Questions Readers Bring to This Canon

The books in this canon are now discussed by millions of people, and the discussion arrives with questions — some ancient, some minted last year. This commentary sets out the main ones, and the answers that have actually been given to them by the traditions and scholars who hold them. It is editorial commentary, not scripture, and it takes no position a reader is asked to share. Where the historical record answers a question, we say so; where it does not, we say that instead.

Translation note. Unless otherwise stated, scriptural quotations in this commentary follow the texts used in this edition: the American Standard Version (1901) for the standard Old and New Testament books; Sir Lancelot C.L. Brenton’s Septuagint (1851) for deuterocanonical and Septuagintal texts where quoted; and R.H. Charles’s public-domain translations for 1 Enoch and Jubilees. Quotations from early Christian writers, rabbinic sources, and modern scholars follow the source translations identified in the source note at the end of this commentary.

The sons of God and the Nephilim

The most asked question about this canon is also one of the oldest questions raised by it: who were the Nephilim? Genesis raises the question in a brief four-verse passage and does not answer it: “the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all that they chose… The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came unto the daughters of men… the same were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown” (Genesis 6:2, 4). The Western Bible preserves the seed of the story: the “sons of God” take the “daughters of men” as wives, and the Nephilim appear in the same passage. But Genesis does not identify the sons of God, and it does not unfold the story. Three answers have been given, and all three are old.

The first answer is the one this canon preserves whole. The Book of Enoch tells the story at length: “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’” (1 Enoch 6:2). Two hundred of these Watchers, under their leader Semjaza, descend; their fellow Azazel teaches men “to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates”; the giants born of the unions fill the earth with violence until “Michael, Uriel, Raphael, and Gabriel looked down from heaven and saw much blood being shed upon the earth,” and the flood is sent — Uriel dispatched to the son of Lamech with the warning “Hide thyself!” (1 Enoch 8–10). The Book of Jubilees, also canonical in Ethiopia, tells the same story of “the angels of God” (Jubilees 5). This angelic reading was not invented by these books’ admirers; it was simply the ancient reading. The Greek Bible that Philo of Alexandria read in the first century said “angels of God” outright, and Philo wrote a treatise on the verse. The earliest Christian writers took it the same way: Justin Martyr wrote that “the angels transgressed this appointment, and were captivated by love of women, and begot children who are those that are called demons”; Athenagoras, that of these angels who “fell into impure love of virgins… were begotten those who are called giants.” The New Testament itself stands nearby: Jude quotes Enoch by name — “Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied” — using the very epithet the book gives its own hero (1 Enoch 60:8), and 2 Peter speaks of the God who “spared not angels when they sinned, but cast them down to hell… to be reserved unto judgment.”

The second answer arose in the third century and conquered the West. The earliest writer known to propose it, Julius Africanus, wrote that “the descendants of Seth are called the sons of God on account of the righteous men and patriarchs who have sprung from him”: the sons of God are the godly line of Seth, the daughters of men the line of Cain, and the sin is intermarriage, not invasion. Augustine settled the question in this direction for a millennium — the sons of God were “the sons of Seth, sunk into this community when they forsook righteousness” — and the Reformers inherited his verdict; Calvin called the angelic reading “that ancient figment… abundantly refuted by its own absurdity.”

The third answer is the synagogue’s. Targum Onkelos renders the phrase “the sons of the rulers,” and Genesis Rabbah records that Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai called them “the children of judges” — and cursed those who translated literally. In this reading the offense is tyranny: great men taking whatever women they chose. A modern scholarly variant reads them as self-deifying kings of the ancient Near East (Kline, 1962).

Modern scholarship has largely returned to taking the first reading seriously as the oldest recoverable one — the standard commentaries on 1 Enoch (Nickelsburg; Nickelsburg and VanderKam) and the reception history of the fallen-angel tradition (Reed) treat the Watchers story as the earliest developed interpretation of Genesis 6, and a popular scholarly literature (Heiser) has carried that case to a wide readership. None of this settles what a reader should believe; it settles only what readers have believed, and for how long.

That is why the question feels new and is not. The Western canons kept the verse but not the book that explains it; the Ethiopian canon kept both. A reader meeting the Watchers today — in whatever register the internet now retells them, genetic, extraterrestrial, or apocalyptic — is meeting, usually unawares, the oldest interpretation of Genesis on record, stripped of the tradition that carried it. This edition prints the texts as the translators rendered them and takes no side among the three readings. The books are here; the question comes with them.

Enoch and the end of days

The Book of Enoch is, among other things, a book about the end — and every age that rediscovers it asks whether it means its own. The book invites the question from its first sentence: “The words of the blessing of Enoch, wherewith he blessed the elect and righteous, who will be living in the day of tribulation, when all the wicked and godless are to be removed” (1 Enoch 1:1). Eight verses later comes the oracle the New Testament quotes outright — “And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of His holy ones” — the sentence Jude cites as prophecy: “Behold, the Lord came with ten thousands of his holy ones” (Jude 14). A reader of this volume holds both ends of that quotation, and can see for himself that the apostolic age already read Enoch eschatologically.

What the book contains is grander and stranger than any timetable. The fallen Watchers are sentenced and bound “for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth, till the day of their judgement” (1 Enoch 10). History is twice told through to its end: once as the great beast-fable scholars call the Animal Apocalypse, which closes before the throne — “And I saw till a throne was erected in the pleasant land, and the Lord of the sheep sat Himself thereon, and the other took the sealed books and opened those books before the Lord of the sheep” (1 Enoch 90) — and once as the Apocalypse of Weeks, which counts the world’s course in great “weeks”: “And after that there shall be another, the eighth week, that of righteousness” (1 Enoch 91). At the book’s center stand the Parables, with their vision of “One who had a head of days, And His head was white like wool, And with Him was another being whose countenance had the appearance of a man” — “that Son of Man… who revealeth all the treasures of that which is hidden” (1 Enoch 46). The imagery stands beside Daniel’s, in this same volume — “one coming with the clouds of heaven as the Son of man, and he came on to the Ancient of days,” whose hair is “as pure wool” (Daniel 7:9, 13) — and beside the Gospels’, where Jesus answers the high priest with “the Son of man… coming with the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:62) and is given “authority to execute judgment, because he is a son of man” (John 5:27). What runs between these texts — which is echoing which, and when the Parables were written — is among the most debated questions in the field; an entire scholarly volume exists to revisit it (Boccaccini, ed., 2007). The standard commentaries (Nickelsburg; Nickelsburg and VanderKam) treat 1 Enoch as a library composed across centuries by many hands, each part speaking to the crisis of its own day in the coded language of apocalyptic.

The modern question is different. A scholar of the book’s online reception, Anne Kreps, describes the reading now common in digital communities: “These groups reach for the Book of Enoch to discern the schedule of the end times and identify the major players of the apocalypse” — and she observes that by spiritualizing the apocalyptic symbols, such readers can keep “an eschatological discourse of literal predictions without being beholden to a timeline and the possibility of prophetic failure.” The church that preserved the book made a plainer use of it: it counted Enoch among the scriptures and carried it, copied and read, through the centuries — a public book, not a sealed one.

This commentary dates nothing and decodes nothing. The honest statement of the matter is short: the eschatology is in the text; the timetable is the reader’s addition. The book’s own first verse already speaks past its first audience — to “the elect and righteous, who will be living in the day of tribulation” — which is precisely why every generation that finds the book asks whether it means them. The visions are printed here as the translators rendered them. Whether a book like this belongs among the scriptures at all is a different question, and the next one.

Treasured there, doubted here

Why is the same book scripture in Ethiopia and apocrypha in the West? The question sounds modern; the disagreement is as old as the canon lists themselves. The first thing an honest answer must say is that “the canon” was never one decision, made once, by one church.

In the year 367 Athanasius of Alexandria circulated a festal letter that drew the line his church would keep. Of the books he listed he wrote: “These are fountains of salvation… Let no man add to these, neither let him take ought from these.” Yet even he named a second shelf — “other books besides these, not indeed included in the Canon, but appointed by the Fathers to be read by those who newly join us,” Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, and Tobit among them — and reserved the word “apocrypha” for forgeries, “an invention of heretics.” A generation later the two greatest Latin authorities disagreed with each other. Jerome, translating from the Hebrew, ruled that “what is outside of them must be placed aside among the Apocryphal writings”; Augustine counted “Tobias, and Esther, and Judith, and the two books of Maccabees” in the canon, and reckoned Wisdom and Sirach among the books that “have attained recognition as being authoritative.” The West lived inside that disagreement for eleven centuries, reading the disputed books in its churches while its scholars kept repeating Jerome’s doubts. The Reformation finally forced the choice — both ways at once. Of the disputed books the Church of England’s Article VI ruled that the Church “doth read [them] for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine”; the Council of Trent received them “with an equal affection of piety” and pronounced anathema on any one who “receive not, as sacred and canonical, the said books entire with all their parts.” Both rulings still stand. The 66-book Bible and the 73-book Bible are not an original and a corruption; they are the two halves of an old argument.

No book shows the argument more sharply than Enoch. Its early friends were serious ones: Jude quotes it as prophecy, a fact every later doubter had to manage. Tertullian, around the year 200, knew the objection and answered it — “the Scripture of Enoch… is not received by some, because it is not admitted into the Jewish canon either,” he reported, and countered that “nothing at all must be rejected by us which pertains to us,” even arguing that the book could have crossed the Flood in Noah’s family memory. A generation later Origen conceded what the churches around him practiced: “the books which bear the name Enoch do not at all circulate in the Churches as divine.” Augustine closed the question for the Latin West: whatever Jude implied Enoch had written, the books in circulation could not be trusted — “their antiquity brought them under suspicion, and it was impossible to ascertain whether these were his genuine writings.” The exclusion was reasoned and recorded. It was also, in the end, total — which is a story for the next section.

Ethiopia stands on the other side of the same evidence. The church’s canon — traditionally reckoned at eighty-one books, and counted for this edition in “The Ethiopian Canon, and Where This Edition Sits” — kept Enoch and Jubilees as scripture without interruption: the books the Greek and Latin mainstream let fall away went on being copied in Ge’ez, century after century, as the word of God. Set side by side, the two histories are not a right church and a wrong one. They are two postures of faithfulness. One guards the boundary: nothing doubtful may bind the conscience — that is Jerome’s instinct, and Article VI’s. The other guards the inheritance: nothing received may be let go — that is the instinct of the church that carried Enoch when no one else did. Each posture can describe the other as a failure. Neither is carelessness.

This edition takes no side between them. It prints the broader canon because that is the tradition it serves; it counts that canon as the standard scholarly enumeration counts it; and it labels what each book is, so the reader always knows what is in hand. But to say the West doubted these books is not yet to say what is now so often claimed — that it hid them. Doubt and concealment are different charges, and the difference is the next question.

Was this canon suppressed?

The loudest claim now made about these books is not that they were doubted but that they were hidden: that someone — Rome, the kings, the translators — knew what the books contained, feared it, and took them away from the people. The charge deserves a serious answer, and a serious answer has to begin by separating three words that the claim runs together. A book may be rejected: examined and ruled out, in the open. It may be lost: not destroyed by anyone, simply no longer copied until no copy remains. Or it may be suppressed: known, possessed, and deliberately withheld. These are three different histories, and the books of this canon passed through the first two. The record does not show the third.

The rejection is the part no one hid. The previous section quoted it happening: canon lists drawn up and circulated, Origen reporting plainly which books the churches did and did not receive, Augustine writing down his reasons in a book that became required reading for a thousand years. Whatever else this was, it was public. A verdict published, copied, and taught is a strange instrument of concealment.

The loss is the part the charge mistakes for theft. Enoch was composed in Aramaic — eleven fragments of it were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls in Qumran’s fourth cave, and their edition (Milik, 1976) let scholars read, on leather two thousand years old, words long known only from Ethiopia. It was translated into Greek; Greek excerpts survive in the chronicle of the Byzantine monk George Syncellus. And there the Western trail thins out. Once the churches of the Greek and Latin world stopped reading the book, their scribes stopped copying it — parchment was dear, and no one preserves what no one reads — until, after some centuries, there was nothing left to find. The surviving record contains councils that declined to list the book and scholars who doubted it; it contains no order to destroy it. What it shows is not a vault but a silence.

What broke the silence was Ethiopia. The full Book of Enoch survives entire only in Ge’ez, because the Ethiopian church kept it as scripture and kept copying it. In 1773 the Scottish traveler James Bruce returned from Abyssinia with three manuscript copies; in 1821 Richard Laurence published the first English translation of any kind; Dillmann’s critical edition followed in 1851, and R.H. Charles’s translation — the one printed in this volume — in 1912. Note what happened the moment the West had the book again: it printed it, translated it, and commented on it, openly and continuously, from that day to this. That is not the behavior of a suppressor. The reason anyone can read 1 Enoch today is not that a vault was finally forced; it is that Ethiopia never needed one.

There remains the kernel that makes the charge feel true, and honesty requires stating it. Books really did disappear from the Bibles in English-speaking homes. The Apocrypha that the King James translators had set between the Testaments was demoted by the Reformation’s rule — read “for example of life,” not for doctrine — and in 1826 the British and Foreign Bible Society, the great engine of cheap mass-printed Bibles, resolved to print and circulate it no longer. The Bibles the Society spread thereafter went out without those books, and within a few generations English readers had grandparents’ Bibles with “extra” pages their own Bibles lacked. The absence people sense is real. But its object is misidentified: what was dropped was the Reformation’s demoted Apocrypha — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Maccabees. Enoch was never in any English Bible to begin with — its first English translation of any kind was Laurence’s in 1821 — so there was nothing to remove it from. Scholars of the book’s modern reception have traced how, all the same, readers came to approach it as a “lost” book of the Bible (Kreps; the full reception history is told in Reed). A lost book is a better story than a doubted one. It is simply not, in this case, the documented one.

So: rejected — yes, openly, and on reasons the rejecters wrote down. Lost — yes, in the West, for something like a thousand years. Suppressed — that is the one history the record does not support. One form of the charge remains, though, and it is the most specific: that the King James Bible itself is where the removal happened. It deserves a precise answer, and it is the last question.

The King James Bible and this canon

No comparison is staged more often than “King James versus Ethiopian,” and no claim in it is repeated more confidently than this one: that King James stripped the Bible down to sixty-six books. The verifiable part comes first. The King James Bible of 1611 was an eighty-book Bible: thirty-nine books of the Old Testament, twenty-seven of the New — and fourteen books of Apocrypha, printed in a separate section between the Testaments under the heading “The Books called Apocrypha.” Whoever made the English Bible a sixty-six-book book, then, it was not King James; his translators bound the disputed books into the volume. The sixty-six-book form arrived by stages over the next two centuries: the Articles had already demoted those books to reading “for example of life”; printings without them grew common; and in 1826 the Bible Society that supplied the English-speaking world resolved to circulate them no longer. “The kings reduced it” compresses two hundred years of canon rulings and printing practice into a single villain. The documented history is slower, duller, and freely available — which is itself the point.

The second claim is that the Ethiopian Bible is “older.” Ethiopia’s real superlatives need no exaggeration. The Garima Gospels — radiocarbon-dated, the earlier of them to roughly the years 390–570 — are believed to be the earliest surviving complete illuminated Christian manuscript; the complete Book of Enoch survives in Ge’ez and nowhere else; this canon preserves whole books the rest of Christendom lost. All of that is true, and this edition exists because of it. But “older than the King James” compares a canon with a translation. As translations, both traditions render texts older than themselves; the oldest complete New Testament anywhere is the fourth-century Greek Codex Sinaiticus; and the originals outrank every copy. “Older” is a property of particular manuscripts and particular readings, weighed one at a time — not a trophy one Bible holds over another. Where this canon genuinely preserves the older book or the older reading, the apparatus of this edition says so, and says where the evidence is.

The third claim is that the name of God was taken out of the Bible, and that an Ethiopian Bible puts it back. Most English Bibles do render the four-letter Hebrew name as “the LORD”; the King James printed the form “Jehovah” just seven times. But the convention was never a secret, and undoing it required no hidden manuscript — only a translator’s decision, taken openly in 1901, when the American Standard Version rendered the name “Jehovah” throughout the Old Testament, in 6,823 places. The American Standard Version is the translation whose Old Testament this edition reprints. A reader of this volume therefore meets the name on nearly every Old Testament page — “And Jehovah said, My spirit shall not strive with man for ever” (Genesis 6:3) — more than six thousand times in all, and not because of anything Ethiopian: because of a committee of American scholars in 1901, who published their reasoning. That is what the “restored name” actually is — a rendering choice, available to any honest translator. It is worth adding, since editions are now sold on the promise of the restored name: at least one widely sold edition advertises it while printing “Lord” throughout its text. The name was never the canon’s secret. It is the translator’s decision, and an honest edition tells you which decision its translators made.

Strip the conspiracy away and the real differences remain — better ones. The canons differ, for the reasons the third section gave. The base texts differ: within this edition alone, the Old and New Testaments are translated from the Hebrew and Greek (American Standard Version, 1901), the deuterocanon from the Greek Septuagint (Brenton, 1851), Enoch and Jubilees from the Ge’ez (Charles, 1902–1912) — and each book’s source is named where it stands. Readings differ accordingly, verse by verse, for reasons a reader can look up rather than take on faith. That is the honest version of “King James versus Ethiopian”: not a theft and a restoration, but two long traditions of carrying old books into new languages, with their choices showing.

Five questions, one method. Every answer in these pages has been of the same kind: name the positions, quote the record, attach the sources, and take no side the reader is asked to share. The books are here, with their histories attached. What a reader believes about them is — as it has always been — the reader’s own work.

Sources: Scriptural quotations in this commentary follow the texts assigned to those books in this edition: the American Standard Version (1901) for the standard Old and New Testament books, including Genesis, Jude, 2 Peter, Mark, and John; Brenton’s Septuagint (1851) for deuterocanonical and Septuagintal passages where quoted, including Daniel; and R.H. Charles’s public-domain translations of 1 Enoch (1912) and Jubilees (1902). Patristic and early Christian quotations follow the public-domain translations of the Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series: Justin Martyr, Second Apology 5; Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians 24; Tertullian, On the Apparel of Women I.3; Julius Africanus, Chronography, fragment 2; Origen, Against Celsus V.54; Augustine, City of God XV.22–23 and On Christian Doctrine II.8; and Athanasius, Festal Letter 39 (AD 367). Jerome’s preface to Samuel and Kings is quoted in its standard English rendering; Calvin from the standard nineteenth-century English translation of his Commentary on Genesis; the Council of Trent, Session IV (1546), from J. Waterworth’s translation (1848); and the Articles of Religion (1571) from the received text. Philo, On the Giants, is cited in C.D. Yonge’s translation; Targum Onkelos and Genesis Rabbah are cited in the English renderings published by Sefaria. Modern scholarship cited: G.W.E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1 (Hermeneia, 2001), and G.W.E. Nickelsburg and J.C. VanderKam, 1 Enoch 2 (2012); A.Y. Reed, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity (2005); G. Boccaccini, ed., Enoch and the Messiah Son of Man (2007); J.T. Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4 (1976); M.G. Kline, “Divine Kingship and Genesis 6:1–4,” Westminster Theological Journal 24 (1962); M.S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm (2015); and A. Kreps, “The ‘Lost’ Book of Enoch and Christian Vernacular Fundamentalism” (Enoch Seminar, 2023). The canonical enumeration follows R.W. Cowley (1974) and B.A. Asale (2016), as elsewhere in this edition. Manuscript datings, including the Garima Gospels and Codex Sinaiticus, follow the published radiocarbon studies and standard catalogues.