The Forbidden Knowledge: What the Angels Taught Humankind

Every parent knows the moment when a child asks a question that is too early to answer. You can tell the truth, you can dodge, or you can put the answer off for a few years. What you cannot do is take the answer back once it has been given.

The Book of Enoch tells of such a moment on the scale of all humanity. According to the book, humans once received answers to questions they were not ready for. Whoever answered them was not a responsible parent. It was two hundred angels who had deserted their post.

What the forbidden knowledge was

“The forbidden knowledge” is the usual name for the things the Watchers taught humans, according to 1 Enoch. The book sets them out in lists. Chapter 7 says that the angels taught their wives charms and spells, and showed them how to cut roots and plants. In chapter 8 the list grows: Azazel teaches the making of swords, shields and breastplates, and also of jewelry, precious stones and eye paint. Other angels teach the lore of the stars, the signs and the cycles of the moon. The names of some of them reveal their field of expertise: Baraqiel, “lightning of God,” and Kokabiel, “star of God,” for example.

If you sort the list by subject, four groups emerge: war, beauty, medicine and sorcery, and foretelling the future. In today’s terms one might say that the angels brought with them the arms industry, the beauty industry, pharmacy and astrology. This is not a random collection. These are the fields in which a person tries to gain control: over his enemies, over the people around him, over his body and over his fate.

Writing is on the list too

Chapter 69 contains another list of angels and their deeds, with a line that surprises every modern reader:

He taught people to write with ink and paper, and because of this many have sinned, from eternity to eternity, to this very day. For people were not created for this, to confirm their faith with pen and ink.

1 Enoch 69:9–10

Writing, forbidden knowledge? An entire book whose hero is a scribe, and which is one long hymn of praise to books, warns against ink and paper. The contradiction is less troubling once you think about what writing makes possible. You can record wisdom with it, and you can also draw up contracts, promissory notes and false testimony. The author lived in a world where a written document could strip a man of his land, and he knew very well that the pen also serves the stronger side.

There is a distinction here that we know very well. Almost every tool we have invented in order to remember, to document and to communicate has also been used to lie more efficiently.

A list that keeps growing

The subject will not let go of the book’s authors. In the later parts it comes back, and the list grows. When Noah asks Enoch why destruction has been decreed upon the earth, the answer is that humans have learned the secrets of the angels, the hidden power of sorcery, and the craft of those who cast images in metal. Chapter 69 adds an angel who showed humans all the blows of death and the weapons of war, and an angel who revealed to them the bitter and the sweet and all the secrets of wisdom.

It seems that every generation of writers added to the list whatever worried it most. That may be the best evidence of the idea’s power: everyone can find room in it for a private fear.

A small secret, great damage

So what exactly is wrong with this knowledge? The book gives an explicit answer, in a sentence addressed to the angels who sinned:

You were in heaven, but not all the mysteries had been revealed to you. You knew a worthless secret, and in the hardness of your hearts you revealed it to the women, and through this secret men and women spread evil on the earth.

1 Enoch 16:3

Notice the words “a worthless secret.” The angels did not hand over the wisdom of heaven to humans. They handed over a small corner of it, cut off from everything else. Someone who learns to make a sword does not learn, on the same occasion, when it must not be drawn. Someone who learns to read the stars does not learn who set their courses. The forbidden knowledge is partial knowledge: there is power in it, and no understanding.

Knowledge given and knowledge stolen

It is easy to mistake the Book of Enoch for a book opposed to knowledge. The opposite is true. It is one of the most curious books written in antiquity. Enoch himself learns almost everything in it: where the winds are kept, how the sun and the moon move, how many days there are in a year, where the souls of the dead go. He writes down everything he sees, and commands his son Methuselah to keep the books and pass them on to the generations to come.

So what is the difference between the lore of the stars taught by the angel Baraqiel and the lore of the stars Enoch learned from the angel Uriel? The content is fairly similar. The difference is in the way. Enoch receives the knowledge with permission, from an angel sent to teach him, as part of a complete picture that also includes law and judgment. The Watchers hand the knowledge over without permission, as a gift to their wives, without any complete picture at all. The same information can be wisdom in one case and danger in another.

The same story in three versions

The idea that dangerous knowledge reached humans from a higher source is not unique to the Book of Enoch. In Greek mythology Prometheus steals fire from the gods and gives it to humans, and is punished for it in chains. In Genesis, Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge and are driven out of the garden.

And yet there is an important difference. In that same Book of Genesis, the crafts themselves do not come from heaven at all. Humans invent them on their own: Jubal is “the father of all such as handle the harp and organ,” and Tubal-cain is “an instructer of every artificer in brass and iron.” The Torah presents technology as a human achievement. The Book of Enoch presents it as stolen goods.

Both of these attitudes still live inside us. When a new invention succeeds, we are proud of human ingenuity. When it gets out of control, we talk about it as an alien force that landed on us from outside.

What to do with an answer that cannot be taken back

The Book of Enoch offers no way to return the forbidden knowledge to where it came from. The angels are punished, but what they taught remains on the earth. Instead, the book offers something else: more knowledge. Against the small secret that was stolen, it sets the broad picture given to Enoch, with order, law and responsibility.

This may be the only practical advice that can be drawn from the story. We cannot forget what we have already learned. We can only learn what is missing as well.