The Book of Enoch

An actor reads from the Book of Enoch:

And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied, that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters, and the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them and said to one another, “Come let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children.”

And they began to go in unto them and to defile themselves with them. And they taught them charms and enchantments and the cutting of roots and made them acquainted with plants. And they became pregnant. And they bore great giants whose height was 3000 ells, who consumed all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them, the  giants turned against them and devoured mankind.

And they began to sin against birds and beasts and reptiles and fish. And to devour one another's flesh and drink the blood. Then the earth laid accusation against the lawless ones.

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Host Aaron Henne: Welcome to episode two of The Dybbukast, the show in which we ask: What do novels, mythological narratives, poems, plays, and lyrics from throughout history tell us about the times in which they were created, and what do they reveal about the forces still at play in our contemporary societies? 

This is Aaron Henne, Artistic Director of theatre dybbuk. In this episode, we'll be exploring the Book of Enoch, an ancient text thought to be  composed during the Hellenistic period, which was between the middle of the fourth and first centuries BCE. The book contains tales of giants, visions of redemption, and much more.

You've already heard some brief excerpts from chapters six and seven of the book. Throughout the episode, actor Joe Jordan will continue to read selections from the text. You will also hear additional pieces of writing performed by other actors from theatre dybbuk. All of these readings are featured alongside my conversation with Dr. Greg Salyer, President of The Philosophical Research Society. During our talk, he takes us on a journey through the  book’s structure, and then helps us to investigate the spiritual and emotional value of apocalyptic literature.

And now, episode two of The Dybbukast: “The Book of Enoch”

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Actor 1 continues to read from the Book of Enoch:

Enoch, a righteous man whose eyes were opened by God, saw the vision of the Holy One in the heavens, which the angels showed me and from them, I heard everything, and from  them, I understood as I saw, but not for this generation, but for a remote one, which is for to come.

Aaron Henne: Greg, it's such a pleasure to have you with me.

Dr. Greg Salyer: Thank you. Thanks, Aaron.

Aaron: Tell us about the Book of Enoch and its contents, the basic plot points and what it covers.

Greg: The story of Enoch, the man and the book, begins cryptically enough with the line in Genesis 5:24.

Actor 2: Enoch walked with God, and he was no more; for God took him.

Greg: Apart from his lineage and his age, that’s all we know. A culture of storytellers isn't just going to let that ending lie there unfinished. So during the fascinating period of Hellenistic - that is Greek - Judaism, which was centered in Alexandria, in Egypt, and in Antioch, in Syria, several writers thought they would pick up this enticing story and flesh it out. And I use the phrase, “flesh it out,” deliberately since the stories they created involved a lot of bleeding and burning flesh along with some fantastic journeys to the heavens; involves parables, dreams and a little revisionist history. So the Enoch phenomenon is incredibly complex and a scholar can spend her entire career on just one part, but let's do a quick overview as you ask.

First of all, there are actually three Enochs. Most people who know the work are referring to First Enoch and we will too, but there's a Second Enoch from the first century of the common era, written in church Slavonic. And a Third Enoch written in Hebrew and used in rabbinic Judaism. By the way, it's in this Third Enoch that we meet Metatron, or the lesser Yahweh of Kabbalah.

Even if we focus on just First Enoch, we're still dealing with several texts written by several people over many years and in different places. In other words, like many of these texts from antiquity, including the Tanakh, this one is a compilation. There seems to be seven different texts in First Enoch, the oldest going back to about the fourth century BCE. And you might also find it interesting that First Enoch was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls in Qumran.

So let's go through and just basically summarize these books of Enoch. The Book of the Watchers: This is probably the most notable part of Enoch. It's based on another cryptic story in the book of Genesis. This is Genesis 6:1-4, before the flood, and people are beginning to multiply on the face of the ground, the text says. And then it says, just out of the blue, that the sons of God, meaning angels, saw that these human women were fair and they took wives for them, all that they chose. And this is where Yahweh gets very tired of humanity. And he says, you know what, I'm going to cut you off at 120 years ‘cause you're so weird, and I'm tired of dealing with you.

Actor 2: And the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in man forever for that he also is flesh. Therefore, shall his days be 120 years.”

Greg: The offspring of the sons of God, the angels, and the human women were called Nephilim. And they were called the heroes of old.

Actor 2: The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children to them; the same were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown.

Greg: And then it's right after that that the Lord sends the flood.

Actor 2: And the Lord said, “I will blot out man, whom I have created, from the face of the earth; both man and beast and creeping thing and fowl of the air, for it repenteth me that I have made them.”

Greg: The book is a collection of these revelations of God's displeasure and divine judgment. So it describes the sons of God, these angels, and their rebellion. And they're called Watchers. They have sexual intercourse with these human women, and the women give birth to a race of giants. And these giants are wicked. They lay waste to everything, to the earth and to the peoples of the earth. And that's why God has to destroy humanity. But for Enoch, for the book of Enoch, their demonic spirits are released from their dead angel bodies and these demons wreck havoc in the world until the end of time.

Actor 1: And now, as to the Watchers who have sent thee to intercede for them who had been in heaven. Say to them, "You have been in heaven, but the mysteries had not yet been revealed to you, and you knew worthless ones, and these in the hardness of your hearts you have made known to the women, and through these mysteries women and men work much evil on earth.” Say to them therefore, “You have no peace.”

Greg: The second book of First Enoch is called The Parables. And again, it's about Enoch receiving a lot of heavenly visions. But this is a really important book too, especially for early Christianity, because Enoch there is referred to as “the son of man.” Now, this is a phrase in the Hebrew Bible, especially in Daniel, that also gets picked up by the Gospel writers, as it would, because they were Jewish.

So now we have this son of man receiving heavenly visions. More than that, there’s The Chosen One. This is the most common title - God’s Anointed One and the Righteous One. And this heavenly being is God's agent for the final judgment and vindication of the righteous.

Actor 1: Hear, ye men of old time, and see, ye that come after, the words of the Holy One which I will speak before the Lord of Spirits, by whom the lot of eternal life has been given to me. Now three parables were imparted to me and I lifted up my voice and recounted them to those that dwell on the earth.

Greg: The third book, the Book of the Luminaries, is really interesting because there you have visions of heavenly and earthly events. We understand why there's a 364-day solar calendar, as opposed to the controversial lunar calendar. That's an old argument in the ancient world. And Enoch describes to his son, Methuselah, his journey through the stars above the earth, guided by an angel, Uriel.

Actor 1: And he showed me all their laws exactly as they are and how it is with regard to all the years of the world and unto eternity, until the new creation is accomplished. And this is the first law of the luminaries: the luminary the Sun has its rising in the eastern portals of the heaven and its setting in the western portals of the heaven.

Greg: The fourth, the Dream Visions: Enoch recounts two visions to Methuselah. The first is of the sky falling and the earth undergoing cataclysmic disasters.

Actor 1: …when I saw in a vision how the heaven collapsed and was born off and fell to the earth. And when it fell to the earth, I saw how the earth was swallowed up in a great abyss, and mountains were suspended on mountains, and hills sank down upon hills, and high trees where rent from their stems and hurled down and sunk in the abyss. And thereupon a word fell into my mouth, and I lifted up my voice to cry aloud and said, “The earth is destroyed.”

Greg: The second is a kind of apocalyptic allegory that describes the history of humanity from the creation of Adam to the final judgment. He's covering the beginning to the end, the alpha to the omega. And in this vision, humans are represented as animals and the angels are represented as human beings. It's really strange and interesting.

Actor 1: Before I took thy mother Edna, I saw in a vision on my bed, and behold a bull came forth from the earth, and that bull was white. And after it came forth a heifer, and along with this came forth two bulls, one of them black and the other red. And that black bull gored the red one and pursued him over the earth and thereupon I could no longer see that red bull.

Greg: The fifth book is called The Epistle, written by Enoch for later generations. Here, righteousness and wickedness are contrasted throughout to show that goodness and truth will be rewarded by God, but evil and sin will be punished by God. And of course it's highly didactic and what we call hortatory; it's like urging you to be good, basically.

Actor 1: And now, hearken unto me, my sons, and walk in the paths of righteousness, and walk not in the paths of violence, for all who walk in the paths of unrighteousness shall perish forever.

Greg: There are two more pieces to First Enoch. One is called The Birth of Noah. And this part appears in the Qumran fragments, separated from the other part of the text. So you might pick up First Enoch somewhere, and this wouldn't be there. It talks about the flood and Noah.

Actor 1: And when Methuselah had heard the words of his father Enoch, for he had shown to him everything in secret, he returned and showed them to him and called the name of that son Noah, for he will comfort the earth after all the destruction.

Greg: And then finally is a second appendix. It was not found at Qumran but it's still considered to be the work of what we called redactor - the person - it's an editor, basically. And it highlights the generation of light and opposition to the sinners who are destined to darkness.

Actor 1: And now I will summon the spirits of the good, who belong to the generation of light. And I will transform those who were born in darkness, who in the flesh were not recompensed with such honor as their faithfulness deserved. And I will bring forth in shining light those who have loved my holy name, and they shall see those who were born in darkness led into darkness, while the righteous shall be resplendent.

Greg: That’s a lot to take in right off the bat. I think there's about a hundred chapters in the Book of Enoch. And frankly, it's hard to read. I think apocalyptic literature is a kind of early horror literature, actually, because it kind of revels in viscera and grotesque punishments.

Actor 1: And this has been made for sinners when they die and are buried in the earth and judgment has not been executed upon them in their lifetime. Here, their spirits shall be set  apart in this great pain, till the great day of judgment, scourgings and torments of the accursed forever.

Greg: Many of your listeners will know apocalyptic literature through the Christian Book of Revelation. And this reads very much like that.

Actor 3: But the fearful and unbelieving, and the abominable and murderers and whoremongers and sorcerers and idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake, which burneth with fire and brimstone which is the second death.

Aaron: Some think that Enoch’s depiction as a visionary is related to some of the Sumerian and Babylonian god figures, specifically to En-men-dur-ana, who went to heaven and learned, or was taught, the secrets of the universe. Can you share with us about the overlap  between works like Enoch, which exists in the early Jewish tradition, and Babylonian and Sumerian mythology and figures?

Greg: The French semiotician Roland Barthes wrote a book called Mythologies in the ‘50s, and he has a little essay at the end called “Myths Today.” And nobody seems to know about this little essay but I love it. He wrote there that myth is stolen language. He was right. Stories that appear in one context or era or culture are used in others because they work, they've been shown to work, and it's easier to adapt a story than to create a new one out of whole cloth.

Accordingly, some of these early parts of Genesis are stolen from ancient Mesopotamia. One of the Genesis creation stories comes from the Mesopotamian creation myth, Enuma Elish,  which means “when on high”. It's the first words of the story.

Actor 4: When on high, heaven was not named, and the earth beneath did not yet bear a name, and the primeval Apsu, who begat them, and chaos, Tiamat, the mother of them both; their waters were mingled together.

Greg: The oldest complete text in the world, the epic of Gilgamesh, is an earlier version of the Genesis flood story.

Actor 5: The flood and wind lasted six days and six nights, flattening the land. On the seventh day, the storm was pounding like a woman in labor.

Greg: Likewise, Enoch appears to be modeled on this Sumerian king that you mentioned, En men-dur-ana. Both figures are in the symbolically significant seventh position in a list of pre flood kings. En-men-dur-ana is connected to sun worship, okay? Enoch’s lifespan is 365  years, which is the same, of course, as the number of days in a solar year, although it comes  across as 364 in the actual Book of Enoch because of numerology. But his name, this En men-dur-ana, it means essentially something like “stitch,” because he was the stitch between heaven and earth, right? En-men-dur-ana traveled through the heavens, learned  astrology and other secrets of heaven and earth. That's exactly what Enoch did.

Actor 1: And they took and brought me to a place in which those who were there were like flaming fire. And, when they wished, they appeared as men. And they brought me to the  place of darkness, and to a mountain, the point of whose summit reached to heaven. And I saw the places of the luminaries and the treasuries of the stars and of the thunder. And in the uttermost depths where were a fiery bow and arrows and their quiver and a fiery sword and all the lightnings. And they took me to the living waters and to the fire of the west, which receives every setting of the sun. And I came to a river of fire in which the fire flows like water and discharges itself into the great sea towards the west. I saw the great rivers  and came to the great darkness and went to the place where no flesh walks.

Aaron: The book is not an official part of the Jewish scriptures with the notable exception of the scriptures in the Ethiopian Jewish communities. Can you take us through the reasons why the book may have been eliminated from inclusion?

Greg: I wouldn't say it was really eliminated from inclusion in Hellenistic Judaism as much as I would say that there was really not a system of canonization at work then. For example, it's  only with Josephus, who died in 100 of the common era, that we get this sense of finality of the Jewish canon. And if you don't know Josephus, he was a Roman and also a Jew writing during some interesting times. 

He writes this:

Actor 6: For we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us disagreeing from  and contradicting one another as the Greeks have, but only 22 books, which contain all the records of all the past times which are justly believed to be divine. And of them, five belonged to Moses, which contain his laws and the traditions of the origin of mankind till his  death. The prophets, who were after Moses, wrote down what was done in their times in 13 books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God and precepts for the conduct of human life.

Greg: There’s your Torah, Ketuvim and Nevi’im right? There's your Hebrew Bible. Before Josephus’ time, it was a kind of mash-up culture with all kinds of texts and stories floating around and being combined and recombined into interesting and confounding works. And in fact, Enoch is part of what we call the pseudepigrapha, or false writings, because, I mean, if you're in a kind of wild west of writing, especially in a very desperate and dangerous time,  slap someone's name on there and that's how you get your message out. I don't mean that  necessarily cynically, but if you're writing Enoch and use the name Enoch, and you tell the  story in first person, that's pretty powerful.

Actor 1: The book written by Enoch - Enoch indeed wrote this complete doctrine of wisdom, praised of all men and a judge of all the earth - for all my children who shall dwell on the  earth and for the future generations who shall observe uprightness and peace.

Greg: More contested was Enoch’s status in Christianity since Christian writers saw Jesus in its pages, especially in that second book. And of course they always did this with Jewish texts. They appropriated them for their own use. Early church fathers proclaimed Enoch as inspired, along with Paul's writings in the gospels, but they quickly departed from that view as they began to form their own canon in the fourth century of the common era.

That most Jewish rabbis had rejected the book in their own time was probably the most  powerful reason for excluding it from the Christian canon. And this is just a guess on my part, but I think it's probably an educated guess: It's a little too close to the Christian apocalypse that is the Book of Revelation. I think it would have been incredibly confusing.

Actor 1: The Holy Great One will come forth from his dwelling, and the eternal God will tread upon the earth, even on Mount Sinai.

Actor 3: And I saw a great white throne and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away. And there was found no place for them.

Actor 1: And all shall be smitten with fear, and the Watchers shall quake, and great fear and trembling shall seize them unto the ends of the earth.

Actor 3: And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God. And the books were opened, and another book was opened which is the Book of Life. And the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.

Actor 1: And the earth shall be rent in sunder.

Actor 3: And the sea gave up the dead which were in it.

Actor 1: And all that is upon the earth shall perish.

Actor 3: And death and Hell delivered up the dead which were in them. 

Actor 1: And there shall be a judgment upon all men.

Actor 3: And they were judged, every man, according to their works.

Aaron: Can you elaborate on the book’s use within Ethiopian Jewish belief, and that there are quotations from it in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church’s Book of Jubilees.

Greg: This question gets into a lot of sectarian and textual source history involving Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Ethiopic and Ge’ez - a language called Ge’ez. The most fascinating part is the Jews and Christians living there during the Hellenistic or Greek period - both of these groups - love the Book of Enoch, and they used it regularly in worship. In fact, the Ethiopic Orthodox Church and the Eritrean Orthodox Church considered Enoch not only canonical, but a vibrant part of their tradition. Ethiopic Beta Israel also accepts the text as part of their canon. All these groups still use it to this day.

Now, the Book of Jubilees is another Qumran text that is drawn from Enoch’s Book of the Watchers and his Dream Visions. It also covers essentially the events of the Book of Genesis, focusing again and especially on the notorious Nephilim and their terrible offspring. So both Enoch and Jubilees were widely read and cited for centuries in the region.

Aaron: As we have already discussed, the book was likely composed during the Hellenistic period. Now, at that time, there was a high degree of conflict between groups within the Jewish communities, speaking to different perspectives on assimilation and preservation.

And, as many know, this period contained the Maccabean Revolt, which is related to the Hanukkah story of a group rising up against the dominant power. Earlier, you brought up the ways in which the book uses animals to represent humans. And sure enough, it deals with the revolt in this fable-like or metaphor-heavy manner.

Actor 1: But behold lambs were borne by those white sheep, and they began to open their eyes, and to see, and to cry to the sheep. Yea, they cried to them, but they did not hearken to what they said to them, but were exceedingly deaf, and their eyes were very exceedingly blinded. And I saw in the vision how the ravens flew upon those lambs and took one of those lambs, and dashed the sheep in pieces and devoured them. And I saw till horns grew upon those lambs, and the ravens cast down their horns; and I saw till there sprouted a great horn of one of those sheep, and their eyes were opened. And it looked at them and  their eyes opened, and it cried to the sheep, and the rams saw it and all ran to it. And notwithstanding all this, those eagles and vultures and ravens and kites still kept tearing the sheep and swooping down upon them and devouring them. Still the sheep remained silent, but the rams lamented and cried out. And those ravens fought and battled with it and  sought to lay low its horn, but they had no power over it.

Aaron: Now, talk to us about the ways in which portions of the books, such as the one we just heard, might've expressed a point of view about the conflicts of the time, and indicated a perspective, or been advocating for something.

Greg: Let’s zoom out a little bit before we get into those weeds. Let's talk about the notion of apocalypse itself that permeates this book. Etymologically, the word means “to unveil.” And Apocalypse is the actual title of the New Testament Book of Revelation in Greek. Okay, so what then is being unveiled? Well, it could be a lot of different things, like the heavens and what they look like, and what's it like to travel through them. But I like to think of apocalyptic literature as unveiling the mechanisms of justice, because in the current time, these mechanisms are veiled, are hidden. You can't see how justice is going to arrive in a  time where the people are crying out for it.

This happens in the Christian Book of Revelation in relation to Rome, for example. So, the oppressors must be punished for their sins. It happens in the Jewish Book of Enoch in relation to a Seleucid, or Greek, king named Antiochus Epiphanes the Fourth. And if he sounds like a jerk, he was. He was a classic mad king. And he even asked his subjects to call  him The Mad King. Like other mad kings, he also persecuted his subjects, especially his so called foreign ones, like the Jews. He was arrogant, bizarre and ruthless, and his offenses  eventually led to what we know as the Maccabean Revolt, as you mentioned.

Devious as he was, Antiochus was also able to split his Jewish subjects between traditionalist and the anti-assimilationist Maccabees. So some scholars suggest that the revolt was against Hellenistic Jews by the traditional Jews. The Pharisees come into play here too. Regardless,  the point is that society was fraying from above, in the form of this mad king, and from within, because of the tension you mentioned between traditional Judaism and the Hellenistic assimilationist version. For example, they might've changed their names to Greek names, the Jews living there during that time.

So when societies begin to fray and persecution occurs, apocalypse is born. Apocalyptic thinking sees no hope for the present and a breaking-in of the divine to set things right. And Enoch shows us that such evil reaches all the way into the heavens, and that a single figure can dramatically enter the picture and restore the world to justice and peace. And we call that figure the Messiah.

Actor 1: And in those days, a change shall take place for the holy and elect. And the light of day shall abide upon them, and glory and honor shall turn to the holy on the day of affliction on which evil shall have been treasured up against the sinners. And the righteous shall be  victorious in the name of the Lord of Spirits. And He will cause the others to witness this,  that they may repent and forgo the works of their hands. They shall have no honor through the name of the Lord of Spirits, yet through His name, shall they be saved. And the Lord of Spirits will have compassion on them, for His compassion is great. And He is righteous also in His judgment. And in the presence of His glory, unrighteousness also shall not maintain itself. At His judgment, the unrepentant shall perish before Him.

Aaron: Let’s talk about the project of aligning one's present with a mythical past. The book takes a character, Enoch, who is featured in Genesis, written many years before the book’s parts, and it spins a whole separate mythology around him. What function, emotionally,  spiritually, might this have served?

Greg: I used to teach at a Methodist-related school that was right down the street from a temple. And so I was in the religion department, and Rabbi Baylinson taught courses for us there. And then once a year, we'd take the students to temple. Every time I was there, there was this prayer.

Actor 5: V’ha-arev na Adonai Eloheinu, et divrei Torat’cha b’finu, uvfi...

Actor 3: …Lord, our God, make the words of Your Torah pleasant in our mouths, and in the  mouths of all Your people, the House of Israel. And may we, and our offspring, and the offspring of our offspring, and the offspring of your people, the house of Israel, all of us, be knowing of Your Name and studying Your Torah for its sake.

Greg: And I think that's it. I don't think you close that loop. I don't think you come to a conclusion. And this is one of the brilliant features of Judaism, is the willingness to stay in that tension. That tension between - yes, this is our past, it’s important, it’s vital, but we don't live there anymore. Who are we now? What does this mean now? Willingness to stay in that liminal zone, first of all, is an invitation to new revelation. It also requires you to do some work. First of all, you must learn the text like we're doing here. You must learn your culture, and then you must find arcs of meaning between the two and, you know what? We usually do.

Aaron: Greg, I hear that the ability to take that which was and make from it that which is serves a real purpose. It can be a way of continuing a lineage of belief or practice. How else do acts of such borrowing and continuation work in relationship to our mythological narratives in a more general sense?

Greg: This recalls Roland Barthes’ notion of myth as stolen language. Put another way, myths sometimes die because their references and relevance slip away. At other times, myths do not die. Rather, they are replaced by the gradual theft of their language. Obviously, sacred stories are prime material for the latter since they already have a devoted  audience and a divine history.

On the compositional level, this happens quite directly with Enoch and other so-called pseudepigraphic, or false, writings. Take a character in an older, sacred text; co-opt him for your own place in time; and use him to tell your own story of suffering and the loss of hope and the coming of salvation. This is the same process as Jesus being stolen from Osiris,  Mithra, and Sol Invictus.

Actor 6: For I hand it on to you as a first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day.

Greg: It’s Zoroaster overturning the daevas and making them part of a new monotheism.

Actor 1: “Come, come on, oh clouds, along the sky, through the air, down on the earth, by thousands of drops, by myriads of drops,“ thus say oh Holy Zarathustra. “To destroy sickness  altogether; to destroy death altogether.”

Greg: It’s also James Joyce stealing Odysseus and placing him in Dublin in a day, instead of in Ithaca for a lifetime.

Actor 3: Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked  thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crust crumbs, fried hencod’s roes. And most of all, he liked grilled mutton kidneys, which gave to his palette a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

Greg: It’s the Paiute medicine man Wovoka creating the Ghost Dance out of the Book of Revelation.

Actor 7: When you get home, you must make a dance to continue five days. Dance for successive nights, and the last night, keep up the dance until the morning of the fifth day, when all must bathe in the river and then disperse to their homes. You must all do in the  same way. The dead are still alive again. I do not know when they will be here, maybe this fall or in the spring. When the time comes, there will be no more sickness, and everyone will be young again.

Greg: In other words, it's what we do to make meaning. We use the stories we or others have told before to tell the stories we need to tell now, especially when now looks hopeless, and that's what Enoch is.

Actor 1: Observe ye how the trees cover themselves with green leaves and bear fruit. Wherefore, give ye heed, and know with regard to all His works, and recognize how He, that liveth forever, have made them so, and all His works go on thus from year to year forever and all the tasks which they accomplished for Him, and their tasks change not but according as God has ordained, so is it done and all shall rejoice and there shall be forgiveness of sins and every mercy and peace and forbearance. There shall be salvation unto them, a goodly light.

Aaron: I’m curious in particular about what you think a work like this book is saying about living in exile.

Greg: We imagine the early Christians, who were Jews, of course, in Rome. There were the zealots who were like, what are we doing? Let's just, you know, let's attack, let's resist, let's go after them. But that's the minority opinion and the minority response. Most people are going to tell stories. And I find that fascinating. And I mean story in the broadest sense. I mean art. I mean any imaginative product, really. Like, why would you go there? And I think it's because, first of all, you can go there. It's one thing they cannot take from you is your imagination and your ability to interpret these events and put them into a story that is, well, the Enoch story is triumphant, but it doesn't even have to be that. It just can be a story of survival. And I love the root of survival, which means “to over live,” “sur viva.” So much of our most powerful literature comes from these desperate, personal, but especially cultural situations that give rise to apocalypse.

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Aaron: Thank you for listening to this episode of The Dybbukast. Selections from the Book of Enoch, from the translation by Robert Henry Charles, were read by Joe Jordan. Additional readings were performed by Rachel Leah Cohen, Julie Lockhart, Clay Steakley, Diana Tanaka, Jonathan CK Williams and Mark McClain Wilson. Scholarship was provided by Dr. Greg Salyer. Our theme music is composed by Michael Skloff and produced by Sam K.S. The series is edited by Mark McClain Wilson. 

Thank you to the Covenant Foundation for its support of The Dybbukast and our development of related educational resources. Speaking of which, please visit us at www.theatredybbuk.org/podcast, where you will find links to a wide variety of materials related to the episode's explorations. And if you want to know more about theatre dybbuk’s work in general, please sign up for our mailing list on that same website, on the contact page. 

New episodes of The Dybbukast will be available every second Friday of the month. This episode was presented in collaboration with The Philosophical Research Society, and was produced by theatre dybbuk.

Actor 1: Let not your spirit be troubled on account of the times. For the Holy and Great One has appointed days for all things. And the righteous one shall rise from sleep; shall arise and walk in the paths of righteousness, and all his path and conversation shall be in eternal goodness and grace. And He will be gracious to the righteous and give him eternal uprightness, and He will give him power so that he shall be endowed with goodness and righteousness. And he shall walk in eternal light. And sin shall perish in darkness forever, and shall no more be seen from that day forevermore.