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Glossary

Mount Hermon (Mt Hermon, Jabal al-Shaykh)

Mount Hermon

If you are standing anywhere in northern Israel, or southern Lebanon, or western Syria, on a clear morning, look north. The mountain with the snow on top — that one — is the one the Watchers landed on.

Mt Hermon is the highest peak in the southern Levant. 2,814 meters, snow-capped most of the year, three summits in a long crest along the Anti-Lebanon range, and so visible from the lowland that the ancient Israelites used it as their boundary marker. "From the river Arnon unto Mount Hermon," says Deut 3:8 — the whole length of the conquered land.

It is also the most cult-saturated mountain in the region. Surveys conducted from the 19th century through the early 21st (Aliquot 2009 catalogues the standing record) have identified thirty-some temples and shrines on its slopes, from the Bronze Age to the late Roman period. The peak itself — Qaṣr ʿAntar at about 2,800 meters — is the highest known sanctuary in the ancient world. A Hellenistic-era Greek inscription found there reads, roughly, "according to the order of the greatest holy god, those who swear an oath proceed from here." A mountain where oaths were sworn, at the place where heaven and earth touch.

That last detail is the one to keep in mind.

What 1 Enoch did with it

The author of 1 Enoch 6 chose this mountain for a reason. 1 En 6:6:

"And they were in all two hundred; who descended ⌈in the days⌉ of Jared on the summit of Mount Hermon, and they called it Mount Hermon, because they had sworn and bound themselves by mutual imprecations upon it." — Charles 1917

That is an etiology. Hebrew ḥerem (חרם) means "a vow," "a thing devoted by oath," "a ban." Hebrew Ḥermon (חרמון) is just ḥerem with a place-name ending. The author is telling you: the mountain is named for what happened on it. The Watchers swore a ḥerem on Mt Ḥermon, and the mountain wears the curse as its name.

Modern critical readers (Nickelsburg in the Hermeneia commentary, ad loc.) read the pun as deliberate. 1 Enoch is not just locating an event; it is reading the toponymy. The mountain on the northern horizon, the one anyone could see from Galilee, was already the place where oath-swearing happened — already a place where the Hellenistic Greeks held inscribed contracts to the highest god — and the author of 1 Enoch built the descent narrative on top of that fact.

There is also a play on the timing. Jared (יֶרֶד) is the patriarch in whose generation the Watchers descend; the name comes from the Hebrew root ירד, "to descend." The descent of the Watchers happens in the days of Descent. Etymology as theology. The text is doing this on purpose.

The geography under the story

  • The summit ridge runs roughly north-south, with three peaks. The southernmost is the Israeli side (military zone since 1967); the northern flank is Lebanon; the eastern flank is Syria.
  • The Jordan headwaters rise from springs on the mountain's southern foot — Banias, Dan, and Hasbani — combining to form the river that runs the length of biblical Israel. Hermon is the literal watershed of Israel.
  • 1 Enoch 13:7 notes that after Enoch confronts the Watchers about their fate, he goes to "the waters of Dan, in the land of Dan, which is to the south-west of Hermon, [where] I read their petition until I fell asleep." The author of 1 Enoch knew the geography precisely.

Banias / Caesarea Philippi

At the southern foot of Hermon sits the spring of Banias, called Paneas in Hellenistic times because of the great cave there that was a sanctuary of Pan. Iron Age cult continued through Hellenistic and Roman occupation. Herod the Great's son Philip rebuilt the city as Caesarea Philippi and made it the capital of his tetrarchy.

And it is here, at the foot of the mountain where the Watchers descended, that the Gospel of Matthew places Peter's confession:

"Now when Jesus came into the parts of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, saying, Who do men say that the Son of Man is?" — Matt 16:13

The geographic detail is unusual for the gospel writers, who don't always bother to locate dialogues. Some readers (notably modern commentaries from Adela Yarbro Collins and others) take the choice of setting as theologically loaded: the question about the Son of Man — Daniel 7's title, the title the Parables of Enoch attached to a divine throne-figure — is asked at the precise location where, in 1 Enoch's narrative, divine beings had once swarmed down and ruined the world. The conversation about messianic identity happens, literally, in the shadow of the Watchers' mountain.

Cross-references

Scholarship pointers

  • J. Aliquot, La vie religieuse au Liban sous l'Empire romain (IFPO, 2009) — the standard catalogue of Mt Hermon shrines.
  • A. Berlin, "The archaeology of ritual: the sanctuary of Pan at Banias/Caesarea Philippi," BASOR 315 (1999): 27–45.
  • E. Lipiński, On the Skirts of Canaan in the Iron Age (Peeters, 2006).
  • N. Wyatt, "The Mountain of YHWH and the Mountain of Baal" — discussion of the cosmic-mountain motif across Ugaritic, Israelite, and Enochic literature.
  • G. W. E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1 (Hermeneia, 2001), ad loc. on 6:6.
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