GENERAL INTRODUCTION

§ 1. SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE BOOK.

In Gen. v. 24, it is said of Enoch that he walked with God. This expression was taken in later times to mean not only that he led a godly life, but also that he was the recipient of superhuman knowledge. It was not unnatural, therefore, that an Apocalyptic literature a genre of prophetic writing that developed in post-Exilic Jewish culture and was popular among early Christians began to circulate under his name in the centuries when such literature was common. In the present book, translated from the Ethiopic, we have large fragments of such a literature, proceeding from a variety of authors. Additional portions of this literature may be discovered in the coming years. Only recently two Slavonic manuscripts, which belong to this literature but are quite independent of the present book, have been printed in Russia.

The present book from the Ethiopic belongs to the second and first centuries B.C. All the writers of the New Testament were familiar with it, and were more or less influenced by it in thought and diction¹. It is quoted as a genuine production of Enoch by St. Jude, and as Scripture by St. Barnabas. The authors of the Book of Jubilees, the Apocalypse of Baruch, and IV Ezra relied on it. With the earlier Church Fathers and Apologists, it had all the weight of a canonical book, but towards the close of the third and the beginning of the fourth centuries, it began to be discredited and finally fell under the ban of the