Woe to You, the Rich: The Social Protest of the Book of Enoch

In shortThe Epistle of Enoch is the last part of 1 Enoch, chapters 91 to 105. In it Enoch addresses his sons and the generations to come, rebukes the sinners and the rich, and encourages the righteous. Most scholars date it to the second century BCE.

“Woe to you, the rich, for you have trusted in your wealth!” Anyone who opens the last part of 1 Enoch expecting more angels and heavens finds something else entirely: an indictment. There are no journeys to the ends of the earth in it and no symbolic animals. There are houses, hoards of silver and gold, false witnesses, and people who toil hard and see no fruit.

This part is known as the Epistle of Enoch, and it runs from chapter 91 to chapter 105. Enoch is speaking to his sons, but the real addressees are two groups who lived in the land of Israel in the second century BCE: “the sinners,” who are mostly rich and powerful, and “the righteous,” who are mostly the people beneath them.

The list of charges

The form is familiar from the prophets. Isaiah cried “Woe unto them that join house to house,” and Amos rebuked those who are at ease in Zion. The Epistle of Enoch takes up that cry and repeats it dozens of times, almost without pause. The author is not content with accusing. He lets the accused speak:

Woe to you who hoard silver and gold unjustly and say: "We have grown rich, we have treasures, and we have gathered everything we wanted. Now let us do everything we have planned, for we have hoarded silver, we have filled our treasuries, and the workers of our houses are as many as the waters." But your lie will flow away like water and vanish. Your wealth will soon leave you and leave you nothing, because you did all this by violence, and you will become a great curse.

1 Enoch 97:8–10

It is worth noticing what the rich say about themselves. They do not apologize and they hide nothing. They are pleased. They have treasures, they have plans, and the workers of their houses are “as many as the waters.” The author turns the same word against them: like water their wealth will flow away.

The sin, in the eyes of the Epistle, is not wealth itself. The sin is the method: “unjustly,” “by violence.” The list is long and detailed. It includes houses built on injustice, people who eat the finest wheat and trample the poor with their power, false witnesses and writers of lies. It even includes men who wear more jewelry than women and more colorful clothes than young girls. Whoever wrote this knew these people at close range, and had probably also seen their houses from the outside.

The real scandal

If the Epistle had stopped at accusations, it would be one more page in the literature of rebuke. What sets it apart is that it admits an embarrassing fact: the wicked are doing well.

Woe to you, sinners, when you die in your sin, and those like you say of you: "Happy are the sinners, for all their days they saw good! And now they have died in happiness and wealth. They saw no distress or slaughter in their lives, they died in honor, and no judgment was carried out on them in their lifetime."

1 Enoch 103:5–6

This is the problem that troubled Job and Ecclesiastes too. The old promise, that the righteous prosper and the wicked are punished, does not survive contact with reality. The rich live in comfort, die in honor, and nobody calls them to account. And the righteous, meanwhile, complain in words that are hard to forget: we hoped to be the head, and we became the tail.

The Epistle's answer is that the account simply has not been closed yet. The souls of the sinners will go down to Sheol, and there their distress will be great. The righteous are told that the angels remember them for good in heaven, that their names are written there, and that one day they will shine like the lights of heaven. This is one of the earliest and clearest statements in Jewish literature of the idea of reward and punishment after death. The idea, it turns out, was born of frustration.

Someone is taking notes

The rich of the Epistle have houses, treasures and workers. What do the poor have? According to the author, they have a ledger.

And you sinners say: "None of our sins will be examined or written down." But know that all your sins are written down day by day.

1 Enoch 104:6

This is the weapon of those who have no other weapon. They cannot bring the rich man to trial, because the judges belong to the rich man. They can only inform him that everything is being written down, day by day, and that the record is kept in a place his hand cannot reach. Nor is there any shortage of witnesses: according to the Epistle, light and darkness, day and night, see every sin.

We tend to think that the fear of surveillance and documentation is an invention of our own age. The Epistle shows that the idea is very old, and that it was originally meant to frighten the strong. Long before cameras there was a book in heaven, and whoever kept it could not be bribed.

Who is to blame for evil

Tucked inside all this is one verse that scholars keep returning to:

I swear to you, sinners: just as a mountain has never been a slave and never will be, and a hill has never been a woman's maidservant, so sin was not sent to the earth. Human beings created it themselves, and all who commit it will become a great curse.

1 Enoch 98:4

For anyone who has read the beginning of the Book of Enoch, the sentence comes as a surprise. There we were told that evil came from above: angels came down, taught humankind war and sorcery, and corrupted the earth. Here the opposite is said. Nobody sent sin. Human beings made it themselves.

Both answers are in the same book, and that is no accident. The Book of Enoch was written by several authors, and each had his own reason. Someone who wants to explain why the whole world is broken tells of fallen angels. Someone who wants to settle accounts with particular people cannot allow them that excuse. A rich man who trampled his neighbor will not be able to claim on the day of judgment that Azazel is to blame.

A long echo

The Epistle was not forgotten. A large part of it also survived in Greek, in a papyrus from the fourth century CE, and Aramaic fragments of it were found at Qumran. And readers of the New Testament hear very similar voices. The Gospel of Luke says “woe unto you that are rich,” and tells a parable about a rich man and a poor man named Lazarus, whose fortunes are reversed after death. The Epistle of James calls on the rich to weep and howl for the miseries that shall come upon them. Scholars have pointed out how close these texts are to the Epistle of Enoch, even if it is hard to prove who read whom.

History, they say, is written by the victors. The Epistle of Enoch is a reminder that sometimes the losers write too. The houses built on injustice in the second century BCE vanished long ago, and nobody remembers the names of their owners. The indictment against them is still being read.