The Apkallu — Mesopotamian sages and the Watchers
The Apkallu
A thousand years before 1 Enoch was written, the Babylonians had their own version of this story.
What the Apkallu were
In Mesopotamian tradition there are seven sages — the Apkallu — who lived before the flood and taught humanity all the arts of civilization. Writing, metalworking, healing, divination, the building of cities, the layout of canals: everything the Babylonians thought their culture rested on, they traced back to these seven figures.
Each Apkallu was paired with one of the seven antediluvian kings in the Sumerian King List. The Apkallu came up out of the apsû — the cosmic freshwater abyss — at the command of the god Ea (Sumerian Enki). They had fish-bodies and human heads in the standard iconography. They taught the kings how to rule and the people how to live.
After the flood, the line of pure Apkallu ended. Their successors were half-divine, then progressively less divine — until the present world, where wisdom is just what humans can manage on their own.
Why this matters for 1 Enoch
The parallel with 1 Enoch's Watchers is striking, and modern scholarship — especially Amar Annus's 2010 article "On the Origin of Watchers" (Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 19.4) — makes the case that the Watchers story is, partly, an inversion of the Apkallu tradition.
| Apkallu | Watchers |
|---|---|
| Sent by Ea before the flood | Descend before the flood |
| Teach humanity the arts of civilization | Teach humanity the forbidden arts |
| Seven of them | (Originally seven? — see below) |
| Cosmic emissaries of a good god | Cosmic rebels against God |
| Praised | Bound and judged |
| Mesopotamian | Israelite reaction to Mesopotamian |
The Watchers story takes what Babylonian tradition celebrated — pre-flood sages teaching humanity arts — and reads it as a transgression. The same arts that Babylon saw as gifts of the gods, 1 Enoch reads as illegal smuggling of heavenly knowledge.
Some scholars have noted that Asael / Azazel teaches metalworking, weapons, cosmetics, dyes, astrology — almost exactly the categories of the Apkallu's gifts. The author of 1 Enoch wasn't pulling these crafts out of nowhere. He was responding to a much older story.
Why there are "seven" archangels
The seven archangels of 1 Enoch 20 (Uriel, Raphael, Raguel, Michael, Saraqael, Gabriel, Remiel) may also be an Israelite response to the seven Apkallu — the angels of God displacing the sages of Ea.
If that's right, 1 Enoch is doing systematic theological replacement: every Mesopotamian role gets an Israelite counterpart. The Apkallu were teachers; the Watchers are illegitimate teachers. The Apkallu were seven; the archangels are seven. The flood that ended the Apkallu line is the flood that judges the Watcher line.
Cross-references
- 1 Enoch 8 — Azazel teaches forbidden arts
- 1 Enoch 20 — the seven archangels
- Azazel
- The archangels
- Enmeduranki — the Apkallu's companion seventh king, parallel to Enoch
- watchers descent
Further reading
- A. Annus, "On the Origin of Watchers: A Comparative Study of the Antediluvian Wisdom in Mesopotamian and Jewish Traditions," Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 19.4 (2010): 277–320. The foundational comparative paper.
- H. S. Kvanvig, Primeval History: Babylonian, Biblical, and Enochic (Brill, 2011).
- H. S. Kvanvig, Roots of Apocalyptic (Neukirchener, 1988) — the earlier book that started the comparison.
- A. Y. Reed, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity (Cambridge, 2005), introduction and ch. 1.