1 Enoch and 2 Enoch: What Is the Difference?

Anyone who goes looking for “the Book of Enoch” soon discovers that there is more than one. There is 1 Enoch, there is 2 Enoch, and whoever digs deeper will find a third as well. It is a bit like a film series in which each installment was shot by a different director, in a different country and in a different century, and only the hero’s name stayed the same.

The difference between the first two is not a matter for specialists only. They are two very different books, and whoever knows what is in each of them will also know which one to open first.

The difference in brief

1 Enoch and 2 Enoch are two separate works, written at different times, by different authors, and preserved in different languages. What they share is the hero: Enoch son of Jared, who according to Genesis walked with God and was taken.

1 Enoch is called “Ethiopic Enoch,” because its complete text survived in Ge’ez, the ancient language of Ethiopia. It has 108 chapters. 2 Enoch is called “Slavonic Enoch” or “The Book of the Secrets of Enoch,” because its complete text survived in Old Church Slavonic. In the edition on this site it has 68 short chapters.

Age and origin

1 Enoch is the ancient one, and it is itself a collection of five works. Its first parts were written in Aramaic, in the Land of Israel, in the third century BCE at the latest. Fragments of it were found in the caves of Qumran. The last of its parts was probably written around the turn of the era.

2 Enoch is younger, and the story of its travels is more obscure. It is known from more than twenty manuscripts and fragments in Slavonic, copied between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Most scholars believe the Slavonic text was translated from Greek. Many date the work itself to the first century CE, and some suggest it was written in Egypt, but there is no agreement on this. In 2009 four fragments of it were identified in Coptic, found in Nubia, and since then the label “Slavonic” is less accurate than it used to be.

A collection versus a story

The difference you feel immediately on reading is in the structure. 1 Enoch is a small library. It contains a narrative about angels and giants, journeys to the ends of the earth, visions of the day of judgment, astronomical tables, a long fable about the history of the world, and words of rebuke. The voice changes from part to part, and sometimes the opinions do too.

2 Enoch is one continuous story that can be read in a single evening. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. Two shining men wake Enoch from his sleep and take him up to heaven. He rises from heaven to heaven, hears from God himself how the world was created, returns home for thirty days to take leave of his sons, and is taken again.

Across and upward

The journey itself is also different. In 1 Enoch, Enoch travels mostly across. The angels lead him to the edge of the earth, to mountains of fire, to the place where the souls of the dead are gathered, to the garden in the east. Heaven is one great palace of crystal and fire:

They brought me up into heaven, and I came near a wall built of crystal stones, surrounded by tongues of fire. Then fear began to take hold of me.

1 Enoch 14:9

In 2 Enoch the journey is upward. The heavens are built story upon story, and each heaven has contents of its own: the storehouses of snow and dew, paradise, the paths of the sun and the moon, camps of angels. In the text we have there are ten heavens, and God sits in the highest of them.

When Enoch had finished speaking to his sons, the angels took him on their wings, carried him up to the first heaven and set him on the clouds. There I looked, and looked higher still, and I saw the air. They set me in the first heaven and showed me a very great sea, greater than the sea on the earth.

2 Enoch 3:1

Who speaks to Enoch

In 1 Enoch, Enoch hardly ever speaks with God directly. It is angels who explain to him what he sees: Uriel, Raphael, Michael. He asks, and they answer.

In 2 Enoch the distance shrinks dramatically. God himself calls Enoch, seats him at his left beside the angel Gabriel, and tells him in the first person how he created the world. He even points out that he has not revealed this secret even to his angels. The Enoch of the second book is more than a traveler and a scribe. He is the Creator’s confidant.

Anger versus ethics

Another difference is the mood. 1 Enoch is an angry book. It has angels who sinned, giants who ravaged the earth, and rich men who oppress the righteous. A large part of it deals with the question of when and how all of these will be punished.

2 Enoch is much calmer. Its longest part is a father’s moral testament to his sons, and most of it consists of instructions for everyday life: give bread to the hungry, do not bear a grudge, do not swear in vain, endure insult with patience. It even has chapters on the treatment of animals, which declare that whoever is cruel to a beast harms his own soul. The angels who sinned appear here too, imprisoned in the second heaven and silent in the fifth, but they are a station on the way. They are not the heart of the story.

Not even the same year

There is also one technical difference that says a lot. 1 Enoch insists on a year of exactly three hundred and sixty-four days, and warns against those who get the count wrong. 2 Enoch speaks of a solar year of three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter days, and a lunar year of three hundred and fifty-four. Whoever wrote the second book already lived in a different world, with a different calendar, and felt no need to carry on the struggle of his predecessors.

And there is a third

To complete the picture: there is also 3 Enoch, known as Sefer Hekhalot, the Book of Palaces. It was written in Hebrew, much later than the other two, and belongs to early Jewish mystical literature. In this book Enoch is no longer a man. He is the angel Metatron, and he is the one who guides a sage who has ascended to heaven. The third book is not included in the editions on this site.

Where to start

If you are looking for the famous story, about the angels who came down on Mount Hermon and about the Nephilim, start with 1 Enoch, in the first thirty-six chapters. This is the foundational book, and everything else grew out of it.

If you prefer one story, short and clear, with a journey through the heavens, a creation story and a father’s words of farewell, start with 2 Enoch. It is more accessible, and you can finish it in a single train ride.

Many people look for “the right version” of every story. In Enoch’s case there is no such version. There is one figure, whom two different generations of writers used to say different things. The first wanted to understand where evil comes from. The later ones wanted to know how to live. Both questions are still open, and it is good that we have two books.