should have been included but were not—reside in our possession.”
Leaning closer to the scroll, I said, “It is difficult to read. Is it Vulgate?”
“Let me read it for you,” Dr. Seraphina said, smoothing the scroll once again with her gloved hand.
“‘And the men took me and brought me to the second heaven, and showed me the darkness, and there I
saw the prisoners suspended, reserved for and waiting the eternal judgment. And these angels were
gloomy in appearance, more than the darkness of the earth. And they unceasingly wept every hour, and
I said to the men who were with me: ”Why are these men continually tortured? ’””
I turned the words over in my mind. Although I had spent years reading the old texts, I had never
heard anything like it before. “What is it?”
“Enoch,” Gabriella said, instantly. “He has just entered the second heaven.”
“The second?” I asked, confused.
“There are seven,” Gabriella said authoritatively. “Enoch visited each one and wrote of what he
found there.”
“Go,” Dr. Seraphina said, gesturing to a bookshelf that spanned the entire wall of the room. “On the
farthest shelf, you will find the Bibles.”
I followed Dr. Seraphina’s directions. After choosing a Bible I found to be particularly lovely—
with a thick leather cover and a hand-stitched binding, a book that was heavy and difficult to carry—I
brought it back to the table and placed it before my professor.
“You’ve chosen my favorite,” Dr. Seraphina said, as if my choice confirmed her faith in my
judgment. “I saw this same Bible as a girl, when I first announced to the council that I would be an
angelologist. It was at their famous conference of 1919, after Europe had been ravaged by the war. I
had an instinctual attraction to the profession. There hadn’t been an angelologist in my family before,
which is rather strange—angelology runs in families. Yet at sixteen years old, I knew exactly what I
would be and was not in the least shy about it!” Dr. Seraphina paused, collected herself, and said,
“Now, come closer. I have something to show you.”
She placed the Bible on the table and opened the pages slowly, carefully. “Here is Genesis 6. Read
it.”
We read the passage, taken from the 1297 translation of Guyart des Moulins:
And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born to them
beautiful and fair daughters. And the angels, the sons of heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to
one another: “Come, let us choose wives from among the children of men and have children with
them.”
“I read that this afternoon,” Gabriella said.
“No,” Dr. Seraphina corrected. “This is not Enoch. Although there is a very similar version in The
Book of Enoch, this is different. It is from Genesis and is the single point where the accepted version
of events—those that contemporary religious scholars accept as true—meets the apocryphal. Of
course, the apocryphal works are the richest source of angelic history. Once Enoch was studied
extensively, but as is often the case with a dogmatic institution like the church, they found it
threatening and began to remove Enoch from the canon.”
Gabriella seemed distressed. “But why?” she asked. “This material could be so helpful, especially
to scholars.”
“Helpful? I don’t see how. It was only natural that the church would suppress such information,”
Dr. Seraphina responded brusquely. “The Book of Enoch was dangerous to their version of history.
This version,” she said, uncapping the cylinder and tapping out another scroll, “was written after
many years of oral legend. It does in fact come from the same source. The author wrote it at the time
of many of the texts in the Old Testament of the Bible—in other words, at the time the Talmudic texts
were composed.”
“But that doesn’t explain the church’s reason for suppressing it,” Gabriella said.
“Their reason is obvious. Enoch’s version of the story is laced with all sorts of ecstatic language—
religious and visionary extremes that conservative scholars thought to be exaggerations, or worse:
madness. Enoch’s personal reflections about what he calls ‘the elect’ were particularly disturbing.
There are many passages of Enoch’s personal conversations with God. As you can imagine, most
theologians found the work blasphemous. To be frank, Enoch was considered controversial
throughout the earliest years of Christianity. Nonetheless, The Book of Enoch is the most significant