Why Isn’t the Book of Enoch in the Bible?

By the traditional Jewish count, the Hebrew Bible has twenty-four books, no more. You can think of them as one short shelf in a very large library: whatever stands on that shelf will be taught in every school, read in every synagogue and receive thousands of years of commentary. Whatever is left off will have to fend for itself. How books are chosen for that shelf is one of the most fascinating questions in Jewish history, and to a large extent one of the most obscure.

The Book of Enoch is perhaps the most famous candidate that was not accepted.

The short answer

Nobody knows for certain why the Book of Enoch was left out of the Bible, because no minutes of the decision have survived. In fact, it is doubtful there was a single decision at all. Scholars once believed that the sages of Yavneh gathered at the end of the first century CE and determined which books were in and which were out. Today most think the process was gradual, and that the list took shape over generations.

What we can do is examine the evidence. It points to a book that was much loved, and to several good reasons to be suspicious of it.

A book everyone knew

First it is worth understanding how widespread the book was. In the caves of Qumran near the Dead Sea, fragments were found of eleven manuscripts of the Book of Enoch in Aramaic. That is more than the number of copies found there of many biblical books. The Book of Jubilees, a Jewish work of the second century BCE, refers to the writings of Enoch as a source of authority. And in the New Testament, the Epistle of Jude quotes a whole verse from it and attributes it to “Enoch, the seventh from Adam”:

And look, he is coming with tens of thousands of holy ones to execute judgment on them. He will destroy the wicked and will call all flesh to account for everything the sinners and the wicked have done, and for all the evil they committed before him.

1 Enoch 1:9

In other words, at the end of the Second Temple period the Book of Enoch was part of the library of many Jews. It was not some remote book that had been forgotten. It was a familiar book that someone, at some point, decided not to include.

First suspicion: a book too late that claims to be too early

According to rabbinic tradition, prophecy ceased in Israel with the deaths of Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, early in the Second Temple period. The historian Josephus also writes that the sacred books were written from the days of Moses to the days of the Persian king Artaxerxes. A book written after that time could not be considered the word of prophecy.

The Book of Enoch was written, in the view of scholars, between the third century BCE and the first century CE. But the book itself claims something entirely different: that Enoch wrote it, before the Flood. That claim put the book in an impossible position. If it is late, it is not prophecy. And if it is as ancient as it claims, where was it all those years? Augustine, the Church Father who lived in the fourth and fifth centuries, put it simply: the book’s extreme antiquity is itself a reason to suspect it.

Second suspicion: a different calendar

The Book of Enoch devotes a whole section, the Book of the Luminaries, to a calendar of three hundred and sixty-four days based on the sun. In this calendar every festival always falls on the same day of the week. The calendar used in the Temple and adopted by the rabbis was a different one, based on the moon and adjusted to the sun.

This is not a technical difference. Whoever keeps a different calendar observes the Day of Atonement on a different day, and in effect claims that everyone else is desecrating it. The calendar of the Book of Enoch was associated with groups that had separated from the wider community, among them the people of Qumran. To include the book in scripture would have meant legitimizing the rival calendar.

Third suspicion: angels who sin, and a man who becomes almost an angel

The book’s content did not help it either. At its center stands the story of angels who came down, took wives and brought evil into the world. The sages of the Midrash did not like the idea. Genesis Rabbah cites Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai as saying that the “sons of God” in Genesis were the sons of judges, and that he would curse anyone who called them actual sons of God.

The figure of Enoch also caused unease. In the book he is a man who ascends to heaven, knows all the secrets and stands before the throne of glory. The same midrash cites a cooling opinion: Enoch was sometimes righteous and sometimes wicked, and God removed him while he was still righteous. It is hard not to read this as a reply to those who had praised him too highly.

Fourth suspicion: the company it kept

Finally, there was the question of the company in which the book circulated. The early Christians read the Book of Enoch with enthusiasm. The Church Father Tertullian, who lived in North Africa around the year 200, even claimed that the Jews rejected the book because they found in it testimony to the Christian messiah. It is hard to know whether there is any truth in this, but a book that had become a favorite of the rivals is not a natural candidate for the shelf.

The Mishnah, in tractate Sanhedrin, records a sharp statement in the name of Rabbi Akiva: whoever reads “the external books” has no share in the world to come. It is not clear which books exactly he had in mind, but the name stuck, and to this day in Hebrew the Book of Enoch and its like are called “the external books.”

Where it did get in

The story does not end with rejection. The Christian churches also gave up the book in the end, all except one. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church includes it in its scriptures to this day, which number eighty-one books. The Jews of Ethiopia also kept it among their sacred books. Thanks to these two communities the book survived in full.

In Jewish tradition, too, it did not disappear entirely. The Zohar mentions “the book of Enoch,” and early mystical literature tells of Enoch who became the angel Metatron. The book went out through the door, and its ideas came back in through the window.

What a short shelf teaches

It is easy to think of the Bible as a collection of everything that was important. In fact, every such list is also a decision about what to leave out. The books that were chosen tell us what a community believed. The books that were rejected tell us what it argued about.

The Book of Enoch is a reminder that the argument was real. Two thousand years after it was left off the shelf, people are still asking about it. Not every book that got in has had that honor.