God had hoped for happy, healthy lives for the life forms He created. He loved us and hoped that we would love Him in return. Most of us who have been in relationships with others understand that true love is something that can only be freely offered by one, not forced or stolen by another. So, God provided humanity with free will. God understood the possibility that man might not return God’s love or acknowledge Him. With true free will, man might someday even curse God for the gift of life.
The plotline
Lucifer, an archangel who wanted to usurp God, could not defeat God, because Lucifer was a created being just as man is, and God is God. However, Lucifer (aka the devil) understood that he could hurt God by alienating the people that God loved from their Creator, and he
began by doing precisely this while the first two humans were still in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were punished for eating fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It may be that God took the initiative to punish them. Or, it may be that punishment was the logical, preprogrammed result of disobedience and God simply did not intervene to spare Adam and Eve from the consequence of their action. I just don’t know. But we do know that God provided a ‘Plan B’ for the survival of humanity. At some point in the distant future, a Messiah would be born who was one hundred percent God while simultaneously one hundred percent Man. This sounds like a contradiction because our minds cannot process it. However, for the plan of salvation to work, the Messiah had to be both. But what if by then humans were no longer truly human, but somehow different?
Genesis 6:1–4 speaks of angelic beings known as the “Watchers.” The Watchers were powerful angels who had specific responsibilities, such as the custodianship of natural forces in the universe and also of human events. What a number of the Watchers could not control, however, were their passions. They were sexually attracted to the daughters of men and impregnated them. It would be foolish to speculate on the genetics of angels — if genetics even apply to angels — and I doubt even Thomas Aquinas would have touched this question. But clearly the offspring of humans and angels would not be human. More to follow on this.
Why did the Watchers have children with mortals? Satan’s plan might have been to corrupt the human gene pool so that generations later, true humans would have been replaced by nonhuman hybrids incapable of giving birth to a redeemer of the human race.
Are there missing books in the Bible?
This may seem irrelvant here, but it is a question that must be answered before we go further. The short answer is: “Not exactly.” There are sixty-six books in the Protestant Bible, but in the Roman Catholic Bible there are seventy-three. The seven additional books in the Catholic Bible are in the Old Testament and include Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus), and Baruch. These books are called the Apocrypha. Catholics consider them inspired — that is, divinely authored — otherwise they would not be included in Catholic Bibles.
When Martin Luther (1483-1546) came along and eventually launched the Protestant Reformation (though that was not his intent), he translated the Bible into German from the original Hebrew and Greek. He noted in his translation that these seven books “are not held equal to the Holy Scriptures and yet are useful and good to read.” So, he collected the seven books and inserted them at the end of the Old Testament, just before the New Testament. In the centuries that followed, the other emerging Protestant movements across Europe — Anglicans, Presbyterians, Baptists, and others — agreed more or less with Luther’s conclusions but completely dropped the Apocrypha from their own Bibles.
The Pseudepigrapha are books a “step lower” than the Apocrypha. In the case of the Pseudepigrapha, neither Catholics nor Protestants consider them to be the Word of God. Nor do the Jews as far as the Old Testament is concerned and of course Jews do not accept the New Testament either. There are sixty-five Old Testament Pseudepigraphal books alone and there are also many other New Testament Pseudepigraphal books. A number of these books claim to have famous authors such as Adam, Elijah, and Ezra, but for different reasons these books could not possibly have been written by these authors, themselves. So, both Church and Synagogue have considered them frauds. However, not every early Christian writer shared that opinion, and two of the Apostles may have quoted from one of the Pseudepigraphal books when they contributed to the Bible. It is this book, I Enoch, that I’ll draw on in this post.
I Enoch
I do not personally consider I Enoch to be the Word of God. The books in the Bible such as the Gospel of John, Acts of the Apostles, I Corinthians and Jude are infallible (i.e., without error). Enoch is not infallible though I do not personally know of any specific errors of fact. Nor would I trust the theology of Enoch when it differs from our creeds. And it may not. But even in that case Enoch is not inspired.
Enoch is a book clothed in mystery and very tempting to many naive people because it speaks of forbidden knowledge. But then, probably so do the Harry Potter books. The difference is where this knowledge comes from and what it might do if someone fills their mind with it. Just as wine coolers and marijuana were considered “gateway drugs” by some because they allow people to develop a taste for alcohol or weed, people who read Enoch may move on to something else that is much darker and further removed from the Word of God.
I don’t want to go into the specifics about why both Jews and Christians of the first and second centuries did not include I Enoch in their Holy Books. Several authors I respect from the early church period, such as Justin Martyr and Tertullian, speak of I Enoch with respect, and 20th century scholars were astonished when I Enoch turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls compiled in the centuries immediately preceding the birth of Christ. The members of the Essene community revered I Enoch almost as much as they did the authorized Old Testament scriptures, and some modern scholars believe that it might have been considered by the Essenes as tantamount to Scripture.
Angels
Angels are always referred to with masculine pronouns. With the possible exception of Lailah, who appears in rabbinic literature but not in Scripture, angels are male.
Nor do people become angels when they die. Angels are a species of their own. There are the rank-and-file angels we read about and occasionally hear about. For example, when I was in Vietnam, there was one evening when the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese attacked us with rockets and mortars. As the first salvo came in, I felt a pair of hands on my shoulder blades and found myself roughly pushed to the ground. A fraction of a second later there was an explosion near me, and I heard shrapnel flying past where I had been standing only a few seconds earlier. Once the attack was over and I had time to process this, I was convinced that an angel had pushed me to the ground in order for me to avoid injury, as there was no one else around me.
Then there are Archangels, which is a designation of rank in the angelic hierarchy. We know from our Bibles that there are two Archangels (Michael and Gabriel). If you are Catholic, you also know of a third Archangel (Raphael). 1 Enoch names another one (Uriel).
Then there are the Watchers, which is not a rank as Archangels are, but rather indicates the function of the angel. There are only three verses in Scripture that mention a Watcher, and that is in Daniel 4:13, 17, and 23. But it is these Watchers that are referred to in Genesis chapter six. Not all of the Watchers, however, disobeyed God and left the heavens. Some apparently remain faithful until this day.
Then there are the fallen angels that joined Lucifer in his rebellion against God long before the events of chapter six.
Genesis and the Watchers
This is a good place to introduce the bible verses in this essay. These are the first eight verses in Chapter Six of Genesis and are translated from the New International Version of the Bible:
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.
Then the LORD said, “My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal ; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.”
The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.
The LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.
The LORD regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.
So the LORD said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.”
But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.
Note the reference to the Nephilum in this passage. When the Nephilum — those beings with angels as fathers and mortal women as mothers — died, their spirits could not travel to the domain of the angels because they were not wholly angelic, nor could they enter the place (Sheol) where human souls went in that era, because they were not truly human. The classical hypothesis, and perhaps the most reasonable one, is that their spirits were condemned to roam the earth as demons. They had the sinful desires of ordinary people, along with the perverse, rebellious nature of their fathers, and they remain on earth today to entice people through lascivious means or torture them in destructive ways. Above all, they needed some man, woman or beast to inhabit. See for example Matthew 8: 28ff.
Enoch agrees. He writes:
But now the giants who are born from the union of the spirits and the flesh shall be called evil spirits upon the earth, and on the earth shall be their dwelling. Evil spirits have come out of their bodies. Because from the day that they were created from the holy ones, and their primal origin is from the holy foundation, they will be evil spirits on earth and evil spirits shall they be called. The spirits of heaven, in heaven is their dwelling; but the spirits engendered on earth, on earth is their dwelling. And the spirits of the giants lead astray, do violence, make desolate, and attack and wrestle and hurl upon the earth and cause illnesses. They eat nothing, but do not hunger or thirst. They are invisible to them, and cause afflictions. And these spirits shall rise up against the children of men and against the women because they have proceeded from them.
Ways in which the Watchers corrupted mankind
Forges, metal working and weapons of war
The purpose of war is to lay waste to entire tracts of lands killing and maiming thousands in the process. The glorification of war celebrates the Watcher Azazel instead of God Almighty.
Astrology and divination
The stars and planets do not govern the fate of mankind. Only God does that. God intended the lights inthe sky to separate day and night and months and years. The need for astrologers has created a priesthood
Putting this all in perspective
I Enoch is a book that adds detail to the days before the Great Flood and about the coming end times. In this book, the Watchers (i.e., fallen angels) are condemned for giving the descendants of Adam and Eve fire, showing them how to process ore and use fire to make weapons of war. I Enoch also warns against the occult arts such as astrology, potions and spells, the use of drugs, of seductive but unnatural enhancements to the human body, predicting the future, and setting the calendar by the moon. So, what is the big deal?
There are three underlying issues that I Enoch reveals: (1) people receiving new technology and far-reaching lifestyle changes before they are ready for them; (2) people receiving dangerous enhancements and harmful knowledge; and (3) being taught to depend on and trust in these “gifts” instead of God Himself.
Let’s look at each of these points briefly. Take a gun. A gun can be used by some bad person to rob a merchant, but it can also protect you from the same robber if he tries to harm you. Yet, no one would approve of letting a toddler have access to a weapon. such as a gun. They are much too young. They don’t know what a gun is capable of. They don’t understand death.
Another example. Wine contains alcohol. Jesus clearly approved of wine — producing wine was His first recorded miracle. But you would not let your three-year-old drink it because he is too young. Then, too, our society protects children from sexual predators as much as possible. Imagine the horror of what happens when small children are abducted by evil men and women! Young lives take turns for the worse and often for much of the victim’s life when a priest molests a young boy or a father his stepdaughter.
Then there is the problem with the quality of what the Watchers provided. Whatever God provides for us is pure. Lucifer has only cheap counterfeits and unpleasant surprises. Even in 2026, in our modern, enlightened society, it is not safe for women to leave their drinks unattended in public. Signs are sometimes posted in clubs warning people not to leave their drinks unattended, and
bartenders are routinely trained to watch for potential predators and unattended drinks. But they cannot observe everything. Dazzle and Ecstasy are among the drugs slipped into someone’s drink to make them vulnerable to robbery or sexual violence. Drugs such as fentanyl, cocaine, heroin, and similar substances are used by predatory individuals to exploit and control vulnerable people.
Then there are poisons, such as Epibatidine that Russia used on opposition leader Alexei Navalny without success before his death and Gelsemium that Russia used to kill whistleblower Alexander Perepilichny while he was in London, in 2012. Add to this chemical warfare agents such as Sarin and a lunatic can cause mass murder on an industrial scale.
Lastly some of the practices mentioned in I Enoch are never permitted by God. An astrologer may assure you of good times ahead, but it is not because of any planetary alignment. Mars does not make you bellicose nor Venus a good lover.
To put as fine of a point as possible on all of this, the apostle Paul wrote in Romans 1:20-32:
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.
Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools
and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.
They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones.
In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done.
They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips,
slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents;
they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy.
Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.
Ways in which the Watchers corrupted mankind
Poisons, potions and spells
Magical power is not just superstition, and this actuak power acts independently from God, allowing the initiate to control the invisible world as a free agent through poisons, magical potions and spells, some of which have an abortifacient effect.
Worshipping heavenly bodies
The increasing presence of sin in the world was said to have a corrupting affect on the moon’s orbit. The mapping mentioned by Azazel does not appear to affect the scientific study of the moon necessary to calculate rocket trajectories.
Tartarus (it’s the pits!)
In the New Testament, “Tartarus” is mentioned specifically in 2 Peter 2:4. This passage refers to the punishment of fallen angels who sinned and were cast into a place of darkness:
For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment.
Your Bible might use the word “hell” for this verse, but the word in the Greek manuscripts is actually tartarōsas (ταρταρώσας), which is a different place than hell.
In this verse, the term translated as “hell” in many English versions is derived from the Greek word “Tartarus.” The phrase suggests a place of confinement for these rebellious angels. It reinforces the notion of Tartarus as a deep abyss in Greek mythology, often associated with a place of punishment or confinement. From the Greek author Hesiod we learn of the impossibility of escape, and the ferocious winds and noise that howl through Tartarus 24/7 forever, though Hesoid’s book The Theoogony is not inspired, of course, so this may not be true.
The Watchers are beings who have been largely forgotten. The reason for their eternal captivity is that they are so depraved and so powerful and seductive that God cannot possibility allow them loose once again.
It’s worth noting that Tartarus does not appear frequently in biblical texts outside of this reference, and its specific connotation within Christian theology is largely tied to the understanding of divine judgment and the fate of disobedient spiritual beings. The term plays a crucial role in discussions about the afterlife and the nature of hell in some Christian traditions.
Footnotes
The Essenes were a sect in Israel during the century or so before Christ and for most of the century in which Jesus lived. They were a third religious faction, along with the Pharisees and Sadducees. Jewish historians who lived at the time estimated the number of Essenes to be 4,000. They may have been considered by people in Jesus’s day as “fanatics,” and John the Baptist, who was a relative of Jesus, was thought by many to have been a member of that community. Probably the simplest way to think of them would be as similar to Benedictine monks, as they wore a distinctive garment, practiced celibacy (with exceptions), and consecrated their lives to holiness and the service of God. While their ‘headquarters’ was in the desert settlement of Qumran, they were also found in various cities throughout biblical Israel.
Nephilim (נְפִילִים (nəfilîm) in Hebrew. The Nephilim all died off before or during the Flood. This is the word used to descibe the hybrids in the Jewish Torah. It correlates with gigantes in the Greek translation, called the LXX.
Giants. Gigantes (γίγαντες), also (נְפִילִים (nəfilîm) in the Hebrew account.
Sheol: This is the place in Hebrew Old Testament teachings that the souls of Jewish people go to when the person dies. Jesus mentions Sheol in his parable about Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16:19ff). The Greek correlate to Sheol is Hades, wrongly referred to as hell.
The elements in I Enoch.
Lightninng
There too, my eyes beheld the secrets of the lightning and the thunder; and the secrets of the winds, how they are distributed as they blow over the earth: the secrets of the winds, of the dew, and of the clouds. 1 Enoch 41:3.
Snow
When the hoar-frost and snow with their chilliness, and all the snow-storms with all their plagues fall upon you, in those days ye shall not be able to stand before them.
I Enoch 100:13
Some FAQs about I Enoch
Q: How can sin on Earth affect the motion of the sun, moon, comets, and so on as Enoch believes?
A: Enoch opens the door to several possibilities, but the easiest to understand is that heavenly bodies like the moon have an angel that guides them, as Scripture itself implicitly notes. The lifeless rock we call the moon cannot obviously make moral choices or break the laws of physics, but the attending angel may be able to do so because God has created them to be custodians. And just as the Watchers went awry and caused great harm in the visible and invisible worlds, Enoch seems to suggest that sin can cause certain perturbations in the moon’s orbit if the angel responsible for the moon is affected. Perhaps Enoch would use Comet 3I/ATLAS as an example if here were here now? You might also find this essay interesting. See also God’s reply to Job (Job 38:31–33). Job as a mere mortal cannot do what God challenges him to do, but the insinuation is that God can, and Biblical prophecy teaches us that someday he will.
Or, you can think of this in another way. The Second Law includes the concept of entropy where by order becomes increasingly chaotic over time. Windup mantle clocks suffer from entropy over generations as mechanical parts produce friction and then heat, causing the mechanisms to eventually fail. Sin or the corruption of the natural order may have the same effect.
Q: How can we reconcile the laws of physics with the notion of invisible angels moving astral bodies around?
A: Only several years ago, NASA launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). As soon as the spacecraft crashed on Dimorphos, the moonlet it was aiming for, the kinetic energy of the impact shifted the equilibrium of Dimorphos, changing its orbital period around Didymos. If the spacecraft were heavier and Dimorphos were larger and heavier, the collision might have allowed Dimorphos to strike our planet, causing millions of deaths. Left alone, this might never have happened. But an unplanned event disturbed the natural order of things. It is at times like that where you appreciate a Watcher.
There is also the “three-body problem,” which launched a Netflix series. The outgassing of a comet can cause minor modifications in its orbit, as can tidal forces when a meteor or asteroid passes a larger body with much more mass. Gravitational waves, density variations in dark matter, and plain chaos theory can all make mischief with extinction-level-event consequences for people on our planet.
Kepler’s Third Law (equation below) is one of several that allows us to sleep at night. But not everything is predictable.
Q: Does 1 Enoch teach that God is against cosmetics and jewelry?
A: This is a controversial question for me to answer, living in a culture that values the personal image of people so much (when God does not), even and especially if it is contrived. Personally, I have no problem with makeup or accessories used in moderation. I will point out that when models starve themselves to keep a job, when people use flashy makeup to extremes, when there are more clicks on stories of nearly nude attendees at the Oscars and Grammys than on who actually won any awards, when we inject poison (botulinum toxin) into our skin and have breast-enhancing surgeries for nonmedical reasons at record rates, or promote gender-affirming surgeries for children, we probably are not living the dream that God planned for us (again, in my personal opinion). It is a free country, but are we doing things to excess, or things that are not wise at all? I would happily welcome anyone described above into my home and share a meal with them, nor would I judge them, because I know God would welcome them home if they called on Him (Joel 2:32). The answer I’ve included here is just my personal opinion, especially after consulting 1 Enoch. And I don’t claim to have the mind of God.
Q: There are so many angels named in 1 Enoch. How many do we know are actually authentic angels?
A: We know for sure that Lucifer exists. We know from the sixty-six standard books of the Bible that Michael and Gabriel are real. We know from the Apocrypha that there is an angel named Raphael, and most likely there is an angel named Uriel.
Q: Should we try to contact our angel?
A: Absolutely not. The reason I say this is that there are hundreds of thousands of spirits that would love to lead you astray by impersonating “your” angel. Nor should you seek “spirit guides” for the same reason.
P.S. If you have a question about this post, please leave it in the comment section and I will try to answer it.
Thanks to Eliza P. @elizaisseliza at Fiverr for graphic assistance. If you have any editing, AI, or visual needs, she is one of the best freelancers available.
