Mount Hermon: The Mountain Where the Angels Swore Their Oath

In shortAccording to chapter 6 of 1 Enoch, two hundred angels led by Semyaza came down on the summit of Mount Hermon, swore to one another that they would not turn back from their plan, and from there went down to the daughters of men.

On a clear day Mount Hermon can be seen from the Sea of Galilee, from the Golan and from large parts of the Galilee. It is the highest mountain in the region, 2,814 meters above sea level, and snow stays on its summit when the valleys below are already warm. Anyone who lived at its foot twenty-three hundred years ago saw it every morning, and had no trouble believing that if something comes down from heaven to earth, this is where it lands.

1 Enoch says so explicitly. Its great story, the story of the Watchers, begins with a precise address.

An oath on the summit

According to chapter 6, the angels saw the daughters of men and desired them. Their leader Semyaza hesitated, and his hesitation is interesting. What troubled him was the possibility that the others would back out at the last moment, and he alone would bear the punishment. The solution his companions offered was entirely legal in spirit:

They all answered him: Let us all swear an oath and make a pact among ourselves, that we will not abandon this plan but will see it through to the end. Then they all swore together and made a pact among themselves. They were two hundred angels in all. They came down on Ardis, the summit of Mount Hermon, and they named the mountain Hermon, because there they swore under a ban and made their pact.

1 Enoch 6:4–6

The first thing the angels do on earth, then, is to make a contract. Before they had touched anyone, they made sure that none of them could later claim he had not been a partner. There is something very human about this moment. Even heavenly beings, when they are about to do something they know is forbidden, first look for mutual insurance.

A name that tells a story

The book explains that the mountain was called Hermon because the angels swore on it under a ban. In biblical Hebrew, herem is something removed from common use, and an oath under herem is an oath whose breaker is accursed. The wordplay works only in a Semitic language, and it is one of the hints that the book, which survived complete only in Ge'ez, was originally written in Aramaic or Hebrew.

A second wordplay hides in the date. According to the book, the angels sinned in the generation of Jared, the father of Enoch. In Hebrew, Jared is Yered, and “they came down” is yaredu: the name and the deed echo each other.

Hermon had other names too, and the Bible records them with the precision of a travel guide. Deuteronomy notes that the Sidonians call it Sirion and the Amorites call it Senir. In the Book of Judges it is called “Mount Baal-Hermon,” a name which shows that gods were worshiped there well before the Book of Enoch.

What was found on the mountain

Here the story moves from literature to archaeology. About thirty temples from the Hellenistic and Roman periods have been documented around Hermon and on its slopes, an unusual density even for a region that has no shortage of temples. On the summit itself lie the remains of a sacred enclosure, known in Arabic as Qasr Antar.

In 1869 the British explorer Charles Warren climbed to the summit and found there a stone bearing a Greek inscription from the Roman period. It can be translated roughly as follows: by command of the greatest and holy god, those who take the oath, from here.

What exactly was required of those who swore, and to which god they swore, the inscription does not say. George Nickelsburg, one of the leading scholars of the Book of Enoch, pointed out how close the inscription is to the story: a god who is “great and holy,” a title that recurs in the Book of Enoch, and an oath on the very same summit. He was careful not to claim more than that, and rightly so. The inscription is centuries later than the book. What can be said is that Hermon was a place people climbed in order to swear oaths, and had probably been one for a long time.

An author who knew the terrain

The Book of Enoch does not stop at the mountain. When the angels ask Enoch to write a petition for mercy on their behalf, he sits down to read it by the waters of Dan, west of Hermon, and falls asleep there. When he wakes, he finds them sitting in mourning at a place between Lebanon and Senir.

These names come from the map, not from legend. Tel Dan and its springs are right there, at the foot of the mountain. Whoever wrote these chapters, probably in the third century BCE, knew the Upper Galilee, and some scholars suggest that the whole tradition grew up in this region, far from Jerusalem and its Temple.

The mountain in other sources

The link between Hermon and the angels did not stay inside 1 Enoch. In 2 Enoch, when Enoch passes through the fifth heaven, he meets the companions of the angels who went down, and hears that those who sinned descended to the earth, to a place called Hermon, and broke their vows there.

The tradition reached the Christian world as well. Hilary of Poitiers, a Church Father of the fourth century, wrote in his commentary on the Psalms that Hermon is a mountain in Phoenicia, and added that according to a certain book, which he did not name, angels who desired the daughters of men came down on this mountain. Even people who never held the Book of Enoch in their hands, then, knew where the story took place.

Why a mountain

People in many cultures have placed the meeting of heaven and earth on mountaintops. The Torah was given on Mount Sinai, the gods of Greece lived on Olympus, and the Temple in Jerusalem stood on a mountain. The logic is simple: a mountain is where the earth comes as close to heaven as it can.

The Book of Enoch uses the same logic, and turns it upside down. Usually the mountain is where a human being goes up to meet the divine. Here it is where the angels come down to meet humankind, and the meeting ends badly. The holy mountain of the north becomes, in this story, the first crime scene. It is hard to know whether this was also a jab at those who climbed Hermon to sacrifice and to swear, but it is easy to imagine that a reader from the Galilee got the hint.

The mountain today

Today Hermon stands on a border between three countries, and in winter people ski on its slopes. Someone waiting in line for the chairlift is usually not thinking about two hundred angels and an oath under a ban.

And yet something of the story remains true even without angels. The mountain can be seen from everywhere, and so every generation has found a role for it: temple, border, lookout post, resort. The Book of Enoch gave it the most dramatic role of all: the place where heaven touched the earth, and regretted it. Nobody, of course, asked the mountain.