How the Book of Enoch Was Lost, and How It Was Found Again in Ethiopia

Books do not disappear with a bang. Nobody announces that from today on they will no longer be read. They disappear quietly, when one day a tired copyist decides he has more urgent things to copy, and then the next copyist decides the same.

In the world before printing, a book that was not copied was a book condemned to a slow death. Parchment wears out, ink fades, libraries burn. If nobody makes a new copy, within a few generations only the book’s name is left. That is what happened to the Book of Enoch, almost everywhere.

How a famous book gets lost

In the Second Temple period the Book of Enoch was one of the widely read books. It was written in Aramaic, translated into Greek, and read by Jews and by the early Christians. The Epistle of Jude in the New Testament quotes from it, and several of the early Church Fathers treated it with respect.

But in the fourth and fifth centuries the tide turned. The Jewish sages had not included it in the Bible. The leaders of the Church, among them Augustine and Jerome, ruled that it was not fit to be counted among the scriptures. A book that is not scripture is not read in worship, is not studied, and above all is not copied. Within a few centuries the copies vanished, one after another.

What remained in Europe were fragments. The most famous of them is a series of passages in Greek that a Byzantine monk named George Syncellus copied into his own work around the year 800. These passages, about the angels who came down to the daughters of men, were printed at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and proved to the scholars of Europe that the book had really existed. They just did not know where to find the rest.

A rumor from Ethiopia

Then rumors began to arrive. Travelers and missionaries returning from Ethiopia reported that the church there held the Book of Enoch as part of its scriptures.

One enthusiastic French scholar even managed, in the seventeenth century, to acquire an Ethiopian manuscript that he was told was the lost Book of Enoch. The excitement was great. It lasted until the greatest scholar of Ethiopic of that generation examined the manuscript and determined that it was an entirely different work. The lost book had been found, and it turned out that it had not.

The man who went looking for the source of the Nile

In 1768 a tall Scottish gentleman named James Bruce set out on a journey. His goal was to discover the source of the Nile. He reached Ethiopia, stayed there for several years, became part of life at the royal court, and eventually reached the springs of the Blue Nile. As it turned out, a Jesuit priest had got there more than a hundred and fifty years before him, but Bruce preferred not to dwell on that detail.

His real achievement was something else. When he returned to Europe in 1773, his baggage held three complete copies of the Book of Enoch in Ge’ez, the ancient language of Ethiopia. One copy he presented to the King’s Library in Paris. A second reached the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The third he kept for himself.

There is a fine irony in this. Bruce set out to discover something that had already been discovered, and came back with something that had been lost for about a thousand years. When he later published the account of his travels, many in London refused to believe his stories. The manuscripts, at least, could not be denied.

A book that was found, and that nobody reads

One might have expected Europe to pounce on the discovery. In fact, the manuscripts rested on their shelves for almost fifty years. The reason is simple: almost nobody could read Ge’ez. The French orientalist Silvestre de Sacy published a few passages from the book in Latin translation in 1800, but that was only an appetizer.

Only in 1821 did Richard Laurence, professor of Hebrew at Oxford, publish a complete English translation, the first in any European language. Thirty years later the German scholar August Dillmann published a scholarly edition of the Ge’ez text based on five manuscripts, followed by a German translation. From then on the book became a subject of serious research.

And in 1892 a circle closed. A twenty-one-year-old Jewish student, Lazarus Goldschmidt, a pupil of Dillmann in Berlin, translated the book from Ge’ez into Hebrew. A work written by Jews in the Land of Israel returned to their language after a long journey through Greek and Ge’ez.

What the first readers discovered

What readers found in the new translations surprised them. They had expected a curiosity, an ancient legend about angels and giants. They found a major Jewish work of the Second Temple period, dealing with the day of judgment, the fate of souls after death and a heavenly figure called “the Son of Man.” Ideas that had until then been considered Christian innovations turned out to be part of a rich Jewish world that came before Christianity.

One book, returning from Ethiopia about a thousand years late, forced scholars to redraw the map of the entire period. It is not every day that we find out a whole chapter was missing from a story we thought we knew.

The discoveries that followed

The story did not end there. In the winter of 1886 a Greek manuscript was found in an ancient Christian grave in the town of Akhmim in Egypt, containing the first thirty-two chapters of the Book of Enoch. And in 1952, fragments of eleven manuscripts of the book were discovered in Cave 4 at Qumran, in Aramaic, its original language. They are more than a thousand years older than any known Ethiopian copy, and proved that the text the Ethiopians had preserved was largely faithful.

So in less than two hundred years the Book of Enoch went from a rumor to a complete book, and from a complete book to one whose journey can be traced through four languages.

Why there of all places

Why did the book survive in Ethiopia of all places? The answer is fairly simple. The Ethiopian church, one of the oldest in the world, accepted the Book of Enoch into its scriptures and never took it out. The book was translated into Ge’ez, probably between the fourth and the sixth centuries, and since then it was copied generation after generation, in mountains far from the debates of Rome and Constantinople.

The book itself contains a verse that today reads almost like a promise:

The books will be given to them, and they will believe in them and rejoice in them, and all the righteous who learned from them all the ways of righteousness will receive their reward.

1 Enoch 104:12

We tend to believe that important books survive because they are important. The story of the Book of Enoch teaches something more modest. A book survives when there is one community, in one place, that keeps copying it even after everyone else has given up. Sometimes that is enough.