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EnochVault a reader's edition
Slavonic Apocalypse

2 Enoch

also called: The Book of the Secrets of Enoch · Slavonic Enoch
This page is an overview, not a reader. The chapter-by-chapter parallel-translation reader that this site offers for 1 Enoch is not yet built for 2 Enoch. The public-domain Morfill (1896) English text is OCR-available but the OCR is heavily annotated and requires substantial cleanup to render usefully. The plan is to add a clean reader; for now this page gives you the orientation and points you at the source.

2 Enoch is the second of three ancient books attributed to the patriarch Enoch. It survives only in Old Church Slavonic, in two recensions traditionally labeled long (J / JR) and short (U / A). The earliest manuscripts date from the 14th century, but the text those manuscripts preserve is almost certainly translated from a Greek original — and the Greek original is almost certainly a translation, or a Jewish composition, from the late Second Temple period.

The narrative

The book opens with Enoch at age 365, the year God takes him from the earth. Two enormous angels arrive in Enoch's house. He bids his sons farewell. The angels carry him up — through one heaven, then another, then another, all the way to the seventh (in the short recension) or tenth (in the long recension). Each heaven contains a different region of the cosmos: the storehouses of dew and snow, the angels of seasons, the place where the wicked are punished, the chambers where the righteous wait, the sun's chariot, the moon's path.

In the seventh heaven (or tenth, in the long recension), Enoch sees the throne of God face to face. He is anointed with myrrh, dressed in the garments of glory, and his mortal flesh is exchanged for the appearance of an angel. God then dictates to him — for thirty days and thirty nights — the secrets of creation, of every age that will pass, and the commandments by which humanity should live.

Then Enoch is returned briefly to earth. He calls together his sons Methuselah, Regim, Riman, Uchan, Chermion, and Gaidad, and his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and he teaches them everything he has learned. He dictates 366 books to them. He commands them how to live. Then the angels return for him and take him up a second time.

After Enoch's final ascent the text closes with a coda about Melchizedek — the priest-king of Salem who appears briefly in Genesis 14 and is taken up theologically in Hebrews 7. 2 Enoch's Melchizedek narrative is distinctive: Melchizedek is born without a father, fully formed, from his mother's womb, with the priestly mark on his chest. The text positions him as the founder of a priestly line that will run, through an underground tradition, all the way to Aaron.

How it differs from 1 Enoch

  • Cosmography: 2 Enoch is structured around the tour of the heavens. 1 Enoch has cosmic tours (in chs 17–36 and 72–82) but they are not its dominant frame. 2 Enoch's seven-heaven structure becomes the template for later Jewish and Christian heavenly-ascent literature.
  • Length and tone: 2 Enoch is shorter (73 chapters in the long recension, less in the short) and more sermonic. Where 1 Enoch's Watchers narrative is mythological-narrative drama, 2 Enoch's Adam and Watchers material is brief and didactic.
  • The Melchizedek coda: Distinctive to 2 Enoch. Important for understanding the broader Second Temple priestly speculation that Hebrews 7 sits inside.

Dating and original language

Modern critical scholarship dates the Greek original of 2 Enoch to roughly the 1st century CE, with most analyses placing it before the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. The author writes about the Jerusalem Temple as if it still functions. Pre-Temple-destruction sacrificial terminology is used naturally and approvingly. These data are widely taken as a Jewish (not Christian) origin in the late Second Temple period.

Some scholars have proposed a much later date — even an early medieval Bogomil composition — but the consensus view (Andersen 1983; Böttrich 1995; Orlov 2007) favors a 1st-century Jewish (or Jewish-Christian) original.

How it survived

The Slavonic manuscripts preserve a Greek original that no Greek copies survive. The book was apparently transmitted within early Christian circles in the Greek-speaking East and was translated into Slavonic at some point in the early medieval Slavic Orthodox tradition — most likely in the 10th or 11th century, around the time Slavic Christianity was consolidating.

The first Western scholar to study 2 Enoch in detail was William Richard Morfill, who translated it into English from the Slavonic in 1896, with an introduction and apparatus by R. H. Charles. That edition is now in the public domain. The standard modern English translation is by F. I. Andersen in James Charlesworth's The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (1983), which remains under copyright.

Read the source text

The Morfill / Charles 1896 edition is freely available:

Cross-references on this site

Scholarship pointers

  • F. I. Andersen, "2 (Slavonic Apocalypse of) Enoch," in J. H. Charlesworth (ed.), The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1 (Doubleday, 1983), pp. 91–221. The standard modern English translation with introduction.
  • C. Böttrich, Das slavische Henochbuch (Gütersloh, 1995). The standard German critical edition.
  • A. A. Orlov, From Apocalypticism to Merkabah Mysticism (Brill, 2007), and Selected Studies in the Slavonic Pseudepigrapha (Brill, 2009).
  • G. Macaskill, The Slavonic Texts of 2 Enoch (Brill, 2013) — recent critical edition of the Slavonic.

Methodology note. Datings and recensional details on this page draw on Andersen 1983, Böttrich 1995, and Orlov 2007/2009. Where scholars disagree on dating, the page reports the consensus view (1st-c. CE Jewish origin) and notes the minority position (later medieval composition). Neither this page nor anything on this site is a reproduction of the Morfill 1896 chapter text — that lives behind the archive.org links.

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