The Forgotten Books of Eden · 145 of 293

Secrets of Enoch: Chapter XL

Enoch admonishes his children truly of all things from the Lord’s lips, how he saw and heard and wrote down.

1.AND now, my children, I know all things, for this is from the Lord’s lips, and this my eyes have seen, from beginning to end.

Insight

Enoch’s claim to know all things ‘from beginning to end’ — every army of heaven, every measure of the cosmos, every soul’s destiny — is the strong form of apocalyptic certainty. The seer has been shown the whole picture, and his testimony is therefore complete. This claim sits in a tense relationship with Christian humility about the limits of revealed knowledge. Paul’s ‘now we see in a glass darkly, then face to face’ (1 Corinthians 13:12) and Deuteronomy 29:29 (‘the secret things belong to the Lord our God’) represent the alternative tradition: even revelation withholds. Augustine, working with both impulses, distinguishes in Confessions XII between what scripture clearly teaches and what it leaves to faithful conjecture. The apocalyptic seer claims completeness; the Christian theologian usually does not.

2.I know all things, and have written all things into books, the heavens and their end, and their plenitude, and all the armies and their marchings.

3.I have measured and described the stars, the great countless multitude of them.

4.What man has seen their revolutions, and their entrances? For not even the angels see their number, while I have written all their names.

5.And I measured the sun’s circle, and measured its rays, counted the hours, I wrote down too all’ things that go over the earth I have written the things that are nourished, and all seed sown and unsown, which the earth produces and all plants, and every grass and every flower, and their sweet smells, and their names, and the dwelling-places of the clouds, and their composition, and their wings, and how they bear rain and raindrops.

6.And I investigated all things, and wrote the road of the thunder and of the lightning, and they showed me the keys and their guardians, their rise, the way they go; it is let out in measure (sc. gently) by a chain, lest by a heavy chain and violence it hurl down the angry clouds and destroy all things on earth.

7.I wrote the treasure-houses of the snow, and the store-houses of the cold and the frosty airs, and I observed their season’s key-holder, he fills the clouds with them, and does not exhaust the treasure-houses.

8.And I wrote the resting-places of the winds and observed and saw how their key-holders bear weighing-scales and measures; first, they put them in one weighing-scale, then in the other the weights and let them out according to measure cunningly over the whole earth, lest by heavy breathing they make the earth to rock.

9.And I measured out the whole earth, its mountains, and all hills, fields, trees, stones, rivers, all existing things I wrote down, the height from earth to the seventh heaven, and downwards to the very lowest hell, and the judgement-place, and the very great, open and weeping hell.

10.And I saw how the prisoners are in pain, expecting the limitless judgement.

11.And I wrote down all those being judged by the judge, and all their judgements (sc. sentences) and all their works.