The Flood According to the Book of Enoch: Why the World Was Destroyed

What would you think of a judge who imposed the harshest sentence imaginable on a defendant, and justified the verdict in a single line: the defendant was bad? Most of us would ask to see the file.

That, more or less, is the position of anyone reading the story of the Flood in Genesis. God sees “that the wickedness of man was great in the earth,” regrets having made him, and decides to blot everything out. What exactly did humans do? What was so terrible that it justified destroying the entire world, cattle and birds included? The Torah makes do with one word, “violence,” and moves on to the measurements of the ark.

The Book of Enoch opens the file.

Why the Flood came: the Book of Enoch’s answer

According to 1 Enoch, the Flood is not a punishment for the ordinary sins of ordinary people. It is a response to an invasion. Two hundred angels came down from heaven, took wives from among the daughters of men and fathered giants, who ate everything on the earth and drank the blood of animals. At the same time the angels taught humans to make weapons and practice sorcery. The earth was filled with blood, and the earth itself, the book says, cried out against the violence.

When the cry reaches heaven, God gives orders to four angels. Three of them are sent to deal with the guilty. The fourth is sent to the one man who is going to be saved:

Tell him in my name: Hide! And reveal to him the end that is coming, for the whole earth will be wiped out. A flood of water will come over all the earth, and everything on it will perish. Now teach him how to escape, so that his descendants may survive and live throughout the earth.

1 Enoch 10:2–3

The Flood, in this version, is first of all an act of purification. Again and again the book uses words of cleansing and healing: to heal the earth the angels have corrupted, to cleanse it of all impurity. The waters come to wash away something that could not be repaired any other way.

A baby who lights up the house

The most surprising part of the story comes at the very end of the book, in chapters 106 and 107. It begins in a birthing room.

A son is born to Lamech, son of Methuselah and grandson of Enoch. The baby is like no other baby. His body is white as snow and red as a rose, his hair is white as wool, and when he opens his eyes the whole house fills with light. Lamech is terrified. He is convinced that the child is not his, and that the real father is one of the angels who came down from heaven. In an age when angels are roaming the earth and taking wives, the suspicion is not as far-fetched as it sounds.

Lamech runs to his father Methuselah, and Methuselah sets out on a journey to the ends of the earth, to the place where Enoch dwells with the angels. Enoch reassures his son: the child is Lamech’s son. His name will be Noah, and he and his sons will be saved from the disaster that is about to come upon the world.

This story was apparently a particular favorite. Another version of it was found in one of the scrolls from the Qumran caves, an Aramaic scroll that retells and expands the stories of Genesis. There Lamech does not just run to his father. First he confronts his wife, and she swears to him by everything dear to her that the child is his.

Noah cries out three times

Noah himself is also given a voice of his own in the Book of Enoch. In the section known as the Book of Parables, he sees that the earth is tilting toward its fall and that its end is near. He goes to the ends of the earth and cries out to Enoch, his great-grandfather, three times: hear me, hear me, hear me.

Enoch explains to him what is about to happen, and why. Humans have learned the secrets of the angels, sorcery and the art of casting metals, and for this destruction has been decreed. Only Noah has been found clean. The angels of punishment already stand ready, holding back the powers of the waters beneath the earth and waiting for the command.

In another part of the book, the Animal Apocalypse, the whole of history is told as a fable about animals, and Noah appears in it as a white bull who learns a secret from an angel, becomes a man and builds himself an ark. Even inside a fable, the book’s authors take care not to leave him out.

Enoch’s nightmare

Enoch himself also sees the Flood in advance. In chapter 83 he tells his son Methuselah about a dream he had in his youth, when he was sleeping in the house of his grandfather Mahalalel. In the dream the heavens collapse and fall upon the earth, the earth is swallowed into a great abyss, mountains hang upon mountains, and tall trees are torn from their trunks. He wakes up screaming, and his grandfather asks him to pray that a remnant may remain on the earth.

It is one of the most personal moments in the book. Before the Flood is a heavenly decree or a lesson in reward and punishment, it is the nightmare of a boy who wakes up in terror in the middle of the night.

Three floods, three reasons

It is interesting to set the three ancient stories of the Flood side by side. In the Mesopotamian story, the oldest of them, the gods send a flood because humans have multiplied and become noisy, and the noise keeps the chief god from sleeping. In Genesis the Flood comes because of human wickedness. In the Book of Enoch it comes because of something that was done to humankind.

These are three answers to the same question: who is to blame when the world is destroyed? According to the first, the gods are short-tempered. According to the second, humans are to blame. According to the third, humans are mostly the victims of forces greater than themselves. And here lies the irony of the third version. The angels are bound, the giants kill one another, but in the end the ones who drown are human beings.

The Flood as a dress rehearsal

The Book of Enoch has another reason to be interested in the Flood. In its view, the Flood is an event of the past and also a model of the future. The book calls it “the first end,” and so hints that there will also be a last one: a great day of judgment, when the bound angels will receive their final punishment and the whole world will be set right.

That is why, immediately after the orders of destruction, the book turns to a description of another world. The earth will be cleansed, trees and vines will be planted in it, all humans will be righteous, and all nations will bless God. At the end comes a promise that we also know from Genesis: a flood will never come again, from generation to generation, for ever.

What remained after the waters

What we tend to remember from the story of the Flood is the ark, the animals and the rainbow in the clouds. The Book of Enoch asks us to remember what came before all that too. According to the book, the ancient world was not destroyed because humans were especially bad. It was destroyed because a power entered it that was never supposed to be there, and because knowledge reached it that nobody was ready for.

The waters went down long ago. The question of what to do with power that is too great and knowledge that is too dangerous is still waiting for a better answer than a flood.