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1 Enoch

About this book

Enoch's Journey to the Northwest

Chapter 17

1 And they brought me to a place where those present were like flaming fire, and when they wished, they appeared as men.⁠ 2 And they led me to a place of darkness,⁠ and to a mountain whose peak reached to heaven.⁠ 3 And I saw the places of the sun and moon and the treasuries of the stars and of the thunder in the utmost depths, where there was a fiery bow and arrows and their quiver, and a fiery sword and all the lightnings.⁠ 4 And they took me to the living waters,⁠ and to the fire of the west, which receives every setting of the sun.⁠ 5 And I came to a river of fire where the fire flows like water and pours into the great sea towards the west.⁠ 6 I saw the great rivers and came to the great river and to the great darkness, and went to the place where no flesh walks. 7 I saw the mountains of the darkness of winter and the place from where all the waters of the deep flow. 8 I saw the mouths of all the rivers of the earth and the mouth of the deep.

Texts in conversation

Compare Hesiod, Theogony 729 and 1 Enoch 17:2

Classical · Pseudepigrapha, Apocalypses

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Summary

1 Enoch draws on Greek mythology, such as the underworld from Hesiod’s Theogony, in its interpretation of Genesis 6. Like the Titans confined in Tartarus, the rebellious Watchers in 1 Enoch are imprisoned in a dark place beneath the edges of the earth.

Passages

Hesiod, Theogony 729

Classical
[725] would reach Tartarus upon the tenth. Round it runs a fence of bronze, and night spreads in triple line all about it like a neck-circlet, while above grow the roots of the earth and unfruitful sea. There by the counsel of Zeus who drives the clouds the Titan gods [730] are hidden under misty darkness, in a dank place where are the ends of the huge earth. And they may not go out; for Poseidon fixed gates of bronze upon it, and a wall runs all round it on every side. There Gyes and Cottus and great-souled Obriareus
730–700 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Hesiod, Theogony

1 Enoch 17:2

Pseudepigrapha, Apocalypses
1 And they brought me to a place where those present were like flaming fire, and when they wished, they appeared as men. 2 And they led me to a place of darkness, and to a mountain whose peak reached to heaven. 3 And I saw the places of the sun and moon and the treasuries of the stars and of the thunder in the utmost depths, where there was a fiery bow and arrows and their quiver, and a fiery sword and all the lightnings.
300 BCE – 100 CE (scholarly estimate) Read in 1 Enoch

References

"... ‘Darkness’ is used frequently as an epithet for the netherworld in the Hebrew Bible. It appears, for example, in Psalm 88:12; Proverbs 20:20; Job 10:21–22 and 17:13. Job especially contains quite a few examples in which darkness, a metaphor for death, and light, a metaphor for life, are contrasted. Job 10:21–22, for example, describes the land from which none return as a land of gloom and deep darkness, where light is like darkness. ‘Darkness’ or ‘the place of darkness’ (it appears thus in 1 Enoch 17:2) is also associated with death and the underworld in Greek literature. While it simply means ‘darkness, dusky, gloomy,’ the related term is used as a synonym for the realm of the dead in early Greek literature. It conveys, for example, ‘gloom of the world below,’ and ‘nether darkness’ in Odyssey 11.57, 155; 20.356; Iliad 15.191; 21.56 and in Aeschylus’s Persians 839.37. Zophos, as ‘gloom’ or ‘darkness,’ designates subterranean Tartarus in Hesiod’s Theogony 729. There, under the misty Gloom, the Titans are banished, at the ends of the earth. Zophos was also apparently linked to the west, and renders ‘the Dark Quarter’ or ‘the west’ in Odyssey 3.335; 9.26; 13.241 and Iliad 12.240 ..."
Kelley Coblentz Bautch, A Study of the Geography of 1 Enoch 17–19: "No One Has Seen What I Have Seen", JSJSup 81 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 50–51.

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Hesiod, Theogony 729 and 1 Enoch 17:2

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