About EnochVault

What this is

A reader for the Book of Enoch — or more accurately, the books of Enoch (there are three ancient ones: 1, 2, and 3 Enoch). The texts here are public domain. The cross-references and commentary draw on mainstream academic scholarship. Where a particular religious tradition reads a passage in a particular way, we label that clearly and put it on its own page.

How to use the Reading Lens

At the top of every page there's a dropdown called Reading lens. You can leave it on the default (“All traditions”) and see everything side by side. Or you can pick a single tradition — Latter-day Saint, Ethiopian Orthodox, Rabbinic Jewish, and so on — and the site will surface that tradition's perspective first, with its own resource panels appearing under the cross-references on each chapter. Your choice is saved in your browser only.

The three translations

Every chapter shows the verse in three different English translations side by side. You can switch between them with the toggle at the top of each chapter, or pick “Parallel” to see all three at once.

• R. H. Charles, 1917. The most rigorous of the public-domain editions. The footnotes and cross-references on this site are tied to Charles's wording.
• Richard Laurence, 1821. The first English translation. Older language; a few chapter divisions differ from Charles.
• George H. Schodde, 1882. The first American English translation. Scanned from a 19th-century copy; some words still have OCR artifacts we haven't cleaned up yet.

Modern critical translations (Nickelsburg/VanderKam in the Hermeneia series; Isaac, Andersen, and Alexander in Charlesworth's Pseudepigrapha collection) are cited in the further-reading sections but not reproduced — they're under copyright.

About the footnotes

The blue underlined phrases inside each chapter open small popovers showing where that phrase shows up elsewhere — Hebrew Bible, New Testament, the Dead Sea Scrolls (4Q201 and the other Aramaic Enoch fragments from Qumran), other Jewish writings from the same period like Jubilees, and Mesopotamian or ancient Near Eastern parallels.

Selection is based on mainstream scholarly consensus: George Nickelsburg's Hermeneia commentary (2001/2012), Loren Stuckenbruck's reception studies (2014), Annette Yoshiko Reed's work on the reception history (2005), James VanderKam's foundational comparative work (1984), John Collins on apocalyptic literature (1998). Nothing fringe. Tradition-specific readings (LDS, Ethiopian Orthodox, Merkavah, etc.) are not in the footnotes — they get their own panels on each chapter, activated by the Reading Lens.

Your privacy

If you highlight a passage, take a note, or bookmark a verse, all of that is stored in your browser only. Nothing leaves your device. There is no account, no tracking, no analytics. If you want to move your notes between devices, use the Export / Import page to download or upload your data as a JSON file.

Things to know

• The three translations don't always agree on which verses belong in which chapter. For 1 Enoch 6–11 in particular, Laurence's chapter numbers are offset from Charles's. The footnotes are tied to Charles's chapter divisions.
• The Schodde 1882 text was OCR'd from an old scan and still has some scanning artifacts (spacing, broken words). We're cleaning these up over time.
• This is a personal study reader, not a scholarly edition. If you're doing academic work on 1 Enoch, use Nickelsburg or Stuckenbruck.

How the site is built

All the content on the site comes from a folder of Markdown files (an Obsidian vault). The website is generated from those files at build time. If you want to read or contribute to the underlying notes, ask Nate.