Texts in Conversation
The Testament of Reuben represents a distinct evolution of the Watchers narrative from 1 Enoch by denying that the divine beings and women had sex, while still affirming their role in the birth of the giants.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
1 Enoch 7:1
Pseudepigrapha
1 And all the others them took wives for themselves, each choosing one for himself, and they began to unite with them and defiled themselves with them. They taught them sorcery, spells, and the art of extracting medicinal substances from plants. 2 The women became pregnant and gave birth to enormous giants, whose height was three thousand ells. 3 These giants consumed everything humans produced. And when humans could no longer support them,
Testament of Reuben 5:7
Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs
Pseudepigrapha
4 A woman cannot overpower a man directly, but through seduction she lures him. 5 So flee from sexual immorality, my children, and tell your wives and daughters not to dress up their heads and faces to deceive, because every woman who uses these tricks has been set aside for eternal punishment. 6 This is how they seduced the Watchers before the flood. As the Watchers kept seeing them, they lusted after them and plotted the act in their minds. They transformed themselves into the shape of men and appeared to the women while they were with their husbands. 7 The women lusted in their minds after the appearance of the Watchers, and they gave birth to giants, for the Watchers had appeared to them as reaching all the way to heaven.
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Notes and References
"... to go into - This is a normative biblical expression for sexual intercourse. A later passage in Testament of Reuben 5:6–7 denies that there was actual intercourse between the Watchers and human women in an effort to explain the product being giants ..."
Heiser, Michael S.
A Companion to the Book of Enoch: A Reader’s Commentary, Vol. 1
(p. 90) Defender Publishing, 2019
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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