nor the method of translation, but simply asks the question, "How does it compare with other records known to be authentic?" This is what the critics of the Book of Mormon and the book of Abraham have never been willing to face up to; with the book of Enoch they have no other choice—and so, through the years, they have simply ignored the book of Enoch. Yet there never was a more delightfully vulnerable and testable object. It offers the nearest thing to a perfectly foolproof test—neat, clear-cut, and decisive—of Joseph Smith's claim to inspiration.

The problem is perfectly simple and straightforward: There was once indeed an ancient book of Enoch, but it became lost and was not discovered until our own time, when it can be reliably reconstructed from some hundreds of manuscripts in a dozen different languages. How does this Enoch redivivus compare with Joseph Smith's highly condensed but astonishingly specific and detailed version? That is the question to which we must address ourselves. We do not have the golden plates nor the original text of the book of Abraham, but we do have at last, in newly discovered documents, a book which is the book of Enoch if there ever was one. And so we have only to place the Joseph Smith version of the book of Enoch—Moses 6:25 through 8:3 with associated texts—side by side with the Enoch texts, which have come forth since 1830, to see what they have in common and to judge of its significance.

For those who seek divine guidance in troubled times, the book of Enoch has a special significance, not merely by virture of its pertinent and powerful message, but also because of the circumstances under which it was received. As the History of the Church records: "It may be well to observe here, that the Lord greatly encouraged and strengthened the faith of His little flock, which had embraced the fullness of the everlasting Gospel, as revealed to them in the Book of Mormon, by giving some more extended information upon the Scriptures, a translation of which had already commenced. Much conjecture and conversation frequently occurred among the Saints, concerning the books mentioned, and referred to, in various places in the Old and New Testaments, which were now nowhere to be found. The common remark was, 'They are lost books;' but it seems that the Apostolic Church has some of these writings, as Jude mentions or quotes the Prophecy of Enoch, the seventh from Adam. To the joy of the little flock, which in all . . . numbered about seventy members, did the Lord reveal the following doings of olden times, from the prophecy of Enoch."⁶

The book of Enoch was given to the Saints as a bonus for their willingness to accept the Book of Mormon and as a reward for their sustained and lively interest in all scriptures, including the lost books: they were searchers, engaging in eager speculation and discretion, ever seeking like Adam and Abraham, for "greater [light and] knowledge." (Abraham 1:2.) And we have been told that if we stop seeking we shall not only find no more, but lose the treasures we already have. That is why it is not only advisable but urgent that we begin at last to pay attention to the astonishing outpouring of ancient writings that is the peculiar blessing of our generation. Among these writings the first and most important is the book of Enoch.

The Lost Book of Enoch

Early Christian writers knew all about the book of Enoch: indeed, "nearly all the writers of the New Testament were familiar with it, and were more or less influenced by it in thought and diction," according to R. H. Charles, who notes that "it is quoted as a genuine production of Enoch by St. Jude, and as Scripture by St. Barnabas. . . . With the earlier Fathers and Apologists it had all the weight of a canonical book."⁷ Its influence is apparent in no less than 128 places in the New Testament,⁸ and Charles can declare that "The influence of I Enoch on the New Testament has been greater than that of all the other apocryphal and pseudepigraphical books taken together."⁹ He further lists some thirty passages in early orthodox Jewish and Christian writings in which the book of Enoch is mentioned specifically, ¹⁰ plus numerous citations from the book that are found in the important Jewish apocalyptic writings of Jubilees, the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Assumption of Moses, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra, and quotations from Enoch found in more than thirty Christian Patristic writers.¹¹

To these we might add the wealth of Enoch lore contained in the Zohar, a work whose prestige and respectability have greatly increased of recent years, and the interesting fact that the Pistis Sophia, that important link between the sectaries of Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Palestinian Christianity and Judaism, claims to contain important material taken from "the two Books of Jeu which Enoch has written. ¹² "They should find the mysteries which are in the Book of Jeu which I caused Enoch to write in Paradise . . . [which I spake out of the tree of knowledge and the tree of life], and I caused him to place them in the rock of Ararad."¹³

"Shortly before the Christian era, Enoch became the hero of a whole cycle of legends," which enjoyed immense popularity.¹⁴ The Christians got their enthusiasm for the book of Enoch as well as the book itself from the Jews, that being "the most important pseudepigraph of the first two centuries B.C."¹⁵ The Hasidic writings of the time as well as the later Cabalistic works show dependence on Enoch.¹⁶ But it is important to note that Enoch is not popular with the gnostics and philosophers; he is quoted almost exclusively by the most respected and orthodox writers among both Jews and Christians. Thus "large parts of the lost Book of Enoch were included in the Pirke of Rabbi Eleaser and in the Hechalot," both highly respected works.¹⁷ Recently some of the oldest and most important fragments of Enoch have turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and far more important ones are still being held back by their uneasy Christian editors.¹⁸ More than a century ago, when A. Jellinek began his zealous search for surviving traces of a Hebrew book of Enoch, he declared that the Enoch literature was the work of the Essenes. ¹⁹ And thereon hangs the principal clue to their disappearance.

How could a book of such long-standing influence, authority, and veneration possibly have become lost? Very simple: it ran afoul of ideas held by the doctors of the Jews and Christians alike after those worthies had fallen under the influence of the University of Alexandria, whose modern descendants resumed their censure of it after it was discovered and have continued to condemn it to this day.

"But our book contained much of a questionable character," writes R. H. Charles with a sigh, "and from the fourth century of our era onward it fell into discredit; and under the ban of such authorities as Hilary, Jerome, and Augustine, it gradually passed out of circulation, and became lost to the knowledge of Western Christendom."²⁰ Enoch "fell early into disuse," according to C. C. Torrey, because it had no strong appeal for the Christians and "was too bulky" to copy and handle.²¹ This explanation is as feeble as that of St. Augustine, who, while admitting that "we cannot deny that Enoch . . . wrote some inspired [divine] things, since the canonical Epistle of Jude says so," refuses to accept it solely on the grounds that the Jewish doctors reject it—an argument that bore no weight whatever with the earlier Christians.²²

"Of a questionable character" to whom? For what Christians did Enoch have "no strong appeal"? The answer is perfectly clear: it was the learned rabbis and doctors of the fourth century who were offended by it.

In his recent study of Hellenistic Judaism, H. F. Weiss comes to the point: It was as inspired or revealed writings that such great apocalyptic works as Enoch, Fourth Esdras, and Baruch "were by the 'official' rabbinic-pharisaic Judaism . . . systematically suppressed and removed, ostensibly on the grounds of their apocalyptic content."²³ They did not just fade out; they were deliberately and systematically destroyed.

Thus, until recently, the only surviving fragments of Enoch have come from Christian copyists, and not a single Jewish text of the Twelve Patriarchs, which draws heavily on Enoch, survives; moreover, not a single picture of Enoch has ever been identified in either Jewish or old Christian art.²⁴ The trouble was, says Charles, that in Enoch the "apocalyptic or prophetic side of Judaism" was confronted by the rabbinical or halachic, that is, by the "Judaism that posed as the sole and orthodox Judaism . . . after 70 A.D.," which damned it forever as a product of the Essenes.²⁵

It was the same story with the Christians; it was "such authorities as Hilary, Jerome and Augustine" who put the book of Enoch "under the ban." They were all learned schoolmen steeped in the rhetorical and sophistic education of the time, admitting quite freely that the Christians of an earlier time held ideas and beliefs quite different from theirs.²⁶ They also knew that Enoch was treasured as a canonical book by the early Christians, but they would have none of it. The transition is represented by the great Origen, another product of Alexandria, who lived a century before them; he quotes Enoch, but with reservation, finding that he cannot agree with the teachings of the book, no matter how the first Christians may have venerated it.²⁷

At the present time, sensational new manuscript discoveries are forcing both the Jewish and the Christian doctors to view Enoch with a new respect. Consider two items from Catholic encyclopedias—then and now. In 1910 the Catholic Encyclopedia brushed aside the idea that the epistle of Jude testifies of the existence in ancient times of the book of Enoch: "Some writers have supposed that St. Jude quoted these words from the so-called apocryphal Book of Henoch; but, since they do not fit into its context [Ethiopic], it is more reasonable to suppose that they were interpolated into the apocryphal book from the text of St. Jude. The Apostle must have borrowed the words from Jewish tradition."²⁸ But the New Catholic Encyclopedia of 1967 tells a different story: not only does Jude actually quote from the book of Enoch, but the "entire passage found in Jude v. 4—15 reveals a dependence on Ethiopic Enoch." ²⁹ When a recent article in Scientific American, of all places, seeks to demonstrate how all our ideas of early Jewish and Christian religions have been drastically expanded and altered in the past few years, its star witness is the newly discovered book of Enoch.³⁰

The last lingering remnant of Enoch's words from the ancient world was a passage cited by the Byzantine writer George Syncellus, about A.D. 800. This, however, was a mere excerpt of less than a page in length; the writings themselves had by that time long since vanished.³¹ For, "from the 4th century on, the Latin Church ceased to concern itself" with Enoch, while "only a few traces are still found, persisting for a short time longer, in the Greek Church."³² All that the Middle Ages had to show as the sole remnant of the book of Enoch was a miserable Arabic proverb, "piety brings easy money," which is not from Enoch at all.³³

The Rumors Fly

With the first dawn of the Reformation, rumors of the existence of a real book of Enoch began to stir. About the time that Columbus set sail, Johann Reuchlin was excited by the report that the famous Pico della Mirandola (d. 1494) "had purchased a copy of the book of Enoch for a large sum of money." ³⁴ The report may well have been authentic, according to Nathaniel Schmidt, who notes that "it is possible . . . that Pico's collection contained a copy of the Hebrew Enoch. . . . There may also have been a copy of the Ethiopic Enoch."³⁵ Rumors gave rise to the usual impositions and frauds, and in 1494 Reuchlin wrote against those who produced books with exciting titles, claiming that they were the books of Enoch, proven by their age to be more holy than other books, falsely claiming some to have been Solomon's, and so easily beguiling the ears of the ignorant. He had heard, he states, of one such book for sale, which he assumes to be a late forgery based on Josephus. ³⁶ This did not mean that Reuchlin ceased to look for the real book of Enoch. In 1517 he wrote that "the books of Enoch and Abraham, our father, were cited by men worthy of faith," and countless examples of ancient authors whose works are now lost to our age confirm the probability of their works having been lost in the same way, still we do not doubt that a great number have survived.³⁷

With the widespread "rediscovery" of the Bible in the Reformation, "the Book of Enoch excited much attention and awakened great curiosity," ³⁸ just as it did among those to whom the Book of Mormon came in a later age of enlightenment. But, as is well-known, the great reformers in their all-out zeal for the Bible condemned the "wretched Apocrypha" for presuming to be classed with it.³⁹ John Calvin considered Enoch to be no more than an ordinary mortal, whose translation to heaven was nothing more than "some extraordinary kind of death," and he held with the Jewish doctors that Enoch's "walking with God" meant no more than that he received inspiration. ⁴⁰ In 1553, the humanist Guillaume Postel, acclaimed at the court of France for his firsthand knowledge of the Near East, announced, "I have heard that there is reason for believing that there are Books of Enoch at Rome, and an Ethiopian priest has told me that that book is held to be canonical and is attributed to Moses in the Church of the Queen of Sheba [the Abyssinian Church]."⁴¹ The famous Codex Alexandrinus, which was presented to Charles I of England in 1633, was accompanied from Egypt as far as Constantinople by a Capucinian monk, Gilles de Loches, who had been living in Egypt. That monk told Peiresc, the famous scholar and manuscript collector of Pisa, about a monastery possessing eight thousand volumes, in which he had seen a book of Enoch.⁴² As the German Orientalist Ludolf recounted a generation later, "Gassendi, in his Life of Peiresc, writes among other things of a certain Capuchin, Aegidius Lochiensis, who had spent seven years in Egypt: He says he mentioned among other things a Mazhapha Einok, or Prophecy of Enoch, declaring what would happen up to the end of the world, a book hitherto not seen in Europe, but written in the character and language of the Ethiopians or Abyssinians among whom it was preserved. By this Peiresc was so excited and so on fire to buy it at any price that he spared no means to make it his own."⁴³ It is now known that this was the authentic Ethiopian Enoch, but Schmidt comments that the scholarly reaction at the time was to suppose that Peiresc had been duped.⁴⁴

The last authentic excerpt to be written from the book of Enoch was the first to be discovered, 800 years later: it was that prince of scholars, Joseph Justus Scaliger, who around 1592 recognized the passage mentioned above when it was quoted by the Byzantine historian Syncellus as a genuine excerpt from the lost book of Enoch. Yet Scaliger "spoke in very disparaging terms of the book . . . although he maintains that the apostle Jude has quoted it." ⁴⁵ So there the matter rested, with Enoch discredited and dismissed by the very man who had discovered him.

Toward the end of the seventeenth century, scholarship lost its former imagination and drive, thanks to the competitive skepticism of experts determined to demonstrate their solid conservatism to each other. Peiresc's manuscript of Enoch ended up in the Mazarin Library in Paris, whither in 1683 the Prussian scholar Job Ludolf repaired with considerable publicity to put it to the test. Schmidt records that Ludolf promptly concluded that it was not the book of Enoch at all: "But that it is not Enoch is at once apparent from the title alone: 'Revelations of Enoch in Ethiopian'"⁴⁶ As for the content of the book, it simply nauseated him: "To tell the truth it contains such gross and vile stinking [putidas] fables that I could hardly stand to read it. . . . Let the reader then judge how beautiful these 'revelations' of Enoch are, how worthy of their magnificent binding and sumptuous edition! We would rather keep silent regarding this most idiotic of books, were it not that so many illustrious men have made mention of it."⁴⁷ Ludolf examined it at the Mazarin Library, and declared it utterly bad; but then, Schmidt sums it up, "Ludolf, who did not believe there ever was a book of Enoch, may be pardoned." ⁴⁸ May he? That was his trouble to begin with—he did not believe that there ever was such a book, just as those Egyptologists who were asked to pass judgment on the book of Abraham approached their task with the settled conviction that there never was such a book. For him, as for them, only one conclusion was possible.

But the Christian world gratefully received the final verdict of the learned (even as they did again in 1912!), and as a result the study of Enoch was dropped for ninety years, until the discovery of new manuscripts broke the intellectual logjam. Until Ludolf's pronouncement, the search for Enoch had been a "subject richly productive of criticism and theological discussion"; but once Berlin had spoken, "the idea that a book of Enoch existed in Ethiopia was completely abandoned, and no one gave it another thought." ⁴⁹ As one scholar observed with relief as late as 1870, "But when Job Ludolf went afterwards to Paris to the Royal Library, he found it [the Enoch manuscript] to be a fabulous and silly production. In consequence of this disappointment, the idea of recovering it in Ethiopic was abandoned." ⁵⁰ As a result of Ludolf's authoritative contribution, "all hopes of obtaining the book seem to have died away throughout Europe. . . . It was generally supposed, that it must be ranked among the books irrecoverably lost." ⁵¹ Even down to the present time, when they should know better, "modern editors and commentators," according to N. Schmidt, go on "repeating with approval the disdainful remarks of Ludolf."⁵²

And so, following the well-worn path of self-certified scholarship, the experts would have gone on automatically repeating each other for generations with the book of Enoch safely laid to rest as a myth, were it not for three copies of that same Ethiopian version, which the famous explorer James Bruce brought home with him from his epoch-making journey to the sources of the White and Blue Nile in 1773.

Bruce was six years in Abyssinia and had learned the language, "and brought home with him a large collection of curious and interesting objects," ⁵³ including some of the most valuable Christian Coptic manuscripts ever discovered, as well as the three priceless Ethiopian Enoch texts.⁵⁴ "Of these three copies, one he retained in Kinnaird House [the family seat in Scotland], another he presented to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the third he gave to the Royal Library in Paris."⁵⁵

Bruce himself wrote: "Amongst the articles I consigned to the library at Paris was a very beautiful and magnificent copy [Ludolf had commented caustically on such waste of effort in the Peiresc manuscript] of the prophecies of Enoch in large quarto. Another is amongst the books of Scripture which I brought home, standing immediately before the Book of Job, which is its proper place in the Abyssinian Canon; and a third copy I have presented to the Bodleian Library at Oxford."⁵⁶

But Dr. Ludolf had done his work well. There was a flurry of interest in Bruce's finds, but it quickly subsided, and "for more than a quarter of a century these manuscripts remained as unknown as if they had still been in Abyssinia."⁵⁷ "Whatever may have been the curiosity of the public at the time of Bruce," a Catholic scholar reports, "it seems to have been long since pacified; and as for the exemplar deposited in the library at Oxford, it slept a profound sleep."⁵⁸ The first public notice of the text was on the Continent, when in 1800 the famous Orientalist Sylvestre de Sacy translated into Latin the first three chapters of the Paris manuscript and the opening lines of some other chapters;⁵⁹ in the following year a German named Rink published a few of the same chapters at Königsberg. That was about it—and then silence for another twenty years.

It was a great and good man, Archbishop Richard Laurence of Cashel in Ireland, who restored the book of Enoch to the world. In "A Charge Delivered at Munster" in 1826 he pleaded, as the Protestant bishop of the most important Irish see, for Catholics and Protestants to learn to live together. For taking and holding this position through the years, Laurence was subjected to savage and relentless attacks from both the Protestant and the Catholic clergy. "His fears for the public peace," wrote the editor of The British Critic, Quarterly Theological Review, and Ecclesiastical Record, "appear to have strangely overpowered his anxiety for the cause of Scriptural truth. That the endeavor to break down the strong holds of Popery in Ireland may occasion some discord and provoke some retaliation, is, indeed, more than probable. But his Grace must know perfectly well that the gospel itself produced, at first, a formidable dislocation of society," etc., etc.⁶⁰

From the other side, the Roman Catholic prelate attacked Laurence with equal vigor, deploring his appeals for Christian charity as "fulsome nonsense; . . . the ways of God are not our ways; the Holy Ghost has told us that there is but one faith; . . . and that without it, it is impossible to please God."⁶¹ The groundwork was being laid, even consciously, for the present-day tragedy of Ulster when the Anglican ministers took Laurence to task, declaring that they must "reconcile even the Archbishop of Cashel to the great and pious enterprise of diffusing the blessings of the Reformation throughout Ireland, and relieve him from his terrors lest the cause of Christianity should suffer in the conflict. It is true that a fiery furnace of persecution may even now be heating for many of those who shall turn their back upon the Church of their ancestors [the Irish Catholics]; it is true that fanaticism may lay a rude and violent hand on the standard of this great cause; . . . but, his Grace has not to learn, that in this world good and evil must ever grow up together; and that it hardly becomes a Christian warrior to sit down counting the cost, till the season of action is gone by! . . . He must acknowledge that there is something marvellous and awful in the present agitation of the public mind; and he will not surely be rash enough to deny that it may possibly be the sign of some great work which the Lord is about to perform in behalf of his Own truth."⁶²

A century and a half later, the "great work" foreseen by a zealous clergy still goes on as a legacy of demoniacal hatred and bloodshed, and Richard Laurence stands vindicated not only as a champion of Christian charity but as one who has done more for the cause of Scriptural truth than all the rest of the clergy put together. For to him "belongs the honour of revealing to the world the treasure that had been hidden for so many ages, and which was almost universally supposed to be lost irrecoverably":⁶³ the book of Enoch. Obliged to do all his work in the dark and damp Bodleian Library, which begrudged lending him manuscripts in which it had not the slightest interest,⁶⁴ he produced in 1821 a translation under the title "The Book of Enoch, an apocryphal Production, now first translated, from the Ethiopic Ms. in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, 1821."

This work was reviewed by de Sacy in the Journal des Savants in 1822,⁶⁵ and a decade later A. C. Hoffman issued a Latin translation;⁶⁶ in 1840 A. F. Gfroerer included a translation of Laurence's English version in a Latin book of oddities.⁶⁷ Not until 1851 was an Ethiopian text published, edited by A. Dillmann, who in 1853 issued a German translation containing passages not found in Laurence.⁶⁸ The first French translation did not appear until 1856.⁶⁹ Laurence himself issued a revised version of his Enoch in 1833, 1838, and 1842; of recent years more translations have been available in English. ⁷⁰ But the only book of Enoch available to anyone before 1830 was Laurence's translation of 1821. It called forth three studies in English, which, being by unknown scholars, "hardly attracted the attention of the learned world at all"; and even so, the tendency of these works was not to enhance but to minimize the importance of Laurence's Enoch.⁷¹ After 1821 no translation was available to the public until 1833, when Joseph Smith's "Book of Enoch" was already three years old. Since we are to test that work by comparison with other versions since brought to light, it is important to ask at the outset just what other Enoch books Joseph Smith could have read. There is only one candidate: the Laurence translation of 1821. Could the Prophet have seen it before 1830? There would seem to be no possibility of that. Let us list the reasons for such a conclusion:

1. 1830 was a busy year for the Prophet Joseph; it saw the founding of the Church, the publication of the Book of Mormon, the sending of missionaries, much coming and going under persecution and pressure. It was also a banner year for revelation, including a sizable part of the Book of Commandments and the book of Moses. But for study? for research? for carefully digesting and critically exploiting a document like Laurence's Enoch, 214 pages long with a forty-eight-page introduction and footnotes? Any dealing with such a text would have left its mark on any work derived from it. All that work by a twenty-four-year-old farmer in upstate New York who had just produced a Book of Mormon without any footnotes at all? Hardly! Laurence's 1821 text only got into the hands of a few scholars in Europe and England, and they gave it scant notice; what would be the likelihood of a copy reaching Joseph Smith? By what grapevine? Who would transmit it and why? That is our next point.

2. Nobody in the learned world paid much attention to Laurence's Enoch. As we have seen, after its publication the "zeal for the cause of this long sought relic of antiquity appears to have expired for a long time in England. . . . In France the Book of Enoch scarcely awakened a sensation."⁷² Even when the expedition of Napier to Magdala brought more Ethiopian manuscripts back to England, and the German missionaries whom he rescued brought yet more of them to Germany, those documents were promptly forgotten.⁷³

3. More to the point, the Christian ministry of all denominations neither liked Laurence's Enoch nor wanted it. It was not circulated by them but suppressed. Just as Peiresc's treasure, on the authority of Ludolf, was thrown out as "nothing more than a worthless tract, replete with fable and superstition," ⁷⁴ so it was assumed from the first that the book of Enoch could only be full of "incantations and bestialities."⁷⁵ In 1828 the very learned Algernon Herbert observed, "It has been supposed that the authour of that epistle [Jude] received and cited, as a holy scripture, that which is called the Book of Enoch, being an ignorant and ridiculous effusion. . . . The book in question is so monstrously absurd, that no person citing it, . . . could have obtained credit with Tertullian. . . . A man so profoundly ignorant of criticism, as to receive the said book for divine revelation, and so nearly allied to the errours of gnosticism, as to believe in its contents," could, he avers, never have written the Epistle of Jude.⁷⁶

One of the best studies ever made on the book of Enoch was written way back in 1840 by Michael Stuart, professor of sacred literature in the Theological Seminary at Andover College, where in 1882 the first and only translation of the Ethiopian Enoch to appear in America was to be published.⁷⁷ He was excited by the discovery, but for the message of the book of Enoch he had only contempt: "To what purpose is an appeal to a book confessedly apocryphal, and therefore of no authority? . . . I have not the most distant intention to refer to the book of Enoch, as a book of authority. I can never be brought to believe that the Ethiopians had any good right to place it in their Canon. . . . My full belief is, that 'our present Scriptures are the only and the sufficient rule of faith and practice.'"⁷⁸ He recognizes the gulf between the book of Enoch and the doctors of the Church who condemned it, noting that what is found in their writings is "less repugnant to sound reason and philosophy, than what is found in the book of Enoch."⁷⁹ "No one now pretends that the book of Enoch is an inspired book," he insists, though admitting that "time was, when individuals probably thought so." Whereas the early Jewish writers and Christian fathers "quoted it as a holy book . . . almost all later fathers reject its claims to a place in the canon: as well they might. . . . No claim to any authority on the part of the book will now be made by any intelligent man."⁸⁰

There it is again—and in America's most staid and respected school of divinity 135 years ago: the authentic, original early Christians just didn't have the intelligence and sophistication to understand things as they really were. The later fathers were all right: they were educated men who understood things the way we do—but those primitive Christians and Jews! Take just one example: "The very basis of the first part of his book, viz. the alleged carnal intercourse of angels with the daughters of men, is an actual impossibility, not to say absurdity." ⁸¹ What could the writer of the book of Enoch have had in mind? Instead of asking that question, the churchmen of every denomination simply threw the book out of the window. To this day, in the official encyclopedias of the Lutherans and even in the literature of such fundamental literalists as the Seventh-day Adventists and the Mennonites, no articles appear under the name of Enoch. Nor do we find any mention of Enoch in the contemporary Vocabulary of Jewish Life or in the Book of Jewish Concepts. Though all the other great patriarchs have places of honor in these works, Enoch is out!

The Catholic clergy of Joseph Smith's day fully shared the scorn of Protestants and Jews for the new discovery. "To him [Enoch] in the first centuries of the Church," wrote the Abbé Glaire in 1846, "was attributed a work full of fables about the stars, the descent of the angels to earth, etc. But it appears that this production was fancied by the heretics, who, not content with falsifying the holy Scriptures, took advantage of the credulity of their stupid followers in spurious and fabulous works. Some critics pretend that this work, really by Enoch, has been disfigured by the hand of infidels; they base this claim on St. Jude. . . . But St. Jude cites Enoch without any mention of his book."⁸²

Later Catholic authorities deplore Enoch on the same grounds as they object to the Dead Sea Scrolls and other more recent discoveries, namely, that if taken seriously they would deprive Christianity of its sovereign claim to absolute originality: "To attribute great influence on the New Testament of the Book of Enoch as Charles does, is to ignore the powerful originality and divine inspiration of those to whom we owe the New Testament."⁸³ "Christ and the Apostles did not draw their doctrines from the Apocryphal works." Who says they did? There are other explanations for the resemblance—and no one today any longer denies that resemblance. But it annoys the clergy no end.

In a recent and important book, Klaus Koch has shown how Protestant and Catholic scholars alike through the years and right down until 1960 (when new discoveries forced them to change their attitude) resolutely steered clear of the basic apocalyptic works, of which Enoch is by all odds the most important,⁸⁴ and C. P. Van Andel, in his survey of the Enoch literature, notes that no one has been willing to touch the vital question of Enoch and the New Testament since 1900.⁸⁵ As recently as 1973, a writer in Scientific American pointed out how new manuscript discoveries, especially Enoch, are now for the first time requiring drastic revision of the conventional Christian and Jewish views regarding the nature of the early Christian and Jewish communities and their teachings.⁸⁶

4. Freethinkers might have exploited the so-called absurdities of Enoch against the Christians, but the latter had beaten them to the punch by promptly and vigorously disowning the book. Who, then, would have an interest in the book of Enoch? One might expect it to appeal to Masons or Rosicrucians, but it did not; Enoch is not found among the books favored by mystic or gnostic groups, and his name does not occur in their lists of inspired prophets.⁸⁷ No library in America had a more representative collection of the works of the ancients than that of Thomas Jefferson, "for in his book-collecting no subject was overlooked by him."⁸⁸ Book No. 1 in Jefferson's library was "Ancient History, Antwerp, including texts of Berosus, Manetho, etc.," and the books that follow show an equal concern for getting at the truth and the whole truth where the ancients were concerned. The collection was systematically and diligently continued, with careful concern for the latest and best information, ⁸⁹ up until 1826. If one expected to find a copy of Laurence's 1821 Enoch anywhere in America it would be in this library; but it is not. It was simply unknown in America.

5. This is thoroughly borne out in Michael Stuart's long and careful study of 1840. The text Stuart uses is the 1838 edition of Laurence, whose work comes to him, nineteen years after the first version, as a novelty. Indeed, his aim in writing his long studies is to make American clergymen aware for the first time of the existence of the book: "The possession of this work, in our country, is rare; and our public, so far from being acquainted with the contents of the work are in general not at all aware, as I have reason to believe, that the book has even been recovered and published to the world."⁹⁰ If this applies to the larger and far more widely publicized edition of 1838, who would have known anything of the 1821 edition, which Stuart does not even mention, and which went unremarked even in Europe by all but a few specialists?

Of the later edition, Stuart writes: "The reader, who is not in possession of it, and may not be able to procure it [he is writing for ministers rather than the general public], will naturally be desirous to know something more particular respecting so curious and interesting a relic of antiquity; and for his sake I shall proceed to give a more enlarged summary of its contents." ⁹¹

The thing was virtually unobtainable in this country. And why not? Its only appeal was as a religious book, but the religious were all against it. "Curious and interesting" it may have been for Stuart, but not to be recommended to the untrained in its original form: "It is in vain for any one to derive much from it which is intelligible. . . . For readers at large, the Book of the Luminaries is at present a sealed book."⁹² The historical part is written "in a very obscure and sometimes even repulsive manner" with some of the principal chapters an "insipid and almost monstrous production." ⁹³ This was no book "for readers at large"!

And now comes a surprise. The same edition of Laurence was reviewed in the same year by another critic, who thought it was simply wonderful! The name of the critic was Parley P. Pratt, at that time, 1840, in England editing the official Latter-day Saint publication The Millennial Star, in which his review appeared. Thus the Latter-day Saints first heard of Laurence's Enoch in England, and greeted it with joyful surprise.

Far from being insipid, repulsive, and monstrous, for Elder Pratt, "this book carries with it indisputable evidence of being an ancient production. It steers clear of modern sectarianism, and savors much of the doctrine of the ancients, especially in regard to things of the latter day. . . . It seems plainly to predict the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, and the mission of Elders . . . together with the late persecution befallen our people in America . . . and the final result of that matter, and the complete triumph of the Saints."⁹⁴ Extravagant as such conclusions may seem at first glance, recent studies of Enoch by non-Mormon scholars show it, as we shall see, to be surprisingly near the mark, for the book of Enoch was handed down through the centuries with the avowed intention of bringing comfort to the persecuted saints in every dispensation of the gospel.

Note that the 1838 edition of Laurence's book of Enoch is brought to the attention of the Saints as an exciting novelty. It does not occur even to the alert and searching Brother Pratt to compare the writing to Joseph Smith's 1830 book of Enoch, buried as it was in the book of Moses, to be published eleven years later in England under the title Extracts from the Prophecy of Enoch. What catches the eye of Parley P. Pratt are the parallels to the Book of Mormon and to the condition of the Church and the world in the last days. "We give the following extract, commencing at p. 156 [chapter 93:2ff], without further comment, and leave our readers to form their own judgment in regard to this remarkable Book." And he proceeds to quote passages peculiarly fitted to the condition of the Latter-day Saints at that time: "To the righteous and the wise shall be given the books of joy, of integrity, of great wisdom. To them shall books be given, in which they shall believe: in which they shall rejoice."⁹⁵

Well might they be impressed, and they should have remembered that Joseph Smith's book of Enoch was given to them as a reward for their receiving and believing in the Book of Mormon. But the parallels escaped them as they have been overlooked by Saints ever since. In 1951 when Elder John A. Widtsoe presented the writer with a copy of the same text of I Enoch (the R. H. Charles edition of 1912), it was with the regretful comment that he had never found time to read it and wondered if it contained anything of interest. At that time this writer himself had never read it—who had? It is only since about 1950 (with the discovery of Enoch texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls), as Koch and Van Andel point out, that anybody has begun to take this Enoch seriously. Pratt read the 1838 edition in England, and there is no indication that any Church member in America owned a copy. The 1846 Inventory of Church Records includes no such title in the books of the Church Library taken across the plains.

6. This laboring of the only too obvious point, that Joseph Smith could not have used or known about the 1821 edition of Laurence's book of Enoch, has been very necessary because: (a) that was the only translation of any ancient Enoch text available to anyone at the time he dictated Moses chapters 6 and 7, and (b) the two books are full of most significant parallels. If such parallels are to have any significance as evidence supporting the Prophet's claims, we must of course rule out his use of the Laurence text.

Aside from the astronomical remoteness of such a probability, we have some useful positive "controls" that definitely show that such parallels are not dependent on the Laurence text. For many other manuscripts of the book of Enoch have come forth in various ancient languages since 1830, adding a great deal to the standard text that is not found in the 1821 version but that is found in the Joseph Smith Enoch. One of the most remarkable parallels, for example, is between some verses of Moses 7 and chapter 11 of the Ethiopian book of Enoch; yet that particular chapter was not included in the Laurence translation, and so could have been known to no one at the time.

7. Finally, even if Joseph Smith had had the rich apocryphal literature of our own day at his disposal, with the thousands of pages of Enoch, or even the 1821 text of Laurence, how would he have known how to handle the stuff? The Prophet's book of Enoch is less than three chapters long; how was he to know from all that what to put in and what to leave out to produce a text that most nearly corresponds to what modern scholars view as the authentic original material of Enoch's book? He did just that; he put together in a few hours the kind of text most closely corresponding to what specialists, after years of meticulous comparison of texts, come up with as the hypothetically essential text of Enoch. Let us now turn to the Enoch texts they have been using for their diligent comparative studies and see how the Enoch story has emerged through the years.

I Enoch

As recently as 1937 Professor C. Bonner could write: "No part of the original writings, Hebrew or Aramaic, which entered into the composite work, has survived in the original language. The Greek version, in which the early church read Enoch, also disappeared. . . . Modern knowledge of the work has been derived from the Ethiopian version," coming from a time "when all Christendom except Egypt had dropped Enoch from the list of sacred writings." ⁹⁶ I Enoch has long been recognized as "the largest and, after the canonical book of Daniel, the most important of the Jewish apocalyptic works which have so recently [this in 1916] come to be recognized as supplying most important data for the critical study of NT ideas and phraseology."⁹⁷ The work was translated into Ethiopic about A.D. 500,⁹⁸ but the twenty-nine Ethiopian Enoch texts used by R. H. Charles in 1912 all date from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.⁹⁹ All agree that the Ethiopic Enoch is a composite work, and the dating of its various elements is still entirely a matter of conjecture.¹⁰⁰

While only guesses are possible regarding the process and steps by which the thing was brought together, Plöger would assign what he considers the oldest parts to Essene origin of the second century before Christ.¹⁰¹ Bonner finds that, compared with the Greek version, the Ethiopic translation "while faithful in intent . . . has many faults, omitting here, expanding there, and in general committing numerous errors. Yet there are not a few places in which it preserves a reading better than that of the Greek papyrus"; ¹⁰² indeed, the text as a whole "may perhaps be . . . truer to the [Hebrew] original than the Greek."¹⁰³ However, "the Ethiopic text is more general and therefore more imaginative and free as a literary work" than the others,¹⁰⁴ and such freedom has been bought at a price, for the work of the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century natives "has been on the whole disastrous," according to Charles; "by far the best" of the manuscripts "exhibits much strange orthography and bad grammar, and many corruptions."¹⁰⁵

Here it is proper to call attention to the lesson drilled into his students by A. E. Housman: There is no such thing as a "beste Handschrift"—the worst manuscript may contain priceless bits of an ancient text in their purest original form, while a manuscript that is notable for its convincing and demonstrably correct readings may without warning come up with unbelievable howlers. So it happens that the Ethiopic Enoch, "though teeming with every form of error . . . additions, corruptions, and omissions," contains for all that a number of "unique, original readings" that can be exceedingly valuable.¹⁰⁶

II Enoch, the Secrets of Enoch

II Enoch was unknown to the Western World until Robert Henry Charles suspected in 1892 that a Slavonic manuscript published by A. Popov in 1880 was no mere rehash of the Ethiopic Enoch, "but a different document. His suspicions proved correct when William Richard Morfill translated the Slavonic manuscript into English in 1896."¹⁰⁷ Plöger concludes that the Slavonic Enoch originated in a Jewish sect in Egypt and was translated into Slavonic at the beginning of the early Middle Ages.¹⁰⁸ S. Terrien notes that it "includes many beliefs of popular Judaism of the 1st century A.D."¹⁰⁹ Others dispute this; H. F. Weiss maintains that the Slavic Enoch is from a Greek original and does not go back to Palestine. ¹¹⁰ Others have it a reworking of the Ethiopic Enoch based on a Greek text, originally written in Palestine before the fall of the temple (A.D. 70), noting that its Hellenistic flavor suggests a Judaeo-Alexandrine author.¹¹¹ Recently, David Winston has called attention to strong Iranian influence in II Enoch. ¹¹² The standard edition of the Slavonic Enoch is that of A. Vaillant, who brings together "a dozen different Slavonic manuscripts" for his text.¹¹³ According to Vaillant, the Slavonic Enoch was first noticed in 1859. ¹¹⁴ R. H. Charles bases his version on the German translation of Bonwetsch and the English Morfill translation of 1896.¹¹⁵

The Slavonic Enoch comes to us in a long and short version, with the experts unable to agree on which has priority.¹¹⁶ Vaillant finds the longer version "imputable to the fantasy of the 15th and 16th centuries,"¹¹⁷ while they and the five Slavonic manuscripts of the short version (translations from the Greek),¹¹⁸ once stripped of the late fantasies that so embarrassed Charles, present "a perfectly coherent ensemble, which without the slightest disparity falls into place as a work of primitive Christianity."¹¹⁹ Vaillant calls the Slavic Enoch "this Christian imitation of a Jewish apocrypha" in which "Christian thought is expressed in terms of the Old Testament, into which borrowings from the Gospel seem to be transposed." ¹²⁰ Though the first major revision took place in the thirteenth century, the manuscript in which it reaches us is from the sixteenth century; the language is Bulgaro-Serbian. Its writer borrows from the Chronicle of Harmatole and belonged perhaps to the circle of Vladislav the Grammarian.¹²¹ A second major revision, which corrects the "mediocre Slavonic" of the first, was by an unknown Moldavian scholar.¹²²

III Enoch, the Greek Enoch

Greek excerpts from the book of Enoch have always been available in Jude 14b—15 (quote I Enoch 4:14); the Epistle of Barnabas 4:3, 16:5—6; Clement of Alexandria, Eclog. Prophet. 53:4; Origen, C. Cels. 5:52; Comm. in John VI, 42 (25); and the long ninth fragment in George Syncellus' Chronicle. (Dindorff, p. 24:2—11.) R. H. Charles lists no fewer than 128 citations from Enoch in the New Testament! ¹²³ Yet these passages could not be identified until an actual Enoch text of some sort was available; as late as 1912, the Greek Enoch was known only through the tenth century Slavic tradition.¹²⁴

A Greek Enoch fragment matching a section of the Ethiopian (I Enoch 89:42—49) "was found in the Vatican Library by Angelo Mai in 1832 and deciphered by Johann Gildemeister in 1885. A considerable part of the same Greek translation was discovered in Akhmîm in Upper Egypt in 1886—1887 and published in 1892." ¹²⁵

Thus, an important, though limited, control of the late Ethiopian and Slavic texts was becoming possible, as the much older Greek stuff emerged. In 1893, Charles made an exhaustive comparison of the Ethiopic and newly discovered Greek texts, which are given in the original in the appendix of his 1912 translation of I Enoch (pp. 318—70). Charles found that the Ethiopic was translated from the parent manuscript G^g, a very corrupt Greek text, though each contains original material not found in the other.¹²⁶ The important Akhmîm text was discovered "during the winter of 1886—1887 by the French Archaeological Mission" and "was thought at the time of its publication [by Bouriant in 1892] to be of the eighth century, but is now assigned to the sixth." ¹²⁷

When in 1930 the University of Michigan got six leaves of papyrus Codex of Enoch in Greek, Professor Bonner discovered that they belonged in a batch of papyri residing in the famous Chester Beatty collection; and sure enough, in 1931 Frederick Kenyon found more leaves of the same text in the Beatty collection, making a total of fourteen pages¹²⁸ written by a single scribe in a handwriting of the fourth century—by far the oldest Enoch text discovered up to that time.¹²⁹ "Written in a large and coarse hand, which is certainly not that of a trained scribe," the Michigan codex is "full of mistakes in spelling . . .";¹³⁰ "almost every page exhibits errors of a more serious sort which show that the scribe was often drowsy or inattentive, and suggest that he understood his text imperfectly. . . . The manuscript from which he copied was itself corrupt or else almost illegible in some places."¹³¹ In form it is not a roll or scroll, but a book,¹³² bound with a text of Melito. The Beatty Enoch is to be viewed, Van Andel suggests, as typical of that "edifying literature in Christian circles from the 3rd to the 6th centuries,"¹³³ showing in what high esteem Enoch was held by the early Christians, having been taken into the church with full honors from earlier times.¹³⁴

The Greek Enoch offers another example and warning to those who would rest arguments on silence. As late as 1910, no less eminent a scholar than C. Schmidt had "attempted to show . . . that the strange silence of all Patristic writers as to this remarkable book, whose Christian coloring, at least in its present form, would have been especially tempting to them, renders it doubtful whether it was ever translated into Greek."¹³⁵ Indeed, Schmidt could write in 1922, "No manuscript of the Greek text has yet been found, and it seems to have left no important traces in Byzantine literature, though it must have been read in Constantinople as well as in Alexandria."¹³⁶

But once a book of Enoch came forth, Charles could supply, not only 128 citations from Enoch in the New Testament, but a list of over thirty important apocryphal (Jewish and Christian) and patristic works quoting Enoch.¹³⁷ Quite recently M. Philonenko has called attention to a Manichaean Greek text with an important excerpt from Enoch. ¹³⁸ Mathew Black has brought together all available and reconstructed Greek Enoch texts into a single hypothetical "Apocalypsis Henochi Graeci," ¹³⁹ but still the big Greek text is missing.

The Hebrew-Aramaic Enoch

It has always been suspected that the oldest version of Enoch would turn out to be Aramaic or Hebrew. "The book of Zohar, in which are various allusions to Enoch, seems to speak of it as an important Hebrew production which had been handed down from generation to generation. The Cabbalists . . . thought that Enoch was really the author."¹⁴⁰

One can follow Jellinek's unfolding of Hebrew Enoch texts in the pages of the Bet ha-Midrash. In 1859, Jellinek suggested that "a Hebrew Book of Enoch resembling the Ethiopian" had once circulated among the Jews: "The Karaite Salmon b. Jerucham in the 10th century, Moses of Leon [12th century] and the Zohar toward the end of the 13th century all cite from a Book of Enoch";¹⁴¹ but as early as 1853, Jellinek had suggested some Hebrew sources for the Book of Enoch, and even posited that Enoch was an Essene creation.¹⁴²

Large fragments of the lost book of Enoch are included, moreover, in the Pirke R. Elieser and the Hechalot, which in the Oppenheim Manuscript is actually labelled "Book of Enoch."¹⁴³ In volume 2 of the Bet ha-Midrash, Jellinek gives the text of a "Book of Enoch" as preserved in Moses of Leon's "Book of the Dwelling of the Secrets,"¹⁴⁴ and in the next volume he notes that the Great Hechalot (meaning the Chambers, that is, of initiation in the temple) was a type of writing that combined Essenism and Sufism, and had great influence on poets and mystics. The Great Hechalot, he said, was actually a secret book of the Essenes dealing with the origin of the universe and the divine throne of Ezekiel. Parts of it appear in the Book of Enoch, that provided the source of Christian-Essene and Jewish-Essene literature.¹⁴⁵

In Bet ha-Midrash, volume 4, Jellinek provides the text to a Life of Enoch from the Sefer ha-Yashar, using older sources, and announced that this provided "a new confirmation that the entire Enoch saga and the Enoch books were known to the Jews, and were only allowed to fall into neglect after the time when a growing Christianity displayed a dogmatic preference to this cycle (Sage)," that is, it was adoption by the Christians that soured the Jews on Enoch.¹⁴⁶

In volume 5, in 1872, Jellinek joyfully announced the vindication of his long search: "In [Bet ha-Midrash]III, 1855, p. xxiii, I suggested that several versions of the Hechalot themes attributed to the Wisdom of Enoch must be in existence. And so also the primitive . . . Book of Enoch was put together from various smaller works, which had been traced back to Enoch!" The final proof is a text that Jellinek reproduced at this place, taken from Recamatic, commentary on the Pentateuch, Venice, 1545.¹⁴⁷ The study of Jewish apocalyptic literature in general was initiated in 1857 by M. Lilgenfeld, and it soon appeared, thanks to citations by the XII Patriarchs, Jubilees, and so on, that Enoch was "the first" and "most important" of all the Palestinian apocalypses. ¹⁴⁸ "Of all the Palestinian writings," wrote the Catholic scholar J. B. Frey, "the Book of Enoch seems to have surpassed all the others in antiquity and in importance."¹⁴⁹

N. Schmidt concluded that "it is possible that Pico's collection [in the 15th century], therefore, contained a copy of the Hebrew Enoch"¹⁵⁰ that the prejudice of the scholars allowed to pass by unnoticed. Besides the Hechalot published by Jellinek in 1873, Schmidt mentions as a Hebrew Enoch source the Sefer Hechalot of R. Ishmael (Lemberg, 1864), but insists that "the Hebrew Enoch contains material that appears to have been drawn from both Ethiopic and Slavonic Enoch . . . as well as from other sources," thus regarding it, as S. Zeitlin does the Dead Sea Scrolls, as a Medieval production.¹⁵¹

What fixes the Hebrew Enoch as the original is the discovery among the Dead Sea Scrolls of sizable fragments of the book of Enoch. It will be recalled that Jellinek suggested way back in 1853 that Enoch was an Essene production. ¹⁵² In this he was vindicated almost exactly a hundred years after.

In 1956, Father J. T. Milik mentioned eight different fragments in the Dead Sea Scrolls of I Enoch in Aramaic, and an Aramaic book III, which was superior to the Ethiopian section on astronomy. There was also an epistle of Enoch to Shamazya and his friends, a manuscript dating before A.D. 70.¹⁵³ F. M. Cross reported in 1954 that the Pesher or commentary on Habakkuk, one of the first works to be discovered at Qumran, was "an unknown work related to the Enoch Literature."¹⁵⁴ Between 1952 and 1973, however, only two of these Aramaic fragments had been published, and in 1970, M. Black had to send his book to press without the benefit of the larger fragments.¹⁵⁵

All the Enoch fragments found in Cave I, according to Milik, were deposited there in the first century A.D.¹⁵⁶ "Fragments of I En. from QCave 4 found in 1952, are all in Aramaic, and show affinities with the Ethiopian version. They contain hitherto unknown Enoch material, such as a letter of Enoch to Shamazya." In three of these manuscripts Enoch's journey on the earth is given "in a longer recension."¹⁵⁷ But for all their importance, the old Aramaic Enoch texts are still being withheld from the world after more than twenty years. The important Genesis Apocryphon from Qumran begins with five columns that "deal with the birth of Noah in a manner that has no direct relationship at all to the brief biblical account in Genesis V, 28—29," but "resembles Chapter cvi of the Book of Enoch in most essential points."¹⁵⁸

Appraisals of the Book of Enoch as a Whole

It was Laurence himself in his first two editions who suggested that "different parts of this book may have been composed at different times and by different persons."¹⁵⁹ Acting on such an assumption, E. Murray went overboard and saw in Enoch nothing but a jumble of separate treatises on disconnected subjects, clustered around an original book of only thirty verses!¹⁶⁰ From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, dismantling ancient writings into many original components was a favorite game of the learned; so J. B. Frey, while hailing the book of Enoch as a work of supreme age and importance, still insists that it is really not a book of Enoch but rather an Enoch literature consisting of very disparate works that have only the name of Enoch in common, as if "Enoch" could not have written on more than one subject.¹⁶¹

Carl Clemen in 1898 found no less than twelve separate traditions in Enoch and made much of the changes of person "as betraying the composite character of the work."¹⁶² Charles suggests that Enoch is "built up on the debris" of an older Noah saga and insists that "the Parables are distinct in origin," as are the cosmological sections.¹⁶³ Every possible theory has been suggested by the experts to account for the book. As R. H. Charles notes, every scholar divides up the Books of Enoch differently and assigns different dates to them.¹⁶⁴ As early as 1840, M. Stuart had the perspicacity to note that "the tone and tenor of the book has many resemblances to passages in the Zend Avesta";¹⁶⁵ while Sieffert sees part of it by a Chasid of the age of Simon Maccabbee and part by an Essene before 64 B.C., Philippi finds it written entirely "in Greek by ONE author, a Christian, about A.D. 100."¹⁶⁶

The Dictionary of the Apostolic Church declared Enoch to be "a work of curious complexity and unevenness. . . . In fact, it is quite a cycle of works in itself," though "in this medley we find certain recurring notes."¹⁶⁷ The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible (2:103) confesses that "the extent to which the compiler reworked his sources cannot be determined. He certainly made little effort to harmonize them. . . . To some extent he interwove his sources. . . . More typically, however, one source is followed by another, with little or no attention to the chronological or logical sequence or to consistency of thought."¹⁶⁸ In 1960, J. E. H. Thomson could still report that there is still as much disagreement as ever among the experts on the structure of Enoch and the nature and priority of its various parts.¹⁶⁹ C. P. Van Andel reported in 1955 that no overall study of any aspect of the book of Enoch had ever been undertaken.¹⁷⁰ He gives the Greek Enoch clear priority, since it is intelligible where I Enoch is often incomprehensible.¹⁷¹ We shall note below important instances in which the Joseph Smith Enoch "follows" the Greek and not the Ethiopian versions.

The Ethiopian Enoch, Van Andel holds, comes from Jewish sources of about the time of Christ; though its "Stitz in Leben" remains to be determined, all the Enoch literature is recognized as being the work of sectaries. R. H. Charles sees a Hasidic origin, that is, Pharisee; while Leszynski thinks it is Sadducee, and Lagrange, Essene—all of which have been related in one way or another to the Qumran community.¹⁷² That part of I Enoch known as the Wisdom of Enoch (91—107) belonged to a separatist group, according to Van Andel, who were without friends in the world and stood in sharp opposition to the ruling classes in Israel.¹⁷³ Van Andel concludes that the ultimate source of the Ethiopian Enoch was a book circulated among related Jewish sects of the second and first centuries B.C. who took Enoch as their model in denouncing a degenerate world.¹⁷⁴ This "book" in turn came from the same source as Jubilees, but is older,¹⁷⁵ while the "Wisdom of Enoch" part has the same origin as the XII Patriarchs and the Zadokite Fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls, with their emphasis on priesthood and the strict keeping of the Law.¹⁷⁶

All scholars agree that the ultimate beginnings of Enoch or its several parts remain completely unknown, while insisting that the book of Enoch must have been derived from earlier writings. Yet the oldest sources we have claim to go back to Enoch and know of none earlier but Adam. Instead of ever seeking for sources to Enoch, which never turn up, why not do the sensible thing and accept Enoch himself as the source, as the writers of Jubilees and the XII Patriarchs do?

Van Andel, who rightly accuses Albert Schweitzer of paying no attention to Jewish Apocalyptic writings in reconstructing his concept of Jesus and his followers,¹⁷⁷ is guilty of the same sort of shortsightedness when he traces everything back to the Jewish writings of the third century B.C. and there comes to a dead halt, as if all were a vacuum before that. But Rudolf Otto asks why we cannot go much farther back than that, since the Seer with his view of the heavenly Zion and the Ancient of Days is a stock figure in very ancient writings indeed.¹⁷⁸

A much debated issue has always been, How Christian are the Enoch writings? "There is a possibility that the latest wording of I Enoch has been written by Christian hand [sic], but nowhere do the various parts give cause to deem it of Christian origin or interpolation, "is Van Andel's conclusion.¹⁷⁹ In such Jewish works as the XII Patriarchs, James II, Peter, Jude, Didache, Barnabas, and Hermas, he finds it "seldom possible to make a clear distinction between Christian and non-Christian elements."¹⁸⁰ J. Z. Werblowsky holds that II Enoch "incorporates the messianic concepts of Alexandrian Jewry as well as many Christian additions . . . in circulation during the 2nd Temple Period." ¹⁸¹

Christian scholars exercised to preserve the "originality" of Jesus in the case of Enoch, as with the Dead Sea Scrolls, have leaned over backward in insisting that Enoch is a work totally alien to the New Testament. In 1840, M. Stuart finds that "the reader who has never pursued at much length the study of sacred criticism, cannot well imagine how much light is cast by it [I Enoch] on various parts of the New Testament; particularly on the Apocalypse. . . . And yet—how different are the two compositions, although partial and even general resemblances are so frequent!"¹⁸² He assures us that Enoch and the book of Revelation were written by "two Jews writing at the same period, having the same general theme and object. . . . Both authors . . . deal altogether in visions and symbols."¹⁸³ To rescue the originality of the New Testament, he explains that the two books are independent inventions, as "both authors . . . range the world of imagination" and freely fabricate.¹⁸⁴

Still, Stuart is amazed to find what looks like true Christology before the time of Christ!¹⁸⁵ How could he account for it? It must be a Christian work: "The whole contour of the Messianic part of the book indicates more knowledge of Christology than any uninspired Jew can reasonably be supposed to have possessed . . . at any time before Christianity was published."¹⁸⁶

How about an inspired Jew then? That, of course, is out of the question: "My full belief is, that 'our present Scriptures are the only and the sufficient rule of faith and practice,'¹⁸⁷ a position that obliges him, no matter what, to announce: "I have not the most distant intention to refer to the Book of Enoch as a book of authority. I can never be brought to believe that the Ethiopians had any good right to place it in their Canon."¹⁸⁸ Yet he frankly admits that the early Christians, including the first of the Fathers, placed it in their canon!¹⁸⁹ His conclusion: "The author was a Christian Jew,"¹⁹⁰ Christian, because "no merely Jewish usage, which is known to us, would, at so early a period, have led the writer in the path that he has trodden";¹⁹¹ Jewish, because he was "unusually familiar with the Old Testament scriptures, and probably having some acquaintance with those of the New. It was composed in all probability in the latter half of the first century of the Christian era."¹⁹²

In 1860, G. Volkmar, moved by the same arguments, insisted that Enoch was a purely Christian work, the idea that it was pre-Christian resulting from faulty translation; it had nothing to do with the sectaries of the first century B.C.¹⁹³ Then in 1864, the purely Jewish Hebrew Enoch texts began to appear, ¹⁹⁴ but A. Vaillant, as a good Catholic, meets the challenge: While the Hebrew Enoch is "badly constructed, confused, and murky, the Christian Enoch is reasonable, orderly, and clear." So it was the Christians who really organized the old Jewish materials and in the process "invented another history," which lets the Jews out.¹⁹⁵ In the same spirit, Weisse, Hofmann, and Philippi all insisted that Enoch was a Christian work, on the "dogmatic principle," according to Charles, that Christianity had to be vindicated "in its pure originality."¹⁹⁶

This is a question that has exercised all the students of early apocalyptic writings of recent years—what can we do when an undeniably Jewish work is full of undeniably Christian elements? That, of course, was one of the major stumbling blocks of the Book of Mormon—how could Jews before the time of Christ speak and act so much like Christians and vice versa? The apparent anomaly has led both Jews and Christians to restrain their enthusiasm for the Dead Sea Scrolls and even to discourage their publication.¹⁹⁷

After listing a dozen references to Enoch in the New Testament, the Encyclopaedia Britannica minimizes the tie-in on the theory that "the recurrence of similar ideas and phraseology need indicate no more than indebtedness to a common tradition."¹⁹⁸ Van Andel insists that the New Testament community that invented Enoch followed Christ, who was not an invention: "The real Enoch is lost in the mists of myth, while the real Christ is a historic figure."¹⁹⁹ And how did they invent Enoch? How much of the story came down to them beside the name? Nobody knows, and theories are cheap. Even R. H. Charles, to avoid giving too much credit to Enoch, has introduced things into his translation, according to Black, without "the slightest support from manuscript tradition. . . . He has in fact practically rewritten the end of the Similitudes 'in accordance with his view of what Enoch ought to have said.'"²⁰⁰

But P. Batiffol, with his usual insight, observed long ago that such works as Enoch are both a prolongation of the canonical prophets, and "at the same time a prologue to the Gospel. So and so alone can one explain the favor with which they met in the Primitive Church, and how, neglected by the Jews of the Talmudic tradition, they have been preserved for us by Christian hands." ²⁰¹

The purpose of this dull and sketchy summary is to make clear at the outset that when Joseph Smith produces pages of a book of Enoch for our perusal he cannot be borrowing from any known ancient source, whether Ethiopian, Greek, Slavonic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, or anything else, for none of them were available to him in 1830.

Of all the momentous concepts brought to the attention of mankind through the ministrations of the Prophet Joseph Smith, none has met with greater derision or merits greater respect than his account of how certain sacred records have been kept and transmitted to the Saints of every dispensation down through the ages. He tells us how a depository of sacred writings has been preserved and expanded from the beginning of man to the present time; and if he is right, there exists somewhere on earth at this time, if only we knew where to find them, the equivalent of thousands of tapes and films recalling crucial events in human history. The equivalent? Better than that! The old science-fiction dream of some day recapturing the waves of sight and sound propagated by great historical events of the past turns out to be a mistake—physicists assure us that waves of light and noise have a way of losing definition and damping out soon after they begin their ambitious voyage in all directions, and it can be shown that the most powerful instruments conceivable can never unscramble their confused and mazy impulses.

This means that the skill of writing, a technique as old as history, still remains and probably always will remain, the most effective means of binding time and space. "But of all other stupendous inventions," wrote the stupendous Galileo, "what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thought to any other person, though very far distant either in time or place, speaking with those who are not yet born, nor shall be this thousand or ten thousand years? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangement of two dozen little signs upon paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of man." ²⁰² The sublimity of the thing brings its human invention into question—men never invented anything else like that before or since, and the idea that "primitive man" insensibly floundered into it inch by inch over tens of thousands of stumbling years is simply hilarious.²⁰³

Well, Joseph the Seer doth a tale unfold which when you put it together is as splendid as it is audacious. And it is not hard to put together, for it runs through all of the inspired scriptures of which he is the purveyor; the Book of Mormon in particular spells it all out for us. This is how it goes.

Enoch of old declared that in the days of Adam "it was given unto as many as called upon God to write by the spirit of inspiration," that "a book of remembrance" was kept "in the language of Adam," and handed down to his own time, "written among us, according to the pattern given by the finger of God." (Moses 6:5, 46; italics added.) At the end of his life, Adam "predicted whatsoever should befall his posterity unto the latest generation," and that information was carefully preserved: "These things were all written in the book of Enoch, and are to be testified of in due time." (D&C 107:56—57; italics added.)

Thus there is a written record that bridges all of human experience from the beginning to the end. And in between comes a busy operation of bookkeeping to fill out the record, bring it up to date, condense and abridge where necessary, and transmit it into the proper hands for still further transmission. "For I command all men, both in the east and in the west, and in the north, and in the south, and in the islands of the sea, that they shall write the words which I speak unto them; . . . I shall also speak unto all nations of the earth and they shall write it." (2 Nephi 29:11—12.)

As writing bridges space, so it bridges time—as the bronze plates that Lehi took from Jerusalem "go forth unto all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people who were of his seed," we are assured that they "should never perish; neither should they be dimmed any more by time." (1 Nephi 5:18—19.) The world by this account is covered with a sort of mesh of communications, something like Teilhard de Chardin's mesh of organic life, by which the righteous regardless of time or place can share in a common universe of discourse: "He surely did show . . . unto many concerning us; wherefore, it must needs be that we know concerning them . . . that they might know concerning the doings of the Lord in other lands, among people of old." (1 Nephi 19:21, 22.)

Even the angels enter into the game: a bit of cross-referencing will show that when Gabriel came to put Zacharias and Mary "into the picture," as it were, his whole discourse to them was simply a pastiche of ancient prophetic writings that were about to be fulfilled (Luke 1); and when Moroni inaugurated a subsequent dispensation, he did so in the same way, "quoting the prophecies of the Old Testament . . . about to be fulfilled," and others both properly corrected and "precisely as they stand in our New Testament," with the necessary explanations. (Joseph Smith History 1:36, 40.)

In the handing down of the sacred record, everything is under strict control from on high, "given by inspiration, and . . . confirmed . . . by the ministering of angels, . . . proving to the world that the holy scriptures are true, and that God does inspire men and call them to his holy work in this age and generation, as well as in generations of old." (D&C 20:10—11.) Everything is timed to the hour, done in "the own due time of the Lord." (2 Nephi 27:10, 21; Ether 4:16—17; esp. Joseph Smith History 1:53—59.) The perfect matching of the records from widely scattered times and places attests their authenticity, for "these last records . . . shall establish the truth of the first." (1 Nephi 13:40.) And from first to last, all is done "by the spirit of inspiration." (Moses 6:5.)

The Prophet is good enough to tell us just how the thing operates. As the material is passed down from one hand to another, it snowballs as only libraries can, so that an abridged version must be made from time to time if the main message is to be kept to the fore, with the editor selecting for special attention what he deems primary and preserving the rest under various categories.

"And there had many things transpired which, in the eyes of some, would be great and marvelous; nevertheless, they cannot all be written in this book; yea, this book cannot contain even the hundredth part of what was done. . . . But behold there are records which do contain all the proceedings of this people; and a shorter but true account was given by Nephi [an earlier editor]. . . . I [Mormon] have made my record . . . according to the record of Nephi . . . on plates which I have made with mine own hands." (3 Nephi 5:10—11; see 1 Nephi 1:16—17.)

The last phrase is the standard colophon by which an ancient editor certifies the accuracy of the record both as he received it and as he is passing it on: "And we know our record to be true, for behold, it was a just man who did keep the record . . . if there was no mistake made by this man." (3 Nephi 8:1—2); the editor himself certifies, "I make a record of my proceedings in my days . . . and I know that the record which I make is true; and I make it with mine own hand; and I make it according to my knowledge." (1 Nephi 1:1—3, see 3 Nephi 5:17.) Jacob the brother of Nephi tells us that he took notes from the older records, of the things that might be of particular interest to his people, jotting down "the heads of them" (ancient kephalaia), to "touch upon them as much as it were possible . . . for the sake of our people." (Jacob 1:4.) For relevance is the keynote: "for I did liken all scriptures unto us, that it might be for our profit and learning." (1 Nephi 19:23.)

Methods of handling sacred writings are conditioned by the hostile world in which they find themselves. There are those who have sworn "in their wrath that, if it were possible, they would destroy our records and us, and also all the traditions of our fathers." (Enos 1:14.) Failing that, they can damage and corrupt them: "They have taken away . . . many parts which are plain and most precious; and also many covenants of the Lord have they taken away," with the disastrous effect that "an exceeding great many do stumble." (1 Nephi 13:26, 29.)

Why should anyone want to do that? For whatever reason, the burning of the books is a stock motif of real history. Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451 tells of a time in the future when the government and people of the United States systematically destroy all books, which are the disturbing element in a world dedicated to TV and the avoidance of serious thinking. But the author misses the main point: the books that are burned are not the sacred depository of which we have been speaking, but the books in the college "Survey of Western Civilization," a second-growth at best, a covering of beautiful fire-weed that sprang up on the ashes of the holy books that had been burned by the very schoolmen who now sponsor their successors. The question right now is not whether the sad and moving chorus of the "Great Books," all admittedly groping in the dark, can answer the great questions of life (by their own admission they cannot), but whether there ever were books that could do so, a lost library that they replaced. Joseph Smith was aware of the blank emptiness that exists between modern man and any such writings. "You may think this order of things to be very particular," he said to the brethren when he introduced them to the record-keeping system of the Church (D&C 128:5); and Moroni, the editor-in-chief of the Book of Mormon, despairs of approaching or even describing the inconceivable power and grandeur conveyed by the written word in the hands of such inspired masters as the brother of Jared. (See Ether 12:23—25.) The point is that such writing operates on a different wavelength from the ordinary; from it the receptive reader can get something that no other writing will give. The last dispensation was inaugurated by such a communication: "Never did any passage of scripture come with more power to the heart of man than this did at this time to mine." (Joseph Smith History 1:12.) The passage was familiar, but until then the power had been shut off.

Because the world is touchy and resentful of what it does not understand—"Dogs bark at strangers," says the immortal Heracleitus—the keeping of the record is much concerned with hiding, withholding, dissembling, rationing, and disguising: "Having been commanded of the Lord that I should not suffer the records which had been handed down by our fathers, which were sacred, to fall into the hand of the Lamanites, (for the Lamanites would destroy them) therefore I . . . hid up in the hill Cumorah all the records which had been entrusted to me by the hand of the Lord." (Mormon 6:6); "Those who have dwindled in unbelief shall not have them, for they seek to destroy the things of God." (2 Nephi 26:17.) Such things are "sealed up" and "shall not be delivered in the day of the wickedness and abominations of the people. Wherefore the book shall be kept from them." (2 Nephi 27:8.)

The safest way to preserve a book from destruction, and the only way to protect it from the inevitable corruption of contents that comes with copying and handling, is simply to bury it: "sealed up to come forth in their purity" (1 Nephi 14:26); "then shalt thou seal up the book again, and hide it up unto me, that I may preserve the words which thou hast not read, until I shall see fit in mine own wisdom to reveal all things" (2 Nephi 27:22, see Ethe: 4:4—6, D&C 6:26—27). The problem of finding the thing again raises no difficulty, of course, since they are hid up "unto God" by his instruction: "Touch not the things which are sealed, for I will bring them forth in mine own due time. . . . Wherefore, when thou hast read the words, . . . then shalt thou seal up the book again, and hide it up unto me." (2 Nephi 27:21—22.) And when they are found again, they are to be shown "only to those to whom [the finder] should be commanded to show them," on pain of the finder's own destruction. (Joseph Smith History 1:42.) When they are "had again among the children of men," it is only "among as many as shall believe. . . . Show them not unto any except them that believe." (Moses 1:41—42.) Some things are never to be circulated publicly, but are only "to be had in the Holy Temple of God" (Abraham, facsimile 2, figure 8); others may not be written down save by a special agent at a special time. (1 Nephi 14:25, 28.)

Sacred writings are often secured from unworthy eyes by the device of recording in code. In a sense, all writing is codified and can be read only by those who have received special instruction; to "read" means to "riddle" or decipher. King Benjamin had to learn a special language before he "could read these engravings," and he had his sons learn the language so they could keep the record (Mosiah 1:4); and the brother of Jared was ordered to guard the teachings, to "write them and . . . seal them up, that no one can interpret them; for ye shall write them in a language that they cannot be read." (Ether 3:22.)

To bridge the cultural and linguistic gap between the hider and the finder, thousands of years apart, special gifts and implements are provided, notably the seer-stones and Urim and Thummim. (Ether 3:23.) These are no mere mechanical gadgets, but "work not among the children of men save it be according to their faith" (2 Nephi 27:23), requiring far greater moral and intellectual qualifications than the manipulation of grammars and dictionaries. They work by "the same power . . . and the same gift" as those by which men wrote the words in the beginning. (D&C 17:7, 9:2, 8:11; Moses 6:5.)

It all begins on earth with the "Book of the Generations of Adam," a complete record of names and events and of God's dealing with his children on earth. (Moses 6:8.) He requires the Saints in every age to keep such a book, or rather to continue the original, adding their own names and histories to it, as they "arrange by lot the inheritances of the saints whose names are found, and the names of their fathers, and of their children, enrolled in the book of the law of God" (D&C 85:7), which is the same as the "book of remembrance" (D&C 85:9), which goes back to Adam (Moses 6:45—46) and is also "the genealogy of the sons of Adam" (Moses 6:22). Enoch reads from the books to remind his people of "the commandments, which I [God] gave unto their father, Adam" (Moses 6:28) when he "called upon our father Adam by his own voice" (Moses 6:51), and ordered them to pass it on: "Teach these things freely unto your children" (Moses 6:58), and in time they are to reach us! (D&C 107:56.) The rule is that "many books . . . of every kind" are "handed down from one generation to another . . . even until they [the people] have fallen into transgression" (Helaman 3:15—16), at which time they disappear until another prophet brings them forth.

Next to Enoch himself, the greatest transmitter of records would seem to be Moses, by whose hand we receive the records that came through Enoch and his successors. And it is Moses who gives us the key to the whole thing: "And now, Moses, my son, . . . thou shalt write the things which I shall speak. And in a day when the children of men shall esteem my words as naught and take many of them from the book which thou shalt write, behold, I will raise up another like unto thee; and they shall be had again among the children of men—among as many as shall believe." (Moses 1:40—41.)

Each time the records come forth, they are brought together in one with such scriptures as have survived among men, making possible the correction and the understanding of the latter. Being the source and author of all, Jesus Christ among the Nephites "expounded all the scriptures in one, which they had written," and "he commanded them that they should teach the things which he had expounded unto them." (3 Nephi 23:14.) This was after he had personally examined all the records, corrected defects, and brought them up to date. The same thing happened in the Old World, where, "beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself," that being what all the writings were about. (Luke 24:27.) The fact that the Lord himself reads to men out of the ancient books, "for . . . they are they which testify of me" (John 5:39), even though he is personally present among them as the risen Savior addressing them with his own lips, gives awesome testimony to the authority of the written word.

What the books testify of, after all, is the reality of the Lord and his mission: "We labor diligently to engraven these words upon plates, hoping that our beloved brethren and our children will receive them. . . . For, for this intent have we written these things, that they may know that we knew of Christ, and we had a hope of his glory many hundred years before his coming." (Jacob 4:3—4.)

"And a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the Lord, and that thought upon his name. And they shall be mine, saith the Lord of Hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels" (3 Nephi 24:16—17), that is, when I gather them all together and put them in proper order. So whoever are in this book are "numbered among the people of the first covenant," no matter when they live (Mormon 7:10), for the writings themselves are "proving to the world . . . that he is the same God yesterday, today, and forever." (D&C 20:11—12.)

To the Saints, the sacred record is a source of joy and delight as well as of instruction and guidance; it is a joy to read, a treat to the mind and spirit, "for my soul delighteth in the scriptures, and my heart pondereth them, and writeth them for the learning and profit of my children" (2 Nephi 4:15); "and if my people are pleased with the things of God they will be pleased with mine engravings" (2 Nephi 5:32). Their discovery is always exciting news to those who know how to value them, like the king who said, as he "rejoiced exceedingly, . . . Doubtless a great mystery is contained within these plates. . . . O how marvelous are the works of the Lord!" (Mosiah 8:19—20), and was "filled with joy" when he learned that somebody could read them. (Mosiah 21:28.) Intellectual curiosity and esthetic feeling are nothing to be ashamed of.

We must understand that the Spirit of God tells men both what and when to write—"you cannot write that which is sacred save it be given you from me" (D&C 9:9, 76:115), what records to translate—"Touch them not in order that ye may translate; for that thing is forbidden you" (Ether 5:1; 1 Nephi 14:28), and the imperative behind the operation: "Wherefore, the Lord hath commanded me to make these plates for a wise purpose in him, which purpose I know not." (1 Nephi 9:5.) "I do this for a wise purpose; for thus it whispereth me, according to the workings of the Spirit of the Lord which is in me." (Words of Mormon 7.) They are to serve "for the instruction of my people . . . and also for other wise purposes, which purposes are known unto the Lord." (1 Nephi 19:3.) The writings are placed completely outside of men's economy, and "no one shall have them to get gain; . . . and whoso shall bring it to light, him will the Lord bless. For none can have power to bring it to light save it be given him of God. (Mormon 8:14—15.) As to the implements and instructions, "whosoever has these things is called seer" (Mosiah 28:16), and his power "is a gift from God. . . . And no man can look in them except he be commanded, lest he should look for that he ought not and he should perish" (Mosiah 8:13). All of which does not exonerate the seer from using his own wits (see D&C 9:7—8; Mosiah 1:2—4) and learning all he can of "the language of his fathers" and "concerning the records . . . that thereby they might become men of understanding" (Mosiah 1:2—3).

The economy of the books is no mere toy for the weak minds of men to play with; it follows a pattern that extends to other worlds. The books that men keep on earth are matched by books kept in heaven: Adam's heavenly Book of Remembrance is duplicated on earth by a Book of Life, "the record which is kept in heaven; . . . or, in other words, . . . whatsoever you record on earth shall be recorded in heaven. . . . It may seem . . . a very bold doctrine that we talk of—a power which records or binds on earth and binds in heaven. Nevertheless, in all ages of the world, whenever the Lord has given a dispensation of the priesthood . . . this power has always been given." (D&C 128:7—9.) What is above is projected and recorded below: "Thou [the scribe] shalt write for him [the prophet]; and the scriptures shall be given, even as they are in mine own bosom." (D&C 35:20.) And what is below is projected above and recorded there: "The alms of your prayers have come up into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth, and are recorded in the book of the names of the sanctified, even them of the celestial world." (D&C 88:2.)

The record is the source of all else, and from it come those writings that have ever been the cornerstone of civilization, a weak terrestrial reflection of the sublime. Aside from their holy offices, "they have enlarged the memory of this people" and preserved them from "incorrect tradition," thus keeping civilization on the track. (Alma 37:8—9.) They check the corruption of the language and the loss of religion (Omni 1:17), and though a great leader like Zarahemla might be able to give "a genealogy of his fathers, according to his memory" (Omni 1:18), still "it were not possible that our father, Lehi, could have remembered all of these things, to have taught them to his children, except it were for the help of these plates" (Mosiah 1:4), without which, says Mosiah, "even our fathers would have dwindled in unbelief . . . like . . . the Lamanites" (Mosiah 1:5).

The kings and leaders of the people, as the trustees of the heritage of culture and dominion, are the regular keepers of the record, "which is had by the kings" (Omni 1:11), handed down from father to son, with special preparation and instructions (Omni 1:1, 4, 9), along with the national treasures of which they are a part—the Liahona, seerstones, sword of Laban; the whole thing is summed up in Alma 37:2—3 and comes down to our own time when the Whitmers were promised a view of these things (D&C 17:1). Others besides the prophet were encouraged to ask for the gift to look into "all those ancient records which have been hid up, that are sacred" (D&C 8:11) and "to obtain a knowledge of history, and of countries, and of kingdoms" (D&C 93:53), as the Prophet was of "all good books, . . . languages, tongues, and people" (D&C 90:15), that they might not approach the sacred depository with vacant minds.

If one lightly assumes that Joseph Smith got these ideas from the Bible, where they are indeed implicit but by no means obvious, let us bear in mind that his contemporaries shrieked in derision when they heard him; and what scandalized them most of all was the idea of a second or third witness to place beside the Bible, in spite of "the divine law of witnesses." But the young prophet, far from simply running on about ancient plates and parchments, angels and seerstones ("the jibberings of a crazy boy," writes one Harvard don), actually went ahead and produced the wonderful volumes of which he spoke—full-length texts, broad fabrics of immense detail, enough rope to hang any imposter twenty times over. If the hypothetical house of books is a wonderful creation, with what astonishment must we view the real and solid structure erected single-handed by the youthful prophet in the midst of countless distractions and afflictions?

According to the Latest News

The foregoing brief survey of a theme long familiar to Latter-day Saints and odious to others is to prepare our patient reader for a visit to the strange and wonderful edifice that houses the emerging Enoch literature, for it is built on precisely the same plan as that set forth by the Prophet Joseph to explain the holy books that he gave us.

We begin with Enoch keeping the books of Adam, recalling that the words and prophecies of Adam were "all written in the book of Enoch" (D&C 107:57), who reminded his people, "the first of all we know, even Adam. For a book of remembrance we have written among us" (Moses 6:45—46). Now according to the Zohar, "Enoch also had a book, which came from the same place as the book of the generations of Adam."²⁰⁴ Rabbi Eliezer said that Adam hid the book that the angel Raziel, the purveyor of the heavenly secrets, gave to him, and that Enoch later found it, and that it was next delivered to Noah by Rafael and so passed on to Shem and hence from one generation to the next.²⁰⁵ It is implied in Genesis 5:1—2 that the human race was fully launched when the book of the generations of Adam was inaugurated, since Adam and Eve were set apart (barā), and given a name and a blessing. A very old tradition equates true humanity with Enoch the recordkeeper, a more complete man than Adam himself.²⁰⁶ The early Christians were fond of the Book of Adam, according to Epiphanius,²⁰⁷ and A. Vaillant, the authority on the Slavonic Enoch, maintained that the Christian Enoch book was not taken from Jewish sources but from an old lost Book of Adam and Seth.²⁰⁸

But everywhere Enoch is credited with being the scribe and transmitter par excellence, "the Righteous Scribe, the Teacher of heaven and earth, and the Scribe of Righteousness."²⁰⁹ The "Joseph Smith Enoch" brings forth the books, including Adam's, as a testimony and a witness to his generation (see Moses 6:46); even so, according to Jubilees, "[Enoch] was the first to write a testimony, and he testified . . . among the generations of the earth. . . . He understood everything [compare Moses 6:37, 7:67], and wrote his testimony" (Jubilees 4:18f); and the Testament of Abraham reports that God "gave him [Enoch] the task to write down all the good and bad deeds that a man's soul would commit."²¹⁰

In the secretarial line, preeminence goes to Enoch, "to whom the angels "showed everything which is on earth and in the heavens . . . and he wrote everything" (Jubilees 4:21), "the man of intelligence, the great writer, whom the Lord took to be a seer of the life above" (2 Enoch, Intd.), who was commanded by God to "take the books which I have written back to earth to your children . . . that they will read them and will know me for the Creator of all things, and distribute the books of the handwriting children to children, generation to generation, nation to nation." (2 Enoch 33:5—9.) Inevitably the saying went abroad in the land that it was that man who "first learned and taught writing, and was deemed worthy to reveal the divine mysteries."²¹¹

What is behind these Jewish and Christian traditions? The idea that there was such a man as Enoch, the "Enoch figure" whom we shall get to know much better, is as old as the oldest human records. We go back to the proposition, clearly set forth in the book of Moses (6:5, 6:46; D&C 128:5), that, in the words of N. Tur Sinai, "the miracle of writing was one which the Ancients regarded as a gift from heaven."²¹² It is apparent from the earliest records of the Sumerians that they "were not ignorant of the concept of a 'sacred book,' that is, of a divinely inspired, even dictated text, which contains the only correct and valid account of the 'story' of deity," according to A. L. Oppenheim, who further observes that the transmitter of the record, according to the ancient doctrine, was not its originator, but only "a kâṣir kâmmé, 'one who collects/arranges/prepares the tablets' without interfering with the wording"—he is merely the transmitter of divine words; yet to function as such, he himself must be inspired. He is "the collector of the tablets," but his information comes to him in a vision of the night, which he faithfully writes down in the morning. ²¹³

Such is the office of Enoch: "Bring out the books from my store house," says God to his angels in the Slavonic Enoch, "and a reed of quick-writing [shorthand], and give it to Enoch, and deliver to him the choice books out of my hand." (2 Enoch 22:12.) Thus instructed, the seer wrote down the glories of the celestial throne on the one hand, and the endless combinations of the elements on the other. (2 Enoch Intd.)²¹⁴

This introduces the cosmological element that is so conspicuous in the Enoch literature, Enoch being "the first among men that are born on earth who learnt writing and knowledge and wisdom and who wrote down the signs of heaven." (Jubilees 4:17.) God shows him "the book of the courses of the luminaries of the heavens." (1 Enoch 72:1.) The emphasis on cosmology, very prominent in the "Joseph Smith Enoch," was highly distasteful to the doctors of the Jews and Christians alike and was their strongest argument for rejecting it;²¹⁵ but the close affinity between the earliest writing and the signs of the heavens is undeniable.²¹⁶ Both among the Egyptians and the Chaldaeans, Clement of Alexandria reports, "writing and the knowledge of the heavens" go hand in hand;²¹⁷ the proper study of those apocalyptic writings so disdained by the doctors of the schools was, as H. Gunkel sums it up, eschatology, angelology, cosmology, and prehistory—all disturbingly tangible subjects.²¹⁸ The handing down of such records is nowhere more clearly stated than in the book of Abraham, 1:31: "But the records of the fathers, even the patriarchs, . . . God preserved in mine own hands; therefore a knowledge of the beginning of the creation, and also of the planets, and of the stars, as they were made known unto the fathers, have I kept even unto this day . . . for the benefit of my posterity that shall come after me." (Italics added.)

This literal-minded concern with the stars in their courses is a mark of antiquity and authenticity in the Enoch literature, as is the repeated reference to the heavenly tablets. "Observe, Enoch, these heavenly tablets," says the angel, "and read what is written thereon. . . . And I observed the heavenly tablets, and read everything . . . and understood everything, and read the book of all the deeds of mankind . . . to the remotest generations." (1 Enoch 81:1, 2, see Moses 7:67.) Here we meet the fusion of the heavenly and earthly books—are they one and the same?—as in the Joseph Smith writings. "I know a mystery; and have read the heavenly tablets, and have seen the holy books and have found written therein and inscribed regarding them." (1 Enoch 103:2, italics added.) "And after that Enoch . . . began to recount [or read] from the books . . . '[what] I have learnt from the heavenly tablets.'" (1 Enoch 93:1; italics added.) The impression is that the books were the earthly copies of the heavenly tablets: "the Lord has shown me and informed me, and I have read them in the heavenly tablets." ²¹⁹ In Moses 7:67, "the Lord showed Enoch all things," and after a vision of heaven and earth he placed before the people "a book of remembrance . . . written among us, according to the pattern given by the finger of God." (Moses 6:46.) In this they recall the Tablets of the Law.²²⁰ (Exodus 31:18.)

Indeed, "few religious ideas in the Ancient Near East have played a more important role than the notion of the Heavenly Tablets or the Heavenly Book";²²¹ "in the literature of early Judaism," in particular, they "play a considerable role."²²² The idea is at home in classical literature and hence it is assumed was taken over by the early Christians with their Book of Life.²²³ In Rabbinic tradition, Abraham, "'being found faithful,' is declared a 'friend of God' on the 'heavenly tablets,' and every righteous keeper of the Covenant . . . is registered in the same Book of Life";²²⁴ the antiquity of this is supported by the Battle Scroll of the Dead Sea Scrolls: "And the covenant of thy peace hast thou engraved for them with a stylus of life, to rule over them in all appointed times of eternity,"²²⁵ where the situation is closely parallel to one in the Book of Mormon, Mosiah chapter 5.²²⁶

Noah, after Enoch, reports, "The Lord has showed me and informed me, and I have read . . . in the heavenly tablets, and I saw written on them that generation upon generation shall transgress" (Enoch 106:19, 107:1); and after him Jacob, when "an angel descended from heaven with seven tablets in his hands . . . he read them and knew all that . . . would befall him and his sons . . . and he showed them all that was written on the tablets" (Jubilees 32:21f). Next, Moses yielded up to an angel "the Tablets of the Divisions of the years . . . from the day of the creation to the time when the heavens and the earth shall be renewed." (Jubilees 1:29.) Thus the same tablets are handed down.

The books of Enoch contain information from all holy sources: "I Enoch will declare unto you, my sons, according to that which appeared to me in the heavenly vision, and which I have known through the word of the holy angels, and have learnt from the heavenly tablets. And Enoch began to recount from the books." (1 Enoch 93:2—3.) In the Slavonic version, Enoch, accompanied by two angelic guides, brings to earth "the books of handwriting" to be handed down from "generation to generation." (2 Enoch 88:6—9.)

The heavenly tablets may be traced back as far as the Babylonian Tablets of Destiny: "These tablets express the law of the whole world . . . and they are truly the mystery of heaven and earth."²²⁷ At the coronation, rehearsing the great creation rite of the New Year, the king was thought to be caught up into heaven, there to receive his copy of the tablets with which he returned to earth as his badge of divine authority.²²⁸ On a like occasion in Egypt the monarch, according to the oldest of books, the Pyramid Texts, is hailed as "the King who is over the spirits, who unites the hearts—so says he who is in charge of wisdom, . . . who bears the god's book, even Sia, who is at the right hand of Re."²²⁹

Back to the books of Adam for a moment, please. A very early Christian source reports that while God was contemplating putting the breath of life into Adam, He took a book, and wrote therein [the names of] those who should come forth from him and who should enter into the kingdom which is in the heavens. . . . 'These are they whose names are written in the Book of Life from the foundation of the world.'"²³⁰ This is certainly close to the idea that the Saints, whose names are in the Book of Life, are "numbered among the people of the first covenant." (Mormon 7:10.) The members of the Qumran community are they whose covenant is "engraved with a stylus of Life."²³¹ After he had come to earth, Adam was given a Book of Knowledge by an angel sent to instruct him, giving him a knowledge of the mysteries—the ordinances—surpassing that of the angels.²³² According to the Zohar, Adam lost such a book upon leaving Eden, and when he "supplicated God with tears for its return . . . it was given back to him, in order that wisdom might not be forgotten of men."²³³ Another version has it that a holy book of seventy-two letters was given to Michael, who gave it to Adam (those two are constantly being confused in the early writings), who based all his knowledge upon it.²³⁴ When God ordered him to register all the animals, he inspired Adam invisibly so that he could read aloud, and on the first tablets he read out the names of the animals as they passed before him. After Adam and Eve had thus been drilled in reading, "God transported his school to the Garden of Eden." ²³⁵

Abraham, when he set up his model Garden of Eden at Hebron, also established a school in the midst of it;²³⁶ in the preexistence Abraham had already learned the art of writing and was given the Book of Creation, but on earth he was not able to read it without assistance, and so his teacher Shem helped him at it.²³⁷ Recalling that Abraham possessed "the records of the fathers" containing "a knowledge of the beginning of the creation" according to the book of Abraham 1:31, one is interested to learn that "the writings of Seth and Idrisi were handed down to the time of Noah and Abraham," Idrisi being usually identified with Enoch himself, but in this Mandaean source is called "the first after Enoch son of Seth son of Adam to write with a reed."²³⁸

The valuable Apocalypse of Adam claims to be taken from a book handed down from Adam himself, containing an exposition of the gospel of salvation but dwelling with particular emphasis on the baptism of Adam;²³⁹ this is particularly intriguing since the wonderfully condensed and powerful presentation of the gospel plan in the Joseph Smith book of Enoch devotes a whole page to the baptism of Adam. (See Moses 6:51—68.) Beginning with the reminder that God "called upon . . . Adam by his own voice" (Moses 6:51), all the words of Enoch's great sermon in the Joseph Smith Enoch are direct quotations from Adam and the Lord, Enoch's own calling being to hand on "the commandments, which I gave unto their father, Adam" (Moses 6:28).

The Pistis Sophia claims derivation from the two books of Jeu, "which Enoch has written as I spoke with him out of the Tree of Knowledge and out of the Tree of Life in the paradise of Adam."²⁴⁰ As he was praying, an "angel . . . appeared to Adam, . . . saying, . . . 'Thy prayers have been heard and I am come to bring thee words of purity and much wisdom. I will make thee wise through the words of this holy book, from which you will learn whatever shall befall. . . . Whoever, even to the last generation makes use of this book, must be pure and faithfully observe what is written in it,'" and so on. [See Moses 1:35!] Then Adam fell upon his face before the angel who bade him rise, stand up, and be strong, and receive the book from his hand, concealing its contents from the unworthy. Then the angel departed in a roar of flame.²⁴¹ Adam's prostration reminds us of the Joseph Smith version, when Enoch presented the Book of Adam, "written . . . according to the pattern given by the finger of God" before the people, and they "trembled, and could not stand in his presence." (Moses 6:46—47.)

This book of Adam story is also told in the old book of Noah, which traces the record from Adam and Enoch to Noah; it begins with Adam's prayer after the fall, when the angel came to instruct him and gave him the book, which Adam hid in the ground and which was later dug up by Enoch.²⁴² Another account tells how Enoch was shown in a dream where Adam's book was buried and how he should obtain it; he went to the place early the next morning and hung around until noon, lest he excite the suspicion of the people in the fields; then he dug up the book, whose characters were interpreted to him by divine revelation, learned from it the fulness of the gospel, and was so set apart by his knowledge that he withdrew from the society of men.²⁴³ C. J. Van Andel finds it significant that the Enoch writings of the Jews are not based on the Torah but go back to unknown works of great antiquity dealing with heavenly tablets.²⁴⁴

Recording sacred matters has been a prophetic function since Adam labored diligently to provide holy books for his descendants. Enoch carried on that tradition, busily arranging and editing the documents, as his grandson Methuselah reports: "After . . . Enoch gave me the teaching of all the secrets in the book and in the Parables which had been given to him, he . . . put them together for me in the words of the Book of Parables." (1 Enoch 68:1; italics added.) Here we must bear in mind that all the long-lived patriarchs from Adam to Enoch were contemporaries and knew each other. The situation is vividly brought home in D&C 107:53—57: "Three years previous to the death of Adam, he called Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, and Methuselah . . . with the residue of his posterity who were righteous, into the valley of Adam-ondi-Ahman," and there "predicted whatsoever should befall his posterity unto the latest generation," and "these things were all written in the book of Enoch." Thus Rabbi Eliezer refers to the Book of Enoch as identical with the book of the Generations of Adam mentioned in Genesis 5:1.²⁴⁵ Adam's book already contained the story of his family "unto the latest generation." (D&C 107:56.) "The Lord had his servants come down [to Adam], saying to them, 'Go ye and testify of me this day. Give to the Man Adam your hand [in covenant], and covenant with him by law.'" Then the Lord put it down in writing, which the three witnesses all signed. "If you ask: 'Could not the Lord have done without the written document, witnesses, and handclasp?' the answer is that it is the Lord's will that this shall be the proper procedure among the children of Adam forever."²⁴⁶ So Joseph Smith is quite right in having Adam's book come down through Enoch to Abraham, Moses, and us.

It went first to Methuselah, who received from Enoch a charge exactly like that later given to Moses:

Moses 1:40—"Moses, my son, . . . thou shalt write the things which I shall speak."	1 Enoch 82:1—"preserve, my son Methuselah, the books from thy father's hand."
Moses 1:41—"the children of men shall esteem my words as naught and take many of them from the book which thou shalt write."	2 Enoch 47:2; 48:8—"Take these books of your father's[Enoch's] handwriting" the foolish ones "understand not the Lord . . . accept not, but reject."
	3 Enoch 104:10—"Sinners will alter and pervert the words of righteousness in many ways, and will speak wicked words, and lie."

Then comes Noah, who has the same experiences with the books and passes on the same information as Enoch.²⁴⁷ "My grandfather Enoch," says Noah, "gave me the teaching of all the secrets in the book . . . which had been given to him" (1 Enoch 68:1), and indeed the Joseph Smith Enoch makes both Methuselah and Noah the heirs of his teachings and promises (Moses 8:2—3, 5—12). Next there is Abraham who, in the Testament of Abraham, has almost the same visions and makes the same heavenly journey as Enoch, and at the end of his celestial visit gives his source away: "I, Abraham, said to the archangel Michael, 'O Lord, who is this honorable old man who has this book in his hand, who comes near to the judge [Adam]?' . . . He replied, 'It is Enoch. . . . God gave him the task to write down all the good and bad deeds a man's soul would commit.'"²⁴⁸

Like Abraham, Isaiah is introduced to a venerable old man with a book at the end of his journey to heaven, and the man is Enoch.²⁴⁹ The Lord himself says to Isaiah, "'No mortal has ever seen what you have!' Saying this, he placed a book in my hands and said to me: 'Take this and know . . . that there is nothing hidden of all the works in that world, good or bad.' And I took the book from his hand and read it, and behold everything was written down about every man from the beginning to the end of the world."²⁵⁰

This gives substance to the Lord's words to the Nephites as he turned the books over to them: "Search these things diligently; for great are the words of Isaiah. For surely he spake as touching all things concerning my people." (3 Nephi 23:1—2; italics added.) After Abraham, Jacob became the holder of the heavenly tablets, which told about the premortal existence, the eternal nature of Jacob's own promise and calling, and the deeds of his posterity to the remotest times, according to a very old Jewish work called the Prayer of Joseph.²⁵¹ Next Moses receives "the complete history of the creation" (Jubilees 2:1), which he transmitted to us. "The whole burthen of Moses' message," wrote C. L. Woolley, "is the restatement of Abraham's message," an appeal to the past.²⁵² Ezra too was commanded to "write down everything that has happened in the world from the beginning . . . that men may be able to find the path, and that those who live in the last days may live."²⁵³ And how like Moroni's situation is that of Ezra's friend Baruch (both were associates of Jeremiah and Lehi) in a work "lost sight of for quite 1200 years" and discovered in 1866:²⁵⁴ "'Earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the mighty God and receive what I commit to thee, and guard them until the last times, so that, when thou art ordered, thou may restore them, so that strangers may not get possession of them . . .' So the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up."²⁵⁵ The personification of the earth is a motif that goes back to Enoch. (See Moses 7:48.)

According to many recently discovered documents, it was during the forty-day mission of the Lord after his resurrection that he handed on the books to his disciples exactly as he does in the Book of Mormon during the same period. The important Epistle of the Apostles, concerning which "whoever knows and observes what is written therein shall be like the angels," was by the Lord "entrusted to Peter, John, Matthew, and to others at Jerusalem, that copies might be sent to [certain carefully chosen disciples], and by them to all the branches [mansiones]."²⁵⁶ The newly discovered Apocryphon of James tells in detail how the books were entrusted by the Lord to Peter, James, and John for careful rationing; and in other new finds both Peter and Paul ascend to heaven and there receive holy books and are introduced to Enoch, the venerable scribe. Of particular interest is the emphasis on John, whose writings are now shown by the Dead Sea Scrolls, according to F. M. Cross, to be significantly "related to the Enoch literature."²⁵⁷ Nowhere do we find fuller instructions for the guarding and transmitting of the records than those given by the Lord to John in the three newly found Apocryphons of John. And it was Joseph Smith who first apprised the world that there was a "record made on parchment by John and hidden up by himself." (D&C 7, section heading.)

The ever-attentive reader may have noticed how no matter who the bookkeeper is, Enoch is somehow lurking in the background. After all is said, he is the supreme scribe, and nowhere is that marvelous economy of book-keeping better described than in the Slavonic Enoch: "Take thou the books which thou hast written thyself . . . and go down to earth and tell thy sons all that I have told thee. . . . And give them the books of thy handwriting, and they will read them and will know me the creator of all . . . and let them distribute the books of thy handwriting—children to children, generation to generation, nation to nations. . . . Thy handwriting and the handwriting of thy fathers Adam and Seth shall not be destroyed till the end of time, as I have commanded my angels . . . that it be preserved, and that the handwriting of thy fathers . . . perish not." (2 Enoch 12.)

The injunction proceeds in words much like those of the book of Moses:

2 Enoch—"I know the wickedness of men, but I shall leave over one just man with all his house . . . ; and that race shall reveal the books of thy handwriting, and of thy fathers, . . . among the children of men; the guardians of the earth shall show them that race."

Moses 1:41—"When the children of men shall esteem my words as naught . . . I will raise up another like unto thee; and they shall be had again among the children of men—among as many as shall believe."

Need we point out that the Slavonic Enoch was not known at the time of Joseph Smith?

The attentive reader will also have noted the frequent reference to the last days whenever the writings of Enoch were mentioned. This is an important key. A. L. Davies makes the generalization that a "feature . . . common to this apocalyptic literature, is the reserving of the visions and the books of Enoch for the last days, for the elect to read and understand";²⁵⁸ instantly bringing to mind the Lord's promises to Enoch in Moses 7:60, 62: "As I live, even so will I come in the last days, in the days of wickedness and vengeance. . . . Truth will I send forth out of the earth, to bear testimony . . . to sweep the earth as with a flood, to gather out mine elect," and so on. It is Enoch who presides when all things are gathered in one; the book that is to be revealed to them of the last days is that very same perfect book that existed from the first in the mind of God.²⁵⁹ "I may write all that has happened in the world," says Ezra, "that they who would live at the last [days], may live."²⁶⁰

"This book," declares the newly discovered Gospel of Truth, "is to be revealed to the Eons [all the other dispensations?] in the End-time. It is secret, . . . known only to the initiated. It is a perfect book which existed first in the mind of God, by which it is conveyed to men."²⁶¹

Contrary to what one might expect, and what has been taught for generations in colleges and seminaries, the ancient sectaries were not simply illiterates confined to an "oral gospel." On the contrary, Pere Lagrange notes with stern disapproval, "These visionaries are the most book-bound (libresque) of men,"²⁶² laying no claim to originality, but uniformly preoccupied, as J. Leipoldt has noted, with initiation rites, sacraments, baptism, common meals, secret books handed down from ancient times, and ordinances and doctrines alien to conventional Christianity. In all of this they resemble "late Judaism in general" and betray ancient connections with Babylonia and Iran.²⁶³

So the call goes forth in the Chester Beatty Enoch papyrus: "Prepare, ye righteous, and present records of your doings as a remembrance, give them as a testimony before the angels." (Gk. 91:3.) The chosen prophet who raises up a generation of righteousness is also chosen to "reveal to them the books of thy [Enoch's] handwriting, and of thy fathers" and to be the leader of God's word in that dispensation, "to the faithful . . . and they shall tell another generation," and so on.²⁶⁴ In short, Enoch is writing for the church, and the idea of the church is nowhere more clearly stated than in the Enoch literature. Like the Apocryphon of James, it "is for those blessed ones who will be saved by their faith in it."²⁶⁵ When Enoch places restrictions on his works with the command, My sons, hand these books "to all who want them, and instruct them, that they may see the Lord's . . . works,"²⁶⁶ he is giving the same orders as the Lord gives the disciples in the Apocryphon of John: "I tell you this that you may write it down and give it secretly to those who are of one heart and one mind [homopneuma] with you; it is reserved for the breed who do not vacillate."²⁶⁷ So Enoch again: "Distribute the books . . . amongst the nations who shall have the sense to fear God; let them receive them, and may they come to love them . . . read them and apply themselves to them."²⁶⁸

Part of the book's appeal is its necessary secrecy, "revealed to the Eons in the End-time." It is a secret, a special writing, only for the initiates.²⁶⁹ "'It is given to you to write it down,'" says the Lord to John, "'and it must be put in a safe place.' Then he said to me, 'Cursed shall be whoever gives it away as a gift or in return for food, drink, clothing, or anything of that nature.'" Then he handed the mysterion to John and immediately vanished.²⁷⁰ Such writings as are made known are carefully rationed: "Some things thou shalt publish, and some thou shalt deliver in secret to the wise"; ²⁷¹ or, in another Ezra text, "These words shalt thou publish openly, but those thou shalt hide,"²⁷² twenty-four books being published and seventy withheld.²⁷³

The tradition of secrecy begins with Enoch: When Enoch found the Book of Adam and read it, "he knew that the human race would not be able to receive it. So he hid it again, and it remained hidden until Noah."²⁷⁴ But the practice began with Adam, who received a golden book from Michael and "hid it in the crevice of a rock."²⁷⁵

The Torah itself was buried when Israel sinned, to be dug up in later times. ²⁷⁶ The Copper Scroll of the Dead Sea Scrolls shows us how in times of dire peril all those sacred things that had been dedicated, including the holy writings, were buried for safety,²⁷⁷ a practice clearly set forth in the Book of Mormon. (Helaman 13:18—20.) From early Babylonian sources comes the report of Berossus, that Kronus ordered Xisuthros (Noah) "to inscribe in writing the beginning, middle, and end of everything, and to bury the records in the city of Sippar," to be exhumed after the Flood.²⁷⁸

So when we are told that the writing of Moses "because of wickedness . . . is not had among the children of men" (Moses 1:23), the claim is confirmed by the tradition that the sons of Moses had a book that their father entrusted to them, but when their children lightly leaked its contents to the world, "the angel returned, took the book, and carried it up with him to heaven."²⁷⁹

The oldest Sumerian epic shows that Mesopotamian theologians knew about a "sacred book" that is of divine inspiration, "which contains the only correct and valid account of the 'story' of the deity."²⁸⁰ This was the book of all knowledge possessed by the king in both Egypt and Babylonia.²⁸¹ Through a Christian channel comes the wellknown and very early Babylonian tradition that the Fish- or Flood-god Oannes taught men all the arts and sciences and wrote all knowledge down in a book, and "nothing since that time has ever been added to human knowledge."²⁸² This is the book that the Babylonian Noah was commanded to bury at the time of the flood, and it is not surprising that scholars have on philological and other grounds often identified Oannes with Enoch.²⁸³

When Enoch and the others saw everything and wrote everything down such as pertains to this world, they were all writing the same book—and they knew it. In Revelation 5:1—2 there is such a book, "a 'revelation' from the Spirit of the Father into the 'Heart of Man.'"²⁸⁴ Yet in the recently discovered reality of the hologram, we have something akin to the paradox of the book each of whose letters contains all of its parts: "each letter is a perfect truth, like a perfect book in itself, for they are letters written in the Oneness."²⁸⁵

In the Joseph Smith Enoch, all the writings from Adam on down have one central perennial theme—the atoning mission of Jesus Christ, which emerges full-blown in a succession of dispensations. (Moses 7:39, 47, 54—67.) In the book of Enoch "the Lord, the Father, wrote with his own fingers ten words," which were "teachings regarding the Son," to whose earthly ministry Enoch looked forward.²⁸⁶ "The limited mysteries . . . which God caused Enoch to write" were later "revealed in their fullness by Jesus," says the Pistis Sophia.²⁸⁷ It is the Savior, according to the Mandaeans, who "brings to mankind the primordial revelation contained in the heavenly books."²⁸⁸ The tradition of the perennial gospel was known to the early church and is confirmed by Athanasias, who explains that the gospel is not new but was preached and known to Adam, Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, and Moses, before the time of Christ.²⁸⁹ Later Christianity, however, down to the present, lays great emphasis on the originality of Christ, and Pico della Mirandola, while translating a newly discovered manuscript of Ezra, reported with amazement, "I see in it (as God is my witness) the religion not so much of Moses as of Christ!"²⁹⁰

The idea of doubled sets of books, one on earth and one in heaven, is also widespread and very ancient. Of Enoch's writings we are told, "some of them are written and inscribed above in the heaven, in order that the angels may read them" (1 Enoch 108:7), while Enoch's own writings are transcripts from a book kept in heaven, and made known in sundry portions to the Fathers, ²⁹¹ all of whom, but most notably Enoch, report having got their information by "reading it in the heavenly tablets" (for example, Jubilees 4:1). Thus by the books above and below, brought together like the sticks of Joseph and Ephraim in perfect agreement as perfectly agreeing witnesses, the world will be judged.²⁹²

Enoch's writings are above all else a warning to the wicked, particularly in the last days, in the days of wickedness and vengeance,²⁹³ to the end "that they who live at the last days may live."²⁹⁴ His book is "for those who . . . keep the law in the last days, and equally for those who break it: "In those days Enoch received books of zeal and wrath, and books of disquiet and expulsion."²⁹⁵ Enoch's book is both a threat and a comfort, "an exhortation not to be troubled on account of the times," but to be vigilant and never overconfident.²⁹⁶

Whenever the sacred writings come forth, they are greeted by the righteous with glad surprise and eager enjoyment: "Then books will be given to the righteous and the wise to become a cause of joy and uprightness and much wisdom . . . and they shall believe in them and rejoice over them." (1 Enoch 104:10—13.) They "will be shown to faithful men," and "shall be glorified thereafter more than the first." (2 Enoch 12.) "They who have the wisdom to receive them . . . will be nourished by them and become attached to them." (2 Enoch 12, p. 48.) "This hope," comments R. H. Charles, "was to a large degree realized in the centuries immediately preceding and following the Christian era,"²⁹⁷ until the doctors of the church threw the treasure away. At a time when the church will be "oppressed and suffering and has no place to set its foot," the sacred writings, having "evaded the hands of the wicked," finally come into the hands of the Saints, properly witnessed and certified and "written in exceeding plainness"; "the Saints will kiss them and say: O Wisdom of the Great One! O armor of the Apostles!"²⁹⁸

The Curtain Rises

The Pearl of Great Price should be read as a single work, an epitome of world history, summarizing and correlating in the brief scope of less than sixty pages the major dispensations of the gospel, past, present, and future. The story is told largely by excerpts, which announce themselves as fragments of original books written by Adam, Enoch, Abraham, Moses, and Joseph Smith, all centering about the figure of Christ and his mission in the meridian of time, with a preview of the millennium thrown in. Enoch's proper place in that story is best known by those who see the big picture. Thus, the following section deals with the type of story that Enoch's history belongs to, the visions from Creation to Judgment.

The recent flowering of comparative studies that look into long-neglected or newly discovered apocryphal writings makes it clear that the concept of recurrent dispensations of light and darkness, restoration and apostasy, is valid for every age of recorded history. Nowhere is the pattern set forth more clearly than in the epic sweep of the Pearl of Great Price. Surprisingly, the perennial pattern presented there is not limited to Jewish and Christian traitions but extends to the oldest ritual literature—epic and dramatic—of the human race; chapter 1 of our book of Moses is as much an introduction to world literature in general as to our conventional scriptures. Daring as such a claim may seem, the more carefully the text is studied the more impressively it is confirmed. Consider the episodes in the order given by this remarkable prologue to the study of man.

A. The story opens (verse 1) with Moses speaking with God face to face on "an exceedingly high mountain," wrapped in the divine glory, sharing the light of divinity. This situation, including the mountain, is the well-known epic and dramatic "prologue in heaven," with the hero receiving a special calling and assignment to a work in this lower world; like the audience, he is being prepared for the blows that follow.

B. Next the lights go out, the glory departs, and we find Moses lying helpless upon the bare earth, cut down to size; he slowly regains his strength until he is able to utter his first commentary on life: "Now, for this cause I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed." (Verses 9—10.) Man begins his earthly career at the bottom of the ladder. Then the hero's next remark puts a different face on things: "But now mine own eyes have beheld God; . . . his glory was upon me; and I beheld his face, for I was transfigured before him." (Verse 11.)

And this is the human predicament, man's condition in its most stark and elementary terms, la misère et la gloire, that besetting contradiction that is the constant concern of early Christian and Jewish writers and the subject of countless philosophical and Gnostic texts, endlessly restated as a perennially new discovery in all the great literature of the world: "How weary, flat, stale and unprofitable" is the earthly life of man, the "quintessence of dust," and yet "how noble in reason" is that same man, "how infinite in faculty! . . . in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god." (Hamlet 1, ii, 133; 2, ii, 303—8.) Yet Moses declares that man is nothing, even while in the same breath calling attention to the clouds of glory still remembered from his native condition.

C. In this state of weakness and suspense, of trials and contradictions, he is the ideal target for the Adversary, who with his usual evil methodology chooses precisely this moment to attack, taking full advantage of his enemy's imperiled condition. With the appearance of this sinister figure the drama begins in earnest. Satan wants to be acknowledged as the ruler of the world—that is the theme—and Moses promptly challenges his claim. Moses, remembering his own high calling, questions his adversary, asking again and again: "Who art thou? For behold, I am a son of God, in the similitude of his Only Begotten; and where is thy glory, that I should worship thee?

"For behold, I could not look upon God, except his glory should come upon me. . . . But I can look upon thee in the natural man. Is it not so, surely?" (Verses 13—14.)

Note that the contest is not between God and the devil—that was never a contest. It is Moses himself who here proclaims his own advantage over Satan, as he goes on: "Where is thy glory, for it is darkness unto me? And I can judge between thee and God." (Verse 15.) In the next three verses he repeats that he shares the nature of the Only Begotten and finds Satan a fraud: "Satan, deceive me not," ending by summarily ordering him off the premises. (Verses 16—18.) These are stinging blows, for Satan has always claimed the earth as his own special precinct and the role of the Only Begotten as his exclusive vehicle. Moses' repeated reminders of his own intimacy with the Only Begotten drives the pretender into a screaming rage.

D. Casting off all pretense to his celebrated subtlety and cunning, the Adversary resorts to an all-out frontal attack, and the battle is on—the ritual combat that meets us so often in the earliest dramatic and epic literature of the race: "Satan cried with a loud voice, and rent upon the earth, and commanded, saying: I am the Only Begotten, worship me." (Verse 19.) Moses was terrified by the ferocity and passion of the attack; in fact he was quite overcome. Paralyzed with fear, "he saw the bitterness of hell." (Verse 20.) It is the well-known theme of the hero-king reduced to the last extremity, calling with his last ounce of strength out of "the bitterness of hell": "Nevertheless, calling upon God, he receives strength" (verse 20), and at the last moment is delivered.²⁹⁹

And now the tables are turned: It is the dark opponent who is down; he trembles and the earth shakes as he retreats in uproar and anguish. Here it is in order to note that the Adversary who relentlessly assails the hero in the earliest epics is none other than the "Earth-shaker," Enosichthōn.

E. Next in order, according to the established pattern, the hero, having met and survived the onslaughts of the Destroyer, should be hailed as victor and king, and this is exactly what happens in our story; God proclaims him blessed, endows him with divine strength, and declares him chosen to be the leader and deliverer of his people, his own representative on earth: "I, the Almighty, have chosen thee, and thou shalt be made stronger than many waters; . . . as if thou wert God . . . for thou shalt deliver my people." (Verses 25—26; italics added.) As we have shown elsewhere, the king must emerge victorious at the moment of passing through the waters of life, death, rebirth, and purification, and the ancients always understood Moses' leading his people through the Red Sea as the type and similitude of a baptism, symbolizing at one and the same time death, birth, victory, and purification from sins.³⁰⁰

F. In the scene that follows, Moses is shown the extent of his "kingdom," in other words, his field of labor; viewing the vast display, he is filled with wonder and asks the Epic Question: "Tell me, I pray thee, why these things are so, and by what thou madest them?" (Verse 30; italics added.) What is behind it all? Let us recall how the ancient epic poet, after stating his basic proposition in the opening lines, launches into his story by asking for revelation in the same terms: "Say first what cause moved our Grandparents in that happy state . . . to transgress. . . . Who first seduced them?" Thus Milton in Paradise Lost, borrowing from Vergil in his Aenead: Musa mihi Causas memoro, quo numine laeso, quidve dolens, and so on—why, who, how? Who borrows in turn from Homer: Ex hou de ta prōté . . . tis t'ar' sphōe theōn—for what cause, who was responsible?

G. The epic question really invites the poet himself to come onto the stage and tell his whole story. Having asked, we cannot begrudge him the long hours needed for a fullscale epic recital. In Moses' case, we are spared, for the Lord will give him "only an account of this earth" (verse 35), still with the reminder that he must never lose sight of the vast cosmic perspective that forms the background to the story and without which human history becomes a rather pointless and parochial tale.

All of that is familiar literary ground in our story's great prologue, and that with a minimum of biblical prompting. Those who wish to credit Joseph Smith with a comprehension of comparative literature and ritual far beyond his time and training are free to do so. They may even insist, as they have with the Book of Mormon, that this is the way any uneducated rustic would tell the story. Today, however, we have several very ancient and significant parallels to Moses 1, which lie far beyond the reach of coincidence or daydreaming. The number of details and the order in which they occur make it perfectly clear that we are dealing with specific works of great antiquity that come from a common source. To show what we mean, let us compare Moses', Abraham's, and Adam's confrontations with Satan; these stories themselves contain pointed references to Enoch, with whom each hero is duly compared. These accounts are not scripture, but are simply ancient records that help us understand the Enoch story.

First the Apocalypse of Abraham, an Old Slavonic account discovered in 1895 and first published by Bonwetsch in 1898.³⁰¹ K. Koch has recently ranked it as one of the five definitely authentic early Hebrew Apocalypses.³⁰² Let us place it in parallel columns against our book of Moses, chapter 1.

Moses, Chapter 1	Apocalypse of Abraham, Chapter 9 (Chapter 1 of the Apocalypse Proper)
The Setting
1:1. The words of God . . . unto Moses . . . when Moses was caught up into an exceedingly high mountain.	9:8. [Abraham, in order to receive the vision, must] "Bring me the sacrifice . . . upon a high mountain."
God Will Show Him Everything
4. I will show thee the workmanship of mine hands: but not all, for my works are without end. . . .	6. In this sacrifice I will show forth to thee the ages of the world,
5. Wherefore, no man can behold all my works, . . . and no man can behold all my glory. [See Abraham 2:12: "Thy servant has sought thee earnestly; now I have found thee."] . . .	and show thee that which is hidden. Thou shalt behold great things, which thou hast never seen before, because thou delightest to seek after me,
6. And I have a work for thee, Moses, my son. . . .	and I have called thee my friend.
8. And . . . Moses looked, and beheld the world upon which he was created . . . and all the children of men which are, and which were created. . . .	9. And I will show unto thee, the ages of the world fixed and created by my word, and show thee what is going to happen to the children of men as they shall do good or evil.
The Hero Is Helpless after the Vision
9. And the presence of God withdrew from Moses, . . . and . . . he fell unto the earth.	10:1. [Hearing a voice] I looked here and there. 2. It was not a human breath, and so my spirit was afraid, and my soul departed from me. And I became as a stone, and fell to the earth, for I had no more strength to stand;
10. And . . . it was for the space of many hours before Moses did again receive his natural strength. . . .	3. And as I lay with my face to the ground I heard the voice of the Holy One say, 4. Go, Jaoel, in the power of my name, and raise that man up! Let him recover from his trembling.
Satan Takes Advantage of His Weakness
	[Chapters 11 & 12 are a detailed description of Abraham's sacrifice, during which, in chapter 13]: 13:1. I carried out everything according to the angel's instructions . . .
12. Behold. Satan came tempting him, saying: Moses, son of man, worship me. [Italics added.]	3. Then an unclean creature with wings alighted upon the sacrificial victims . . . 4. The unclean bird said to me: What are you doing, Abraham, in this holy place . . . where . . . you yourself may perish in the fire! 5. Leave the man [angel] standing beside you and flee!
13. And . . . Moses . . . said: Who art thou? . . .	6. . . . And I asked the angel, "Who is this, my Lord?"
15. I can judge between thee and God. . . . 16. Get thee hence, Satan; deceive me not. . . .	7. He said: This is ungodliness: this is Azazel [Satan]!
Satan Put to Shame by Humiliating Contrast with the Hero
13. I am a son of God, . . . and where is thy glory, that I should worship thee?	8. . . . [Michael:] Shame upon you, Satan! 9. For Abraham's part is in heaven, and thine is upon this earth. 10. (God has placed thee upon this earth as the Adversary, to lead dishonest spirits and practice deception.)
14. For behold, I could not look upon God, except . . . I were transfigured before him. But I can look upon thee in the natural man. Is it not so, surely?	12. Listen, my friend, and I will put you to shame.
15. . . . Where is thy glory, for it is darkness unto me? And I can judge between thee and God. . . .	13. Thou hast not the power to tempt all the righteous.
16. Get thee hence, Satan; deceive me not:	14. Depart from this man! Thou canst not lead him astray, for he is thine enemy and enemy to all those who follow thee and love after thy desire.
for God said unto me: Thou art after the similitude of mine Only Begotten.	15. For behold, the garment[of glory] which once fitted you in heaven, is now laid up for him. And the decay to which he was fated now goes over to thee!
The Hero is Strengthened for the Contest
17. And he also gave me commandments . . . saying: Call upon God in the name of mine Only Begotten, and worship me.	14:3. Take heart, exercise the power that I give thee over this one, who hateth truth . . . 4. . . . who rebelled against the Almighty . . .
18. . . . I have other things to inquire of him: for his glory has been upon me, wherefore I can judge between him and thee. Depart hence, Satan.	5. Say to him: . . . Depart, Azazel . . . 6. Thy lot is to rule over those who are with thee . . . 7. Depart from me . . . 8. And I spoke as the angel instructed me.
The Hero Is Overcome but Calls Out and Is Saved
19. And . . . Satan cried with a loud voice, and ranted upon the earth, and commanded, saying: I am the Only Begotten, worship me.	9. He [Satan] spoke: Abraham! And I said: Here is thy servant.
20. And . . . Moses began to fear exceedingly; and . . . saw the bitterness of hell. Nevertheless, calling upon God, he received strength, and he commanded, saying, Depart from me, Satan. . . .	10. [But] the angel said to me: O, do not reply to him! For God has given him power over those who answer him. 11. . . . no matter how much he speaks to thee, answer him not, lest his will overpower thine. 12. For the Eternal One has given him a powerful will. Answer him not! [See Testament of Abraham (Falasha p. 100ff.), where he says to Isaac approaching the altar: "Come near, my son, so that thou mayest perceive the one . . . who frightened me and because of whom I was afraid . . . " referring to his own jeopardy on the altar.]
21. And now Satan began to tremble, and the earth shook; and Moses received strength, and called upon God, saying: In the name of the Only Begotten, depart hence, Satan.	[This detail is found in Enoch's meeting with Satan in Gizeh 13:1—3." And Enoch said to Azazel, Depart! Thou shalt have no peace, a great sentence has gone forth against thee to bind thee. 2. And there will be no further discussion or questioning with thee, because of thy dishonest and deceitful and sinful works among men."]
22. And . . . Satan cried with a loud voice, weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth; and he departed hence, even from the presence of Moses, that he beheld him not. . . .	Gizeh 13:3. Then he with departed and spoke to all of them [his followers] and they all feared, and trembling and terror seized them.
The Hero Is Borne Aloft
24. And . . . when Satan had departed . . . Moses lifted up his eyes unto heaven, being filled with the Holy Ghost. . . .	15:2. The angel in charge of the sacrifice . . . took 3. me by the right hand, and set me on the right wing of the dove while he sat on the left side.
25. And calling upon . . . God, he beheld his glory again. . . .	4. So it bore me to the limits of the flaming fire . . . then on into heaven, as if on many winds, which was fixed above the firmament.
[See 2 Nephi 4:25—"Upon the wings of his Spirit hath my body been carried away upon exceeding high mountains. And mine eyes have beheld great things, yea, even too great for man."]	Bet ha-Midrash 5:170. R. Ishmael (double for Enoch): When I went up to the mountain top . . . arriving at the seventh temple, I stood to pray before God; and I lifted up my eyes and said. . . . deliver me from Satan. And the Metratron [also Enoch!]
24. And . . . when Satan had departed from the presence of Moses, . . . Moses lifted up his eyes unto heaven, being filled with the Holy Ghost. . . .	came who [served?] the angel, even the Prince of the Presence, and spread his wings and came to meet me with great joy . . . and he took me with his hand and raised me up.
25. . . . And he heard a voice, saying: Blessed art thou, Moses, for I, the Almighty, have chosen thee, and thou shalt be made stronger than many waters; for they shall obey thy command as if thou wert God. [Here Moses is hailed as the victorious sacral king.]	17:1. And while he was speaking, fire surrounded us and a voice . . . like the voice of many waters like the raging of the sea in the surf.
27. And . . . Moses cast his eyes and beheld the earth. . . . 28. And he beheld also the inhabitants thereof, and there was not a soul which he beheld not . . . and their numbers were great, even numberless.	15:6. And I saw . . . a mighty light . . . and in the light a mighty fire in which was a host, even a great host of mighty beings [forms] constantly changing shape and appearance, moving, changing, praying, and uttering words I could not understand.
He Is Shown the Field of His Mission
In the "Testamentary" literature, each Patriarch takes a journey to heaven and is given a view of the entire earth, an account of which then becomes an integral part of his missionary message upon his return. (Compare 1 Nephi 1:4—15; Abraham 3:15; Moses 1:40.)
27. As the voice was still speaking, Moses cast his eyes and beheld the earth, yea, even all of it; and there was not a particle of it which he did not behold. . . .	21:1. He said to me: Look beneath thy feet upon the Firmament. Recognize at that level the creation there presented, the creatures that are in it, and the world that has been prepared for them.
28. And he beheld also the inhabitants thereof, and there was not a soul which he beheld not, . . . and their numbers were great, even numberless as the sand upon the sea shore.	2. And I looked down, and behold . . . the earth and her fruits, and all that moves upon her . . . and the power of her people . . . 3. the lower regions . . . the pit and its torments . . .
29. And he beheld many lands; and each land was called earth, and there were inhabitants on the face thereof.	4. I saw there the sea and its islands, the beasts, its fishes, leviathan and his sphere . . . 5. the streams of water, their sources and their courses . . .
	9. I saw there a mighty host of men, women, and children half of them on the right side of the picture and half on the left.
Confrontation with God
31. And . . . the glory of the Lord was upon Moses, so that Moses stood in the presence of God, and talked with him face to face. . . .	16:1. I said to the angel: . . . I can see nothing. I have become weak, my spirit leaves me! 2. He said to me: Stay with me; be not afraid. He whom thou now beholdest coming towards us . . . is the Eternal One, who loves thee. 3. But He himself you do not see . . . 4. But do not be overcome, I am with you to strengthen you.
30. And it came to pass that Moses called upon God. . . .	17:5. So I continued to pray . . . 6. He said: Speak without ceasing! 7—10. [Abraham calls upon God naming his attributes.] 11. Eli, meaning My God . . . El! El! El! El Jaoel!
33. And worlds without number have I created; and I also created them for mine own purpose. . . .	13. Thou who bringest order into the unorganized universe, even the chaos which in the perishable world goes forth from good and evil.
38. And as one earth shall pass away, . . . even so shall another come; and there is no end to my works, neither to my words.	Thou who renewest the World of the righteous. 14. O light, that shone upon thy creatures before the morning light . . .
The Epic Question and Answer
30. And . . . Moses called upon God, saying: Tell me, pray thee, why these things are so, and by what thou madest them? [Italics added. Compare Abraham 1:2." I sought for the blessings of the fathers, . . . desiring also . . . to possess a greater knowledge."]	16. Hear my prayers! I 17. Look with favor upon me: Show me, teach me. Give thy servant all that which thou hast promised him. 26:1. . . . Eternal, Mighty, Only One! Why hast thou so arranged things, that it should be so?
31. . . . And the Lord God said unto Moses: For mine own purpose have I made these things. Here is wisdom and it remaineth in me.	26:5. . . . As thine own father's [Terah's] will is in him, and as thine own will is in thee, so the resolves of mine own will are set in me for all the future, before you knew there even was such a thing . . .
33. And worlds without number have I created; and I also created them for mine own purpose. . . .	19:3. . . . Look upon the places beneath the firmament, upon which thou standest[Compare this formula in Abraham 3:3, 4, 5, 7, etc.!]
35. But only an account of this earth, and the inhabitants thereof, give I unto you. For behold, there are many worlds . . . that now stand, . . . but all things are numbered unto me, for they are mine and I know them.	Behold there is not a single place nor any spot at all but what is occupied by Him whom thou seekest. . . . 4. As he spoke the place opened up and beneath me there was heaven. 5. And upon the seventh Firmament on which I stood I saw . . . the splendor of invisible glory investing all living beings.
Left Alone a Second Time
9. And the presence of God withdrew from Moses, that his glory was not upon Moses; and Moses was left unto himself. And as he was left unto himself, he fell unto the earth.	30:1. And as he was still speaking I found myself upon the earth. 2. I spoke: Eternal, Mighty, Only One! 3. Behold I am no longer in the glory in which I was above! And what my heart sought to know I did not understand.
[Abraham 2:12: "Now, after the Lord had withdrawn from speaking to me, and
withdrawn his face from me, said in my heart: Thy servant has sought thee earnestly; now I have found thee."]	I 4. And he said to me: What in thy heart thou didst so desire, that I will tell thee, because thou hast sought diligently to behold, etc.

These parallel accounts, separated by centuries, cannot be coincidence. Nor can all the others. The first man to have such a confrontation with Satan was Adam. A wealth of stories about it closely matches the accounts of Abraham, Moses, Enoch, and other heroes. Perhaps the oldest Adam traditions are those collected from all over the ancient East at a very early time, which have reached us in later Ethiopian and Arabic manuscripts under the title of "The Combat of Adam and Eve against Satan."³⁰³ It contains at least thirteen different showdowns between Adam and the Adversary, of which we present a few of the most striking. Since the motif was characteristically repeated with variations (the monkish mind could not resist the temptation to work a good thing to death), it will be necessary to repeat some passages from the book of Moses.

Moses, Chapter 1	Combat of Adam and Eve (Direct quotations from the documents are indicated with quotation marks)
9. And the presence of God withdrew from Moses, that his glory was not upon Moses; and Moses was left unto himself. . . . He fell unto the earth.	Pp. 297—98. Leaving the glorious garden, they (Adam and Eve) were seized with fear and "they fell down upon the earth and remained as if dead."
10. And it came to pass that it was for the space of many hours before Moses did again receive his natural strength like unto man; and he said unto himself: Now, for this cause I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed.	P. 299. While Adam was still in that condition, Eve, stretching high her hands, prayed: "O Lord . . . thy servant has fallen from the Garden" and is banished to a desert place. (Genesis 3:18f.)
11. But now mine own eyes have beheld God; but not my natural, but my spiritual eyes, for my natural eyes could not have beheld; for I should have withered and died in his presence; but his glory was upon me; and I beheld his face, for I was transfigured before him.	P. 299. They say: "Today our eyes having become terrestrial can no longer behold the things they once did."
12. And it came to pass that when Moses had said these words, behold, Satan came tempting him, saying: Moses, son of man, worship me.	P. 306. Satan, seeing them at prayer, appears to them in a great light and sets up his throne on the site, thus claiming the earth as his kingdom while his followers sing hymns in his praise.
13. And it came to pass that Moses looked upon Satan and said: Who art thou? For behold, I am a son of God, in the similitude of his Only Begotten; and where is thy glory, that I should worship thee?	P. 307. Adam, puzzled, prays for light, asking: Can this be another God here hailed by his angels? An angel of the Lord arrives and says: "Fear not, Adam, what you see is Satan and his companions who wish to seduce you again. First he appeared to you as a serpent and now he wants you to worship him so he can draw you after him away from God."
15—18. . . . Where is thy glory, for it is darkness unto me? . . . Get thee hence, Satan; deceive me not; . . . I can judge between thee and God. Depart hence, Satan.	Then the angel exposed and humiliated Satan in Adam's presence and cast him out saying to Adam:
13. I am a son of God. . . . 14. . . . I could not look upon God, except . . . I were transfigured before him. [See verse 20: "Calling upon God, he received strength."]	"Fear not: God who created you will strengthen you!"
	Pp. 307—8. The next morning as Adam prayed with upraised hands, Satan appeared to him, saying, "Adam, I am an angel of the great God. The Lord has sent me to you." It was his plan to kill Adam and thus "remain sole master and possessor of the earth." But God sent three heavenly messengers to Adam bringing him the signs of the priesthood and kingship. P. 309. And Adam wept because they reminded him of his departed glory, but God said they were signs of the atonement to come, whereupon Adam rejoiced. Pp. 323—24. After a forty- day fast Adam and Eve were very weak, stretched out upon
12. . . . Satan came tempting him, saying: Moses, son of man, worship me. 19. . . . I am the Only Begotten, worship me.	the floor of the cave as if dead, but still praying. Satan then came, clothed in light speaking sweet words to deceive them saying, "I am the first created of God. . . . Now God has commanded me to lead you to my habitation . . . to be restored to your former glory."
	P. 325. But God knew that he planned to lead them to far- away places and destroy them. Adam said, Who was this
13. . . . Moses looked upon Satan and said: Who art thou?	glorious old man who came to us? Answer: He is Satan in human form come to deceive you by giving you signs to prove his bonafides but I have cast him out.
	P. 326. Adam and Eve, still weak from fasting and still praying, are again confronted by Satan, who, being rebuffed,
21. Now Satan began to tremble. . . . 22. And it came to pass that Satan cried with a loud voice, with weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth; and he departed hence.	"is sore afflicted" and weeping and wailing says, "'God has wrecked my scheme . . . he has rendered worthless the plan which I contrived against his servants.' And he retired in confusion."
18. . . . I have other things is this? to inquire of [God]: for his glory has been upon me, wherefore I can judge between him and thee. Depart hence, Satan.	P. 327. Adam asked, Why Answer: "God wanted to show you the weakness of Satan and his evil intentions for since the day you left the Garden he has not let a day pass without trying to harm you, but I have not let him have the victory over you." [Adam thus learned to distinguish between good and evil.]
5:6. And after many days an angel of the Lord appeared unto Adam, saying: Why dost thou offer sacrifices unto the Lord? and Adam said unto him: I know not, save the Lord commanded me.	P. 329. Again Adam and Eve were sacrificing with upraised arms in prayer, asking God to accept their sacrifice and forgive their sins. "And the Lord said to Adam and Eve: As you have made
7. And then the angel spake, saying: This thing is a similitude of the sacrifice of the Only Begotten of the Father, which is full of grace and truth. 9. . . . As thou hast fallen thou mayest be redeemed, and all mankind, even as many as will.	this sacrifice to me, so I will make an offering of my flesh when I come to earth, and so save you. . . . And God ordered an angel to take tongs and receive the sacrifice of Adam."
10. . . . Adam . . . was filled, . . . saying: . . . In this life I shall have joy, and again in the flesh I shall see God.	At this Adam and Eve rejoiced. God said: When the terms of my covenant are fulfilled, I will again receive you into my Garden and my Grace. So Adam continued to make this sacrifice for the rest of his days. And God caused his word to be preached to Adam. P. 330. On the fiftieth day, Adam, offering sacrifice as was his custom, Satan appeared in the form of a man and smote
1:20. Moses began to fear exceedingly; and as he began to fear, he saw the bitterness of hell. Nevertheless, calling upon God, he received strength. [See Book of Abraham, Facsimile No. 1!] 5:7. This thing is a similitude of the sacrifice of the Only Begotten of the Father, which is full of grace and truth.	him in the side with a sharp stone even as Adam raised his arms in prayer. Eve tried to help him as blood and water flowed on the altar. "God . . . sent his word and revived Adam saying: 'Finish thy sacrifice, which is most pleasing to me. For even so will I be wounded and blood and water will come from my side; that will be the true Sacrifice, placed on the altar as a perfect offering.' . . . And so God healed Adam."

Surprisingly enough, the best documented story of a clash between Adam and Satan is the scene in heaven. One old writing with unusually good credentials that trace back to books deposited by the apostles in the archives of the early church in Jerusalem is the Coptic "Discourse of the Abbaton, a sermon based on the text delivered by Timothy the Archbishop of Alexandria." ³⁰⁴

The book belongs to the forty-day literature; and as it opens, the Lord on his last day on earth with the apostles just before his ascension asks them if there is any final request they would like to make of him—exactly as in 3 Nephi 28:1. What they want most is to understand the role of death and its horrors in God's plan for his children.³⁰⁵ To explain this the Lord tells them of the council in heaven in the preexistence where the plan of the creation is being discussed. There was great reluctance among the hosts to proceed with the creation of the earth, the earth itself complaining, exactly in the manner of Moses 7:48, of the filthiness and corruption that would surely go out of her and begging to be allowed to rest from such horrors. (Fol. 10a—b.) Because of the council's reluctance to proceed, God allows the lifeless body of Adam to lie upon the earth for forty days, unwilling, without the council's approval, to let his spirit enter. (11b.) The Son of God saves the day by offering to pay the price for whatever suffering will be entailed, thus permitting "God's children to return again to their former condition." (12a.) Christ alone thus becomes the author of our earthly existence; amid joy and rejoicing God calls for a book, in which he registers the names of all the "Sons of God" who are to go to earth. (See Genesis 5:1ff; Fol. 12b.) This of course is the heavenly book of the generations of Adam opened at the foundation of the earth, the book to which Enoch refers so explicitly in Moses 6:46, 8.

In the presence of all the hosts, Adam is next made ready to take over his great assignment. He is placed on a throne and given a crown of glory and a scepter, and all the sons of God bow the knee first to God the Father and then to Adam the Father in recognition of his being in God's exact likeness and image. (13a.) Satan, however, refuses to comply, declaring that he is willing to worship the Father but not Adam: "It is rather he that should worship me for I arrived before he did!" (13a—b.) (See Moses 1:19: "I am the Only Begotten, worship me.") God saw that Satan, because of his boundless ambition and total lack of humility, could no longer be trusted with celestial power and commanded the angels to remove him from his office. This ordinance they performed with great sorrow and reluctance: They "removed the writing of authority from his hand. They took from him his armor and all the insignia of priesthood and kingship." Then with a ceremonial knife, a sickle, they inflicted upon him certain ceremonial blows of death which deprived him of his full strength forever after. (14a.) Other accounts say that after these cuts he retained only one-third of his former power, even as he was followed by one-third of the hosts.

Next Adam was escorted to earth to enter his mortal body, and for a hundred years thereafter he was often visited by angels. (14b.) Thereafter, for two hundred years he lived happily in innocence with Eve, taking good care of the animals in his charge. Eventually Satan succeeded in getting possession of a mortal creature, which enabled him to carry on an extensive campaign aimed at Eve. (16a—17a.) Adam was greatly upset; but when Eve, the victim of a trick, took all responsibility, he joined her. (17b.)

Satan stopped Adam outside of the Garden and gloatingly told him that this was his sweet revenge for Adam's victory in heaven: Adam had got him expelled from heaven and now he had paid him in kind; what was more, he intended to continue his project—"I will never cease to contend against thee and against all those who shall come after thee from out of thee, until I have taken them all down to perdition!" (21a—b.) With the threat of death before him, Adam saw the bitterness of hell (19a, 21b), but calling upon God he received not only the assurance of salvation for the dead through the atonement of Christ (20b), but was told that death shall be sweet to those whose names are in the Book of Life (24a—b). Fear of death (the angel Mouriel) is wholesome and necessary to remind the human race of its fragility and constant need of repentance. This has the salutary effect of countering Satan's plan by providing a constant check on the tendencies of men to misbehave, a sobering and, if necessary, frightening lesson.

What comes after the showdown between our first parents and the Adversary? Our sources obligingly go right on with the story and follow Satan from his attempts to win Adam's obedience to his highly successful interviews with Cain, tracing the steady spread of wickedness among mankind down to its culmination in the days of Enoch. There is no better summary of the story than that given in the book of Moses, which is surprisingly close to the "Combat of Adam" version on every point. Let us briefly survey events leading up to the call of Enoch, as given in the Joseph Smith account.

Having been instructed by an angel of the Lord, Adam and Eve enjoyed a fulness of the gospel, "and they made all things known unto their sons and their daughters." (See Moses 5:1—2.) Enter Satan, the negative one, with his nongospel: "Believe it not!" and his countergospel: "I am also a son of God." (Moses 5:13.) He gains a following by pushing downhill, in the direction of what is "carnal, sensual, and devilish." (Moses 5:13.) This called for much preaching of repentance (Moses 5:14—15), as Adam and Eve remained true and faithful, and "ceased not to call upon God" (Moses 5:16). Into this world was born Cain, who rejected his parents' teachings as irrational—"Who is the Lord that I should know him?" (Moses 5:16.) The Lord gave Cain every chance to be wise and save himself, showing him in all reasonableness the dangerous course he was taking, and warning him that he would be in Satan's power to the degree that he refused obedience: "And thou shalt rule over him." (Moses 5:23; see also Genesis 4:7.) Cain rule over Satan? Yes, that is the arrangement—the devil serves his client, gratifies his slightest whim, pampers his appetites, and is at his beck and call throughout his earthly life, putting unlimited power and influence at his disposal through his command of the treasures of the earth, gold and silver. But in exchange the victim must keep his part of the agreement, following Satan's instructions on earth and remaining in his power thereafter. That is the classic bargain, the pact with the devil, by which a Faust, Don Juan, Macbeth, or Jabez Stone achieve the pinnacle of earthly success and the depths of eternal damnation.

The Lord held forth the fatherly invitation to Cain: "If thou doest well, thou shalt be accepted," along with the solemn warning, "Satan desireth to have thee." (Moses 5:23; see also Genesis 4:7.) He is admonished against the folly of "reject[ing] the greater counsel" (Moses 5:25), and the door of repentance is held open right to the last moment, when it is Cain himself who breaks off the conversation and angrily stamps out, refusing to listen "any more to the voice of the Lord" or to his brother's remonstrances (Moses 5:26). Cain married "one of his brother's daughters" not necessarily Abel's), and together "they loved Satan more than God" (Moses 5:28), quite satisfied with their religion and quite defiant about it.

What could one do in such a situation? Nothing: "Adam and his wife mourned before the Lord, because of Cain and his brethren." (Moses 5:27.) Having deliberately severed all connection with his Heavenly Father, Cain was free to enter a formal agreement with Satan, by which he would receive instruction in the techniques of achieving power and gain: "Truly I am Mahan, the master of this great secret [The language is that of ancient colleges or guilds where the secret is the mystery of the trade or profession; in this case, his secret is how to convert life into property], that I may murder and get gain." (Moses 5:31; see also Moses 5:49.) Cain "gloried" in the power of his new-found skill and dialectic, declaring that it made him "free." (Moses 5:33.) He put his knowledge to work in a brilliantly successful operation in which "Abel . . . was slain by the conspiracy of his brother" (D&C 84:16), and gleefully congratulated himself and "gloried in that which he had done, saying: I am free; surely the flocks of my brother falleth into my hands." (Moses 5:33; italics added.) This new light on Cain's behavior is confirmed in the Combat of Adam and Eve, where we learn that, after killing Abel, Cain "felt no inclination to repent of what he had done," a detail pointed out also by some of the early church fathers.³⁰⁶

Plainly this is not the conventional novel of Cain and Abel, in which an impetuous adolescent loses his head and brains his spoiled brother in a fit of jealousy; it is a carefully planned and executed operation in which Cain slew "his brother Abel, for the sake of getting gain" (Moses 5:50), dismissing his conscience with the thought that all was fair and square since Abel was quite capable of taking care of himself: "Am I my brother's keeper?" (Moses 5:34). This was the philosophy by which Satan seduced the human race, teaching them that "every man fared in this life according to the management of the creature; therefore every man prospered according to his genius, and that every man conquered according to his strength; and whatsoever a man did was no crime." (Alma 30:17.) When God took a different view and called him to account, he still pleaded the profit motive as an excuse: "Satan tempted me because of my brother's flocks." (Moses 5:38.) Being "shut out from the presence of the Lord" (Moses 5:41), Cain started his own establishment, the main line of his descendants being Enoch (who built a city of Enoch), Irad, Mahujael, Methusael, Lamech the father of Jubal and Tubal Cain. (Moses 5:42—46.) Lamech like Cain "entered into a covenant with Satan," and like him "became Master Mahan." (Moses 5:49; italics added.) When Lamech heard that Irad the son of Enoch was violating the secrecy of these terrible things, he "slew him for the oath's sake" (Moses 5:50), since "Irad began to reveal . . . unto the [other] sons of Adam" these top-secret signs of recognition (Moses 5:49). All those who covenanted with Satan were excluded from the holy covenants of God, though they pretended that everything was the same as before. The dirty business spread as such things do once started; Lamech became an outcast like Cain, not because of the murder but because his wives started spreading his secrets—the very ones he had murdered Irad for divulging. "And thus the works of darkness began to prevail among all the sons of men. And God cursed the earth with a sore curse." (Moses 5:55—56.)

Is there no relief in the terrible picture? There is: all this time the gospel was "being declared by holy angels . . . and by the gift of the Holy Ghost" (Moses 5:58), while "all things were confirmed unto Adam, by an holy ordinance," in the assurance that "the Gospel . . . should be in the world, until the end thereof" (Moses 5:59). Adam, having lost Abel, got another son, Seth, to carry on his work. (Moses 6:2.) From him comes that line of successors in the priesthood, duly registered in the Book of Life, from which the wicked were excluded. (Moses 2:5—8.) After Seth came Enos, who decided to make an important move. Since "in those days Satan had great dominion among men, and raged in their hearts," causing "wars and bloodshed . . . in administering death, because of secret works, seeking for power" (Moses 6:15)—exactly as in the modern world—Enos gathered "the residue of the people of God" and with them migrated out of the country "and dwelt in a land of promise," named Cainan after his son (Moses 6:17). The line is Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, and Noah. (Moses 6:16—21; 8:2, 5—11.)

In The Combat of Adam and Eve, as Migne observes, "the author depicts the descendants of Adam as divided into two separate and distinct branches: the Cainites dedicated to following Satan, who lived in a fertile country but very far distant from Eden, and who devoted themselves to all the pleasures of the flesh and all manner of immorality," and the Sethites who "dwelt in the mountains near the Garden, were faithful to the divine law and bore the name of the Sons of God."

The occurrence of like names in the two genealogies should not surprise anyone who does much genealogy, where the same family names keep turning up in an endless round. The thing to notice is that there are two lines and that Enoch is seen as a stranger and a wild man only when he leaves his native colony in Cainan, "a land of righteousness unto this day" (Moses 6:41), to sojourn as a missionary among the wayward tribes. And so the stage is set for Enoch.

NOTES

"A Strange Thing in the Land: The Return of the Book of Enoch" first appeared in the Ensign from October 1975 to August 1977.

1.   The book of Moses, heading to chapter 1.

2.   Joseph Smith, History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, B.H. Roberts, ed. (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1902) 1:133.

3.   Pearl of Great Price: Being a Choice Selection from the Revelations, Translations, and Narrations of Joseph Smith (Liverpool: F.D. Richards, 1851), p. 1.

4.   Smith, History 1:139.

5.   Ibid., 1:135—36.

6.   Ibid., 1:131—33.

7.   R.H. Charles, The Book of Enoch (London: Oxford University Press, 1913), p. ix, n 1. Compare his Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912) 2:163, where he maintains that "some of its authors . . . belong to the true succession of the prophets, . . . exhibiting on occasions the inspiration of the O.T. prophets."

8.   Charles, Book of Enoch, pp. xcv—ciii, indicates that many "passages of the New Testament . . . either in phraseology or idea directly depend on or are illustrative of passages in 1 Enoch." "In the New Testament," according to a current Encyclopaedia Britannica, 24 vols. (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1973) 8:604, "Enoch himself is mentioned in Luke iii:37; Heb. xi:5; and Jude 14, while there is reference to him in Jude 4—15, Matt. 19:28, 26:24, Luke 16:9, John 5:22, 1 Thess. 5:3, 1 Pet. 3:19ff., and Revelation.

9.   Charles, Book of Enoch, p. xcv.

10.   Ibid., pp. xii—xiii.

11.   Ibid., pp. lxx—lxxix for the Jewish sources, pp. lxxxi—xci for the Christian.

12.   Carl Schmidt, ed., Pistis Sophia, trans. by Violet MacDermot (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1978), p. 247.

13.   Ibid., p. 349.

14.   Eugenio Zolli, "Henoch," in Enciclopedia Cattolica, 12 vols. (Città del Vaticano: Ente per l'Enciclopedia Cattolica per il Libro Cattolico, 1951), 6:1405.

15.   Charles, Book of Enoch, p. x; it was second only in influence to the canonical Daniel, Klaus Koch, Ratlos vor der Apokalyptik (Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1970), pp. 19—20.

16.   Adolf Jellinek, Bet ha-Midrash, 6 vols. (Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books, 1967) 2:xxx. Hereafter cited as BHM.

17.   Ibid. For a list of Enoch citations in Cabalistic writers, see Isaac Myer, Qabbalah (Philadelphia: Isaac Myer, 1888), p. 167.

18.   "So far only two Aramaic fragments have been published. . . . In view of this important discovery it might seem premature to publish a Greek text before the publication of these fragments. . . . Unfortunately this has not proved to be possible; and the prolonged delay . . . of the Aramaic Enoch and latterly the confused situation with regard to the custody of the Aramaic mss., make any further postponement of this provisional Greek edition inadvisable." (Matthew Black, Apocalypsis Henochi Graece [Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1970], p. 7.)

19.   Adolf Jellinek, "Hebräische Quellen für das Buch Henoch," Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft 7 (1853): 249.

20.   Charles, Book of Enoch, p. ix.

21.   C.C. Torrey, The Apocryphal Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1945), p. 27.

22.   St. Augustine, City of God 15:23.

23.   Hans-Friedrich Weiss, Untersuchungen zur Kosmologie des hellenistischen und palästinischen Judentums (Berlin: Akadamie-Verlag, 1966), p. 119.

24.   H. Leclerq, "Henoch," in F. Cabrol and H. Leclerq, Dictionnaire d'Archéologie Chretiénne et de Liturgie, 15 vols. (Paris, Librairie Letouzey et Ane, 1925) 6:2245—46.

25.   Charles, Book of Enoch, p. ciii.

26.   This attitude is illustrated in the author's "Christian Envy of the Temple," in Jewish Quarterly Review 50 (1959): 99ff.

27.   In his work Peri Archon, 1:iii:3 (J.-P. Migne, Patrologiae Graecae, Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1857, hereafter cited as P.G.) 11:147—48 and 4:35 (P.G.11:409), Origen appeals to "The Book of Enoch" to support his theories of the creation, but when Celsus quotes Enoch he objects: "Even less should things be taken seriously which Celsus seems to have picked up and misunderstood from the Book of Enoch." (Contra Celsum 5:54; P.G. 11:1265.) He says things are "very much mixed up" and "in the churches not taken very seriously as Scripture (divine)," since they contain "matter not preached (uttered) nor heard in the churches of God," which nobody would be foolish enough to take literally. (Contra Celsum, P.G., 11:1268—69.)

28.   A.J. Maas, "Henoch," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, 15 vols. (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910) 7:218.

29.   J. Plastaras, "Henoch," in New Catholic Encyclopedia, 17 vols. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1967) 6:1019.

30.   Michael E. Stone, "Judaism at the Time of Christ," Scientific American 228 (January 1973): 80—82.

31.   The Syncellus fragment, from his Chronographia 1:47, found in Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae 41, ed. Wilhelm Dindorf (Bonn: Weberi, 1829), is also reproduced in appendix 1 of Charles, Book of Enoch, p. 305. Reference to this was made by Georgius Cedrenus, circa A.D. 1100 in his Compendium Historiarum 1:17 in Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae 4, ed. I. Bekker, 1838. See also P.G. 121:41, 44—45, 476.

32.   G.B., "Livre d'Henoch," in J.-P. Migne, Dictionnaire des Apocryphes, 2 vols. (Paris: Migne, 1856), 1:396, in Troisième et Dernière Encyclopédie Théologique, Tomes 23 and 24. Hereafter cited as Dictionnaire

33.   G.B., "Livre d'Henoch," in Migne, Dictionnaire, 1:397. It is quoted by Peter Alphonsus, and is simply a Latinized rendering of the well-known Moslem merchant's creed: Al-kāsib ḥabīb ullāh!

34.   Nathaniel Schmidt, "Traces of the Early Acquaintance in Europe with the Book of Enoch," Journal of the American Oriental Society 42 (1922): 45.

35.   Ibid., p. 47.

36.   Ibid., p. 47.

37.   Ibid., p. 46.

38.   John McClintock, "Enoch, Book of," in Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, 12 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1870) 3:225.

39.   See author's discussion in Since Cumorah: The Book of Mormon in the Modern World (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1970), pp. 32—35.

40.   James Strachan, "Enoch," in Dictionary of the Apostolic Church, ed. James Hastings, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916), 1:334.

41.   Schmidt, Book of Enoch, p. 50, placing Postel's meeting with the priest around 1536.

42.   Ibid.

43.   "Livre d'Henoch," in Migne, Dictionnaire 1:399.

44.   Schmidt, Book of Enoch, p. 51.

45.   Michael Stuart, "Christology of the Book of Enoch," The American Biblical Repository, 2nd Series, 3 (January 1840): 88.

46.   Schmidt, Book of Enoch, p. 51.

47.   Ibid., pp. 51—52.

48.   Ibid., p. 52.

49.   "Livre d'Henoch," in Migne, Dictionnaire 1:400. However, in 1736, Johann Albert Fabricius in his Codex Pseudepigraphus Veteris Testamenti, 2 vols. (Hamburg: T.C. Felginer, 1722), 1:22, gathered and reproduced all available passages from the church fathers concerning Enoch ("Livre d'Henoch," in Migne, Dictionnaire 1:399).

50.   McClintock, "Enoch, Book of," 3:225.

51.   Stuart, "Christology," 3:89.

52.   Schmidt, Book of Enoch, p. 52.

53.   Stuart, "Christology," 3:89. Among Bruce's treasures was the Codex Brucianus 96, a long Coptic Christian work which is strongly influenced throughout by the Enoch tradition.

54.   Ibid., 3:89.

55.   J.E.H. Thomson, "Apocalyptic Literature," in James Orr, ed., The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia 5 vols. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1939), 1:164.

56.   McClintock, "Book of Enoch," 3:225.

57.   Thomson, "Apocalyptic Literature," 1:164.

58.   "Livre d'Henoch," in Migne, Dictionnaire 1:400.

59.   "Livre d'Henoch," in Migne, Dictionnaire 1:394, 403. De Sacy's work appeared in the Magasin encyclopédique, ann. 6, 1:382, and included chapters 1—3, 11—16, 22, and 32, all from the Paris manuscript.

60.   Richard Laurence, "A Charge Delivered at the Triennial Visitation of the Province of Munster, in the Year 1826," editorial in The British Critic, Quarterly Theological Review, and Ecclesiastical Record, Series 4, 2 (1826): 162, 131—33, 160—62, pursuing Laurence with relentless fury.

61.   Ibid., p. 163.

62.   Ibid., pp. 165—66.

63.   Stuart, "Christology," 3:90.

64.   "Livre d'Henoch," in Migne, Dictionnaire 1:400—401.

65.   S. De Sacy, in Journal des Savants (October 1822), pp. 545—51, 587—95.

66.   Andreas Gottlieb Hoffmann, Das buch Henoch in vollständiger uebersetzung mit fortlaufendem commentar, ausführlicher einleitung und erläuternden excursen, 2 vols. (962 pages), (Jena: Croeker, 1833—38). R. H. Charles ignores this item in his list of translations, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha 2:186.

67.   "Livre d'Henoch," in Migne, Dictionnaire 1:393—394. A. F. Gfroerer was director of the Stuttgart Library.

68.   "Livre d'Henoch," in Migne, Dictionnaire 1:394.

69.   This translation of the Book of Enoch is contained in "Livre d'Henoch," Migne, Dictionnaire 1:425—514.

70.   Fraser's Magazine 48 (November, 1833) contains a review of the second edition of Laurence's Enoch. Recently there has been available in bookstores The Book of Enoch the Prophet, "Literally Translated from the Ethiopic" by Richard Laurence, LL.D. A reprint from an edition edited, with variations, and published by John Thomson, Glasgow, 1882"; 1966 edition, Seattle, Washington. The text differs from the recent reprint, The Book of Enoch the Prophet (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co., 1883).

71.   They were Edward Murray, Enoch Restitutus, or "an Attempt to separate from the books of Enoch, the book quoted by Saint Jude"; D. M. Butt, The Genuiness of the Book of Enoch Investigated; John Overton, An Inquiry into the Truth and Use of Enoch . . . (1822). The neglect of these writings is noted in "Livre d'Henoch," Migne, Dictionnaire, 1:398.

72.   Stuart, "Christology," 3:90.

73.   Thomson, "Apocalyptic Literature," 1:164.

74.   Stuart, "Christology," 3:89.

75.   Schmidt, Book of Enoch, p. 47.

76.   Algernon Herbert, Nimrod (London: Printed for R. Priestey, 1828) 1:36.

77.   George H. Schodde, The Book of Enoch Translated from the Ethiopic with Introduction and Notes (Andover: Warren F. Draper, 1882).

78.   Michael Stuart, "Future Punishment, as Exhibited in the Book of Enoch," The American Biblical Repository, 2nd series, 4 (July 1840): 10.

79.   Ibid., 4:11.

80.   Stuart, "Christology," 3:130.

81.   Ibid., 3:129.

82.   Glaire & Walsh, eds., "Enoch," in Encyclopédie Catholique, 18 vols. (Paris: Parent Desbarres, 1846), 11:214—15.

83.   J. B. Frey, "Apocryphes de l'Ancien Testament," in L. Pirot, ed., Dictionnaire de la Bible, Supplement (Paris: Librarie Letouzey et Ane, 1928) 1:369.

84.   K. Koch, Ratlos, pp. 7—9.

85.   C. P. Van Andel, De Structuur van de Henoch-Traditie en het Nieuwe Testament (Utrecht: H. Kemink & Son, 1955), p. 1.

86.   Michael E. Stone, "Judaism at the Time of Christ," Scientific American 228 (January 1973): 80—82.

87.   Geo Widengren, The Gnostic Attitude, trans. and ed. Birger A. Pearson, (Santa Barbara: Institute of Religious Studies, 1973), pp. 41—45.

88.   E. M. Sowerby, Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 5 vols. (Washington: Library of Congress, 1959) 5:vii.

89.   Ibid., 1:1.

90.   Stuart, "Christology," 3:91; italics added.

91.   Ibid., 3:92—93.

92.   Ibid., 3:102.

93.   Ibid., 3:103.

94.   Parley P. Pratt, "The Apocryphal Book of Enoch," Millennial Star 1 (July 1840): 61.

95.   Ibid., pp. 62—63.

96.   Campbell Bonner, The Last Chapters of Enoch in Greek (London: Christophers, 1937), p. 3.

97.   A. L. Davies, "Enoch, Book of," in Hastings, ed., Dictionary of the Apostolic Church 1:334. See also note 40.

98.   O. Plöger, "Henochbücher," Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1959), p. 222.

99.   Charles, Book of Enoch, p. xxiv; one important manuscript dates "possibly as early as the 15th century," p. xxiii, and another from the 18th century, p. xxii.

100.   Plöger, "Henochbücher," p. 222.

101.   Ibid., p. 223—24.

102.   Bonner, Last Chapters, p. 22.

103.   Ibid., p. 24.

104.   Van Andel, Structuur, p. 7.

105.   Charles, Book of Enoch, pp. xxiv—xxv.

106.   Ibid., p. xxvi.

107.   Samuel Terrien, "Enoch, Books of," in Encyclopedia Americana, 30 vols. (1970), 10:395.

108.   Plöger, "Henochbücher," p. 224.

109.   Terrien, "Enoch, Books of," 10:395.

110.   Weiss, Untersuchungen zur Kosmologie, p. 126. See also O. Eissfeldt, Einleitung in das Alte Testament (Tübingen: Mohr, 19642), p. 843.

111.   Emmanuele da San Marco, "Henoch, Libro di," in Enciclopedia Cattolica, 12 vols. (Città del Vaticano: Ente per l'Enciclopedia Cattolicae per il Libro Cattolico, 1951), 6:1407.

112.   David Winston, "The Iranian Component in the Bible Apocrypha, and Qumran," History of Religions 5 (Winter 1966): 197.

113.   Terrien, "Enoch, Books of," 10:395.

114.   Andre Vaillant, Le Livre des Secrets d'Henoch (University of Paris: Institut d'Etudes Slaves, 1952), p. iii.

115.   Ibid., p. iv.

116.   Ibid., p. i.

117.   Ibid., p. i.

118.   Ibid., p. v.

119.   Ibid., p. viii.

120.   Ibid., p. xi.

121.   Ibid., p. xxii.

122.   Ibid., p. xxiii.

123.   Charles, Book of Enoch, p. xcvff.

124.   Vaillant, Secrets d'Henoch, p. viii.

125.   Terrien, "Enoch, Books of," 10:394.

126.   Charles, Book of Enoch, p. xvii.

127.   Bonner, Last Chapters, p. 3.

128.   Ibid., p. 4.

129.   Ibid., pp. 12—13.

130.   Sir Frederic G. Kenyon, The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri (London: Emery Walker, 1933—41) 8:12.

131.   Bonner, Last Chapters, p. 17.

132.   Kenyon, Beatty Biblical Papyri 8:5—7.

133.   Van Andel, Structuur, p. 3.

134.   Ibid., p. 4.

135.   Schmidt, Book of Enoch, p. 44.

136.   Ibid., pp. 44—45.

137.   Charles, Book of Enoch, pp. lxx—lxxix.

138.   Marc Philonenko, "Une Citation Manichéenne du Livre d'Hénoch," Revue d'Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuses 52 (1972): 337—40. 341

39.   Black, Apocalypsis Henochi.

140.   Ibid.

141.   BHM 2:xxx.

142.   McClintock, "Enoch, Book of," 3:228.

143.   Jellinek, "Hebräische Quellen," p. 249.

144.   BHM 2:xxx—xxxii.

145.   BHM 3:vii, 83—102.

146.   BHM 4:xi—xii, 129—132.

147.   BHM 5:xli; Frg. XXIV, pp. 170—90.

148.   Pierre Batiffol, "Apocalypses Apocryphes," in F. Vigouroux, ed., Dictionnaire de la Bible, 5 vols. (Paris: Letouzey and Ane, 1895—1912), 1:757.

149.   Frey, "Apocryphes," 1:357.

150.   Schmidt, Book of Enoch, p. 47.

151.   Ibid., p. 45.

152.   Jellinek, "Hebräische Quellen," p. 249.

153.   J. T. Milik, "Prière du Nabonide et autres écrits d'un cycle de Daniel," Revue Biblique 63 (July 1956): 407—415.

154.   Frank M. Cross, "The Manuscripts of the Dead Sea Caves," Biblical Archaeologist 17 (February 1954): 3.

155.   Black, Apocalypsis Henochi, pp. 6—7.

156.   D. Barthelemy and J. T. Milik, eds., Discoveries in the Judean Desert, 1: Qumran Cave 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), p. 3.

157.   Terrien, "Enoch, Books of," 10:394.

158.   Nahman Avigad, A Genesis Apocryphon (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1956), p. 19.

159.   Terrien, "Enoch, Books of," 10:394.

160.   Livre d'Enoch 1:425—26.

161.   Frey, "Apocryphes," 1:357.

162.   Carl Christian Clemen, "Die Zusammensetzung des Buches Henoch, der Apokalypse der Baruch und des Vierten Buches Esra," in Theologische Studien und Kritiken 71 (1898): 211—46, cit. Charles, Book of Enoch, p. xliii.

163.   Charles, Book of Enoch, pp. xlvii—xlviii.

164.   Ibid., pp. xxx—xlvi.

165.   Michael Stuart, "Christology," 3:132. Later, in 1891, T. K. Cheyne pointed out "Essene and Zoroastrian elements" in the Enoch literature; cit. Charles, Book of Enoch, p. xlii.

166.   Charles, Book of Enoch, p. xxxv, emphasis added.

167.   Davies, "Enoch, Book of," 1:334.

168.   M. Rist, "Enoch, Book of," in Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible (New York: Abingdon Press, 1962) 2:103.

169.   Thomson, "Apocalyptic Literature," 1:166.

170.   Van Andel, Structuur, p. 1.

171.   Ibid., pp. 5—7.

172.   Summarized by Van Andel, Structuur, p. 9.

173.   Ibid., p. 11.

174.   Ibid., p. 43.

175.   Ibid., p. 47.

176.   Ibid., p. 51.

177.   Ibid., p. 68.

178.   Ibid., pp. 69—70.

179.   Ibid., p. 114.

180.   Ibid., p. 48.

181.   Raphael Jehudah Zwi Werblowsky, "Enoch, Books of," in Encyclopedia of Jewish Religion (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1965), p. 129.

182.   Stuart, "Christology," 3:105. He finds "by far the most interesting and important part of the book" is that which develops its christology, p. 99.

183.   Ibid., 3:105.

184.   Ibid., 3:105.

185.   Ibid., 3:113.

186.   Ibid., 3:128.

187.   Stuart, "Future Punishment," 4:10.

188.   Ibid., 4:10.

189.   Ibid., 4:10.

190.   Ibid., 4:11; Stuart, "Christology," 3:133.

191.   Stuart, "Christology," 3:123.

192.   Stuart, "Future Punishment," 4:5.

193.   G. Volkmar, "Beiträge zur Erklärung des Buches Henoch nach dem äthiopischen Text," Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft 14 (1860): 87.

194.   Schmidt, Book of Enoch, p. 45.

195.   Vaillant, Secrets d'Henoch, p. xiii. J. B. Frey, another Catholic, avers that "the finest and most important part" of the Enoch literature is possibly a Christian interpolation. (Pirot, Dictionnaire de la Bible, Supplement) pp. 358—59.

196.   Charles, Book of Enoch, p. xxxiii.

197.   See John Marco Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Penguin Books, 1956), pp. 134—80.

198.   G. W. Anderson, "Enoch, Books of," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 24 vols. (1973), 8:604—5.

199.   Van Andel, Structuur, p. 113.

200.   Matthew Black, "Eschatology of the Similitudes of Enoch," Journal of Theological Studies, New Series, 3 (1952): 4, quoting T. W. Manson.

201.   Batiffol, "Apocalypses," 1:757. Enoch reflects the Judaism of Palestine during the transition to Christianity and to Rabbinism according to Zolli, another Catholic writer. ("Henoch," 6:1405—6.)

202.   Quoted by G. Santillana, Hamlet's Mill (Boston: Gambit, 1969), p. 10.

203.   Hugh Nibley, "The Genesis of the Written Word," New Era 3 (September 1973): 38—50.

204.   The Zohar, trans. Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon (New York: Rebecca Bennet, 1958), Bereshith, 37b.

205.   BHM 3:xxxii.

206.   Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 7:viii and 11:vi, in P.G. 21:520, 856f.

207.   Epiphanius, Adversus Haereses 1:ii, 26, 8, in P.G. 41:341f.

208.   Vaillant, Secrets of Enoch, p. x.

209.   H. Gunkel, "Der Schreiberengel Nabu im Alten Testament und im Judentum," Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 1 (1898): 299.

210.   "Testament of Abraham," in W. Leslau, ed., Falasha Anthology (New York: Yale University Press, 1951), p. 100.

211.   Georgius Cedrenus, Historiarum Compendium 1:17 of vol. 4 in series. See note 31.

212.   N. H. Tur Sinai, "Shitir Shame, die Himmselschrift," Archiv Orientalni 17 (1949): 433.

213.   A. Leo Oppenheim, "Mesopotamian Mythology II," Orientalia 19 (1950): 155—56.

214.   M. J. Bin Gorion, Die Sagen der Juden (Frankfurt: Kuttier & Loening, 1913) 1:100.

215.   Ian Henderson, Myth in the New Testament (Chicago: Regnery Company, 1952), p. 16, congratulates contemporary theology in having risen through demythologizing above the quasi-physical ideas of Paul. According to Origen, the church rejects any involvement with a physical universe whatsoever, nothing in its teachings being kata physin; the trouble with the Greek myths is that they are tainted with the physical. (P.G. 6:1260.) Arnobius says such questions as "What is man? What is the origin of the soul? Whence comes evil? How large is the earth?" etc., are completely irrelevant: "Leave these things to God and care for your soul!" (Arnobius, Adversus Nationes, 2:61, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticarum Latinorum 4:97.) According to an official Roman Catholic handbook, whoever says or believes that the physical heavens have any relationship whatever to God and the divine orders of Cherubim and Seraphim is anathema (H. J. K. Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum [Rome: Herder, 1957], no. 2:206). Whoever studies the Creation, the Chariot or asks what is above, below or beyond or what will be in the eternities, "it were better for him had he not come into the world!" (Mishnah, Hag. 2:1).

216.   Nibley, "Genesis," pp. 42—43.

217.   Clemens Alexandrinus, Stromata 1:23; 153; in Theodorus Hopfner, Fontes Historiae Religiones Aegyptiacae (Bonn: A. Marc and E. Weber, 1922), p. 370.

218.   H. Gunkel, Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Verständnis des Neuen Testaments (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1910), p. 29.

219.   1 Enoch 106:19; Bonner, Last Chapters, p. 3. Chapter 106 is not included in the translations of Laurence, being a fragment of the book of Noah. Since the Ethiopic Enoch was the first known, its chapters and verse numbers are standard for all Enoch texts; thus 1 Enoch 106 designates the same section, no matter in what language it is found.

220.   Mayer Lambert, "Que portaient les tables de pierre?" Revue des Études Juives 82 (1926): 45—48.

221.   Geo Widengren, The Ascension of the Apostle and the Heavenly Book (Uppsala: Lundquistska Bokhandeln, 1950), p. 7.

222.   Ibid., p. 28.

223.   Edwyn Robert Bevan, Sibyls and Seers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929), p. 116. Initiates to Greek mysteries must record their inspired versions on tablets and deposit them in the temple archives. (Pausanias 9:39.14.)

224.   August Freiherrn von Gall, Basileia tou Theou (Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitatsbuchhandlung, 1926), pp. 313—14.

225.   1QM (Scroll of the War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness) 12:3, in Yigael Yadin, Scroll of the War of the Sons of Light (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 314—15.

226.   Mosiah 5:5—15, where the acceptance of the covenant goes with the general engraving and sealing of names.

227.   Widengren, Ascension, pp. 11—12.

228.   Ibid. pp. 7, 10—11.

229.   Samuel Mercer, The Pyramid Texts, 4 vols. (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1952), 1:76—77 (No. 2550.267).

230.   Timothy Archbishop of Alexandria, "Discourse on the Abbaton," in E. A. W. Budge, Coptic Martyrdoms in the Dialect of Upper Egypt (London: British Museum, 1914), pp. 482—83.

231.   Yadin, Scroll of the War, pp. 314—15.

232.   Bin Gorion, Sagen 1:263—66.

233.   The Zohar, Breshith 37b.

234.   Bin Gorion, Sagen 1:263.

235.   Barhadbshabba, On the Founding of the Schools, in Patrologia Orientalis (Paris: Firmin-Dicht, 1908; hereafter cited as P.O.) 4:352.

236.   Nibley, "A New Look at the Pearl of Great Price," Improvement Era 72 (November 1969): 120.

237.   Bin Gorion, Sagen 2:143.

238.   D. A. Khvol'son, Die Ssabier und der Ssabismus, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Buchdruckei der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1856), 2:502—3.

239.   Apocalypse of Adam, in Douglas M. Parrott, ed., Nag Hammadi Studies, vol. 11 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1979), folio 85, lines 24—25, 31 (p. 195); also see folio 79, line 27 (p. 183).

240.   Schmidt, Pistis Sophia, pp. 246—47.

241.   Bin Gorion, Sagen 1:261—62.

242.   BHM 3:14:xxxii.

243.   Bin Gorion, Sagen 1:269.

244.   Van Andel, Structuur p. 19.

245.   Meyer, Qabbalah, pp. 98f. The claim is repeated in the Zohar, Bereshith 37b.

246.   Bin Gorion, Sagen 1:257.

247.   Van Andel, Structuur, pp. 41ff; Moses 8:2.

248.   Leslau, "Testament of Abraham," p. 100; italics added.

249.   Ascension of Isaiah 9:21—22.

250.   Ibid., 9:22.

251.   Origen, In Genesim, in P.G. 12:73, 81, 84.

252.   Charles Leonard Woolley, Abraham (London: Faber, 1936), p. 182.

253.   4 Ezra 14:22.

254.   Charles, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha 2:470.

255.   2 Baruch 6:8—10.

256.   In these passages the document is called a "testament." (Carl Schmidt, Gespräche Jesu mit seine Jüngern nach der Auferstehung, ein katholisch-apostolisches Sendschreiben des 2 Jahrhunderts, vol. 43 [3rd series, vol. 13] of Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Altchristlichen Literatur [Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1919], pp. 164—65.)

257.   Cross, "The Manuscript of the Dead Sea Caves," p. 3.

258.   Davies, "Enoch, Book of," 1:334.

259.   Michel Malinine, ed., Evangelium Veritatis (Zürich: Rascher Verlag, 1956), folio 12r, p. 23.

260.   4 Ezra 14:20.

261.   Malinine, Evangelium Veritatis, folio 12r, p. 23.

262.   M. J. Lagrange, Le Messianisme chez les Juifs (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1909), p. 46.

263.   Geo Widengren, "Synkretistiche Religionen," Religionsgeschichte des Orients in der Zeit der Weltreligionen, ed. B. Spuler (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961), pp. 77—78ff.

264.   2 Enoch.

265.   Apocryphon of James, folio I:1, lines 28—32, I:2, lines 7—18, in James Robinson, Nag Hammadi Library in English (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977), p. 30. This text, discovered in 1945, is one of the most enlightening commentaries on the subject of secrecy and transmission, "Since you have asked me to send you a secret discourse delivered by the Lord to Peter and me . . . I am writing it in Hebrew letters and sending it to you alone. . . . Make every effort to avoid/prevent the document's reaching a lot of people, the Savior not wishing to tell these things to all of us of the Twelve. . . . Ten months ago I sent you another discussion/talk which the Savior had with me in secret. . . . The Twelve used to have sessions in which they would recall things the Savior had said to them individually, alone or in public, and then write them down in books."

266.   2 Enoch 54:1; italics added.

267.   Apocryphon of John, in Die Gnostichen Schriften des Koptischen Papyrus Berolinensis 8402, ed. Walter C. Till, vol. 60 of Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Altchristlichen Literatur (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1955). Page numbers refer to the Coptic manuscript. Codex 1, p. 75, lines 15—20; p. 76, line 1. Page 76, lines 10—15, contains a curse on whoever gives up this (writing) as a present or in return for food or drink or clothing or anything of that nature.

268.   2 Enoch 48:6; italics added.

269.   Malinine, Evangelium Veritatis, folio 12r, p. 23. It is no secret that when Jesus explains it to Mary, a cloud envelops them, forming seven veils of flame, so that even the angels could see or hear nothing of what was going on. (Sebastian Euringer, "Die Binde der Rechtfertigung," Orientalia 9 [1940]:245.)

270.   Apocryphon of John, codex 1, p. 76.

271.   4 Ezra 14:45—46.

272.   4 Ezra 14:6.

273.   4 Ezra 14:46.

274.   Bin Gorion, Sagen 2:270.

275.   Bin Gorion, Sagen 1:263.

276.   Tha^clabī Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyā (Cairo: Mụṣtafa al-Ḥalabī al-Bābī wa-Awladuhu, 1354 A.H.), p. 242. A very good source.

277.   John Marcos Allegro, The Treasure of the Copper Scroll (Garden City: Doubleday, 1960), pp. 120ff.

278.   Syncellus 1:53—55.

279.   Silvain Grebaut, Livre des Mystères du Ciel et de la Terre 2:24, in P.O. 6:412.

280.   Oppenheim, "Mesopotamian Mythology," 19:155.

281.   A. Moret, Histoire de l'Orient (Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France, 1929), pt. 1, pp. 85—86, 96—97, 141—44.

282.   Syncellus 1:51. See note 31 above and note the additional references to Eusebius in Syncellus 1:50—51.

283.   Van Andel, Structuur, p. 74.

284.   Gerhard Fecht, "Der erste Teil des sogenannten Evangelium Veritatis," Orientalia 32 (1963):327—31.

285.   Malinine, Evangelium Veritatis. f. 12r:23; 11:22, 1, 38f.

286.   Grevaut, Livre des Mystères 4:4, in P.O. 6:430—31.

287.   Carl Schmidt, Gnostische Schriften in koptischer Sprache aus dem Codex Brucanius, vol. 8 of Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Altchristlichen Literatur (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrich, 1892), p. 342. (Hereafter cited as T.U. 8.)

288.   Widengren, The Ascension of the Apostles, pp. 74—76.

289.   Athenasius, De Decretis Nicaena Synodi, 5, in P.G. 25:424, discussing 1 John 2:7. 342

290.   Schmidt, Book of Enoch, pp. 46—47.

291.   Jubilees 4:19.

292.   Leo Koep, Das himmlische Buch in Antike und Christentum (Bonn: P. Hanstein, 1952), pp. 46ff.

293.   Davies, "Enoch, Book of," 1:334.

294.   4 Ezra 14:22.

295.   1 Enoch 39:2.

296.   Kenyon, Beatty Biblical Papyri 8:8.

297.   Charles, Book of Enoch, p. ix.

298.   "The Kephalaia," in H. J. Polotsky, ed., Manichäische Homilien (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1934) 1:25.

299.   This motif is discussed in Hugh Nibley, The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1975), pp. 214—17.

300.   Ibid., pp. 94—103. It is significant that at this point in the Joseph Smith version the hero is declared to be a victor over the waters, since to the casual reader that seems quite irrelevant.

301.   For the sources, Paul Riessler, Altjüdisches Schrifttum ausserhalb der Bibel, 2nd ed. (Heidelberg: F. H. Kerle, 1966), p. 1267. It has been traced to Ebionite and Essene circles closely related to the communities of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Unfortunately, we are here reduced to using Riessler's German translation of the Old Slavonic text.

302.   Koch, Ratlos, pp. 16, 19ff.

303.   The sources are discussed and some of them are collected and translated in J.-P. Migne, Troisième et Dernière Encyclopédie Théologique, vol 23 (Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1856), pp. 297ff. It is to this work that our page numbers refer in the following parallel columns.

304.   Text in E. A. W. Budge, Coptic Martyrdoms, pp. 225—49, translation pp. 474—96. A full account of the findings of the book by Timothy, giving strong indication of its authenticity, is included in the text, folios 1b, 41—5b.

305.   Here is powerful confirmation of the Book of Mormon version. Other "forty-day accounts," especially the Coptic Évangile des Douze Apotres, first published in 1913 (in P.O. 2:132—37), and believed by no less an authority than Origen to be older than the Gospel of Luke, tell a story very close to 3 Nephi: The Lord asks the Twelve one by one if there is any last request; and when some of them are too embarrassed to ask him more, he tells them not to hold back, since he knows their minds already—exactly as in 3 Nephi 28:4—7. Most significant is that the final questions they ask him always have to do with the problem of death and the possibility of coming to terms with it or even avoiding it—the problem of the Three Nephites.

306.   Migne, P.G. 23:338, citing St. Ephraim and St. Jerome.