The Book of Enoch: Who Were the Watchers, Why Was It Removed, and Why Does It Matter Now?
*By Stephen Cartledge | Write Minded Books*
There is a book that was carried in the ark.
That, at least, is what several early church writers believed. The Book of Enoch — named after the man who walked with God and was simply *taken* (Genesis 5:24) — was widely read in the centuries surrounding the birth of Christ. The Dead Sea Scrolls contained multiple copies of it. The New Testament quotes it directly. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church has included it in its biblical canon for over fifteen centuries.
And yet most Western Christians have never heard of it.
That is not an accident. It is a decision — made by councils of men, in specific historical moments, for reasons that had as much to do with politics as theology. Understanding those reasons tells you something important, not just about the Book of Enoch, but about how the Bible we hold today was assembled, and what was left outside the door.
This post is an introduction to that story. It is also the backstory to *The Watchers* — my upcoming novel retelling the Book of Enoch, releasing August 14, 2026.
Who Was Enoch?
Enoch appears briefly in the genealogy of Genesis 5. Most of the entries follow the same pattern: he lived X years, he fathered Y, he lived another Z years, and he died. Enoch’s entry breaks the pattern in two ways.
First, his lifespan: 365 years, the shortest in the chapter and — not coincidentally — the number of days in a solar year.
Second, the ending: *”And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.”* No death. No burial. Just — gone.
That four-word departure launched centuries of speculation. Where did he go? What did he see? What did he know? The Book of Enoch is, in its own telling, his answer.
What Is the Book of Enoch?
The Book of Enoch is a collection of five sections, most likely written between the third century BC and the first century AD. Its oldest portions may date to as early as 300 BC, making them contemporaneous with the later books of the Hebrew Bible.
The most significant section — and the one that has generated the most theological controversy — is the Book of the Watchers, which occupies chapters 1 through 36.
It tells the story of the Watchers.
Who Were the Watchers?
The Watchers are introduced in Genesis 6:1-4 — a passage that has puzzled scholars, theologians, and curious readers for millennia:
*”When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose.”*
The Hebrew phrase translated as *sons of God* — *bene ha’elohim* — appears elsewhere in the Old Testament to refer specifically to angelic beings (Job 1:6, Job 2:1, Job 38:7). The Book of Enoch takes this identification seriously and tells the story in full.
Two hundred Watchers — angels assigned to observe and guard humanity — descended on Mount Hermon. Their leader was Semyaza. His second was Azazel. They made a pact, descended together, and took human wives.
The consequences were catastrophic.
Their offspring were the Nephilim — giants who consumed the earth’s resources, turned on humanity, and filled the world with violence. The Watchers themselves taught humanity forbidden knowledge: the forging of weapons, the art of seduction, sorcery, astrology, the cutting of roots.
God’s response was the flood. The Nephilim were destroyed. The Watchers were bound and imprisoned in darkness, awaiting the final judgment.
Enoch — uniquely righteous, uniquely positioned between heaven and earth — was called to serve as the messenger between the fallen Watchers and God. He carried their petition for mercy. He received God’s judgment. He saw things no living human was meant to see.
Daniel 4:17 references them without explanation, as if the reader should already know: *”This matter is by the decree of the watchers, and the demand by the word of the holy ones.”*
They were known. Their story was told. It was simply told in a book that got left out.
Why Was the Book of Enoch Left Out of the Bible?
This is the question that interests me most, because the answer is more complicated than most people assume.
The Book of Enoch was not universally rejected. For several centuries it was treated with considerable respect. Tertullian, one of the most significant early Christian writers, defended its authenticity and argued it deserved a place in the canon. The Ethiopian church included it without controversy. Early Christian art and writing drew on its imagery freely.
The problems that led to its exclusion were several.
**The angel-human relationships.** The explicit account of angels taking human wives proved increasingly uncomfortable as Christian theology developed. Later interpreters preferred to read Genesis 6’s *sons of God* as the righteous line of Seth rather than angels — an interpretation that made the passage theologically tidier, if textually strained.
**Questions of authorship.** If Enoch himself wrote the book before the flood, how did it survive? And could Moses, writing Genesis, have access to it? These questions nagged at its credibility in an era when provable apostolic or prophetic authorship was the primary criterion for inclusion.
**Its content was being used in ways that troubled church authorities.** Certain groups — including some Gnostic movements — were drawing heavily on Enochic literature to support theological positions the emerging orthodox church found problematic.
By the time the Western biblical canon was being formalised in the fourth and fifth centuries, the Book of Enoch had drifted to the margins. Jerome excluded it from the Vulgate. And so it largely disappeared from Western Christianity — until the eighteenth century, when an Ethiopian manuscript was brought to Europe and the full text was translated into English for the first time.
What the early church fathers knew, most Western Christians were encountering for the first time.
Why Does It Matter Now?
The Book of Enoch is not just ancient theology. Its themes map onto some of the most pressing questions of the present moment in ways that are difficult to ignore.
**The Disclosure Agenda.** In recent years, governments — including the United States — have begun formally acknowledging the existence of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena and non-human intelligence. The question of whether humanity has been observed and influenced by non-human beings is no longer fringe. The Book of Enoch has been asking that question for two and a half thousand years.
**Transhumanism.** One of the Watchers’ primary sins in Enoch was the mixing of categories — the corruption of the human through forbidden knowledge and genetic interference. The Nephilim were something new: neither fully angelic nor fully human. The questions that surround genetic engineering, AI consciousness, and human augmentation today are not entirely different in kind. They are questions about what it means to be human, and what happens when that boundary is crossed.
**Project Blue Book.** The US Air Force’s official investigation into UFO sightings ran from 1952 to 1969 and was officially closed without conclusions. What was being investigated, what was found, and what was buried is a question that has never been satisfactorily answered. *The Watchers* engages with that history directly.
The ancient text and the modern moment are in conversation. That is what drew me to this story.
5 Things Most People Don’t Know About the Book of Enoch
1. The New Testament quotes it directly.
Jude 1:14-15 quotes the Book of Enoch almost word for word: *”Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his holy ones, to execute judgment on all.”* This is a direct citation. Jude treats the Book of Enoch as a legitimate prophetic source.
2. Jesus may have referenced it.
Several scholars have noted that Jesus’ use of the phrase *Son of Man* — his most common self-designation — appears to draw on a specific figure in the Book of Enoch rather than Daniel alone. The Enochic Son of Man is a pre-existent heavenly figure who will come to judge the world. The parallels are substantial.
3. Multiple copies were found in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
When the Qumran community buried their library in the caves above the Dead Sea sometime before 68 AD, they included fragments of eleven different manuscripts of the Book of Enoch. It was clearly considered important scripture by the community that produced the scrolls.
4. It was preserved entirely in Ethiopia.
The complete text of the Book of Enoch survived in a single ancient language: Ge’ez, the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. When the Scottish explorer James Bruce brought three manuscripts back to Europe in 1773, it was the first time the Western world had access to the full text in over a millennium.
5. It describes a final judgment before Revelation does.
The Book of Enoch’s vision of the Great White Throne — the final judgment of angels and humans alike — predates the Book of Revelation by several centuries. Many of Revelation’s most striking images have Enochic precedent. The two texts are in deep dialogue with each other.
The Watchers — Coming August 14, 2026
*The Watchers: The Book of Enoch* is my retelling of this ancient text — a novel that takes the story of Enoch, the fallen Watchers, the Nephilim, and the judgment of heaven, and places it in conversation with the modern world: Project Blue Book, the Disclosure Agenda, transhumanism, and the question of what non-human intelligence means for humanity in 2026.
It is not a comfortable book. It is not meant to be.
The Book of Enoch was hidden for a reason. Whether that reason was good theology or institutional caution is a question worth sitting with.
*The Watchers* releases August 14, 2026.
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If you want to go deeper before the release — the history of the canon, the theology of the Watchers, the connections to current events — sign up for the Write Minded Books newsletter below. I’ll be sending out pre-release content, extracts, and the research that didn’t make it into the book.