2 Enoch reaches this page only as English translated from Slavonic manuscripts — Charles (1913) wrote that it had been preserved only in Slavonic, “so far as is yet known”, and the 2012 volume named in Stage 1, No Longer Slavonic Only, was not consulted — and it comes in two forms that do not agree on how high heaven goes. This page reads both as Nevill Forbes translated them side by side in 1913 — the longer text R. H. Charles called A and the shorter he called B — and measures them against each other in one translator’s English. In B, Enoch is carried through seven heavens, and its 228 verse rows name each of the seven exactly once (its chapter titles, which no count here includes, name six of them again). In A he is shown a tenth: every eighth, ninth and tenth heaven in all 340 rows of A stands in three verses — 20:3, 21:6 and 22:1 — inside the two passages Charles pointed to in 1896. B has no such clause at 20:3 and no verse at all at 21:6 or 22:1–3. And inside that cluster stands a disagreement about whether Enoch sees. A 22:1: Thus I saw the Lord’s face. B 22:4: and I fell prone, and could not see the Lord God. It is not Scripture for us: 2 Enoch is read here as a witness from the world between the testaments, and tested by the canon. There is no Slavonic on this disk, and the page says what that costs. See the method →
2 Enoch — The Book of the Secrets of Enoch in Charles’s editions — is a Jewish apocalypse on Charles’s account (its origin is argued in literature not read here), known from Slavonic manuscripts: Enoch carried through the heavens to the Lord’s face (chapters 1–22, this page), what he is told and writes there, and his teaching of his sons before he is taken. Charles (1913) dated it to the first century AD and placed its author in Egypt; the page reports that and tests none of it. It is not Scripture for us, and not deuterocanonical either. We read it as we read the other Second-Temple books — as a window on how some Jews imagined the heavens in the centuries around Christ — critically, gratefully for the light it throws, and testing everything by the canon. Where it carries what Scripture does not — numbered heavens, their Hebrew names, an angel who keeps the books, a vision of the face of God — this page reports it and does not adopt it.
⚠️ What this page can and cannot measure — read this first.
HELD: Forbes’s English of A (340 rows, prologue and chapters 1–68) and of B (228 rows), with the printed headings and a file of verse-boundary judgements; the archive.org OCR of APOT vol. 2 and of the Morfill–Charles edition of 1896 (Charles’s notes and introductions are quoted from these, checked against two or three OCR copies, and the notes that carry a finding read again on the page images); the Greek Old Testament (30,348 CATSS units screened); the SBLGNT (7,927 verses); the Masoretic text (23,204 verses); Dillmann’s Ethiopic Genesis; the Samaritan Genesis 5; the Clementine Vulgate; Charles’s English of 1 Enoch, Jubilees and the Testaments; the Greek fragments of 1 Enoch (Online Critical Pseudepigrapha).
NOT HELD: any Slavonic text of 2 Enoch — no clean public-domain transcription exists to fetch; Sokolov’s text, except where Charles reports it; and every modern edition (Stage 1).
CONSEQUENCE: the Greek New Testament screen cannot run — there is no Greek 2 Enoch to run it with — so every New Testament connection on this page is named, never measured. The one word screen that does run is A against B in Forbes’s English: one translator, two recensions, so a shared run tracks shared content but cannot speak to Slavonic wording. No 2 Enoch English is run against any other English — Charles’s 1 Enoch, Jubilees or any Bible — because that would measure translators, not texts.
2 Enoch, Prologue & 1:1–22:12 — thirteen lines, both recensions named on every one
English: N. Forbes in Charles, APOT 2 (1913) · A = Charles’s longer text · B = Charles’s shorter textB — no prologue. B opens with a superscription instead: “Now behold the books of the secret of God, the revelations of Enoch.” —
A only, and unnumbered in print. It stands full-width above the two columns on the first page (p. 431), under A’s first heading; the file numbers it 0:1. It speaks of Enoch in the third person — a wise man, a great artificer — and 1:1 turns to the first.
B 1:1 “At that time when three hundred and sixty-five years were fulfilled to me,”
A gives two numbers B does not: 165 at Methuselah’s birth, and two hundred years after it. Those are the numbers of the CATSS Greek Genesis 5:21–22 (ἑκατὸν καὶ ἑξήκοντα πέντε ἔτη) and of Dillmann’s Ethiopic Genesis (፻፷ወ፭ዓመተ); the Masoretic text reads 65 and 300 (חָמֵ֥שׁ וְשִׁשִּׁ֖ים שָׁנָ֑ה), as do the Samaritan file and the Vulgate (sexaginta quinque annis). B gives only the total, 365, which all of them share. Stage 4 sets them out. The file’s B 1:1/1:2 boundary is marked LOW; on the page image 1:2 begins on a certain day, as the file has it.
B 7:5 “And I answered them: ‘Who am I, a mortal man, that I should pray for angels? who knows whither I go or what will befall me or who pray for me?’”
Fourteen consecutive words in common, tie band 1 from both sides — the second-deepest agreement between the two columns in these chapters (Stage 4). The angels of the second heaven ask a man to pray for them, and in both texts he asks who will pray for him — with the words of his farewell at 2:1, whither I go, or what will befall me (A’s words; B 2:1 has nor), which both recensions repeat here.
B 8:1 “And the two men placed me thence and carried me up on to the third heaven and set me down in the midst of Paradise, and a place unknown in goodness of appearance.”
Paradise is in the third heaven in both texts. B sets Enoch down in the midst of Paradise in this verse; A names paradise at 8:3, 8:5 and 8:6. Charles’s note on 8:1: “Paradise is here in the third heaven, as in 2 Cor. xii. 2, 4.” Paul’s Greek has ἕως τρίτου οὐρανοῦ (12:2) and εἰς τὸν παράδεισον (12:4). Named, not measured — there is no Greek 2 Enoch to run against it.
B 10:3 “cruel relentless angels carrying arms and tormenting without mercy.”
The page’s own counter-example. Both texts arm the angels of the place of torment and deny them mercy — and as the file divides them the two verses share no two consecutive words; the longest common run is one word (and, cruel, angels tie). B 10:3 shares no two consecutive words with any of A’s 108 rows in these chapters. The A-against-B screen measures one translator’s wording; it cannot tell you whether two Slavonic sentences say the same thing. Only the middle of each verse is printed: where each begins is uncertain by a few words on the page, and the end of A 10:3 is one of the two places where the file has Forbes’s words in the wrong order (Stage 5).
B 16:5 “therefore it goes in the year with three hundred and sixty-four days complete”
Two different years. A: a solar year of 365¼ days (14:1, 16:4) and a lunar year of 354. B: three hundred and sixty-four days complete — and B’s 228 rows nowhere give 365¼. Charles’s note: “364 days complete (B). This seems to be an error for 354 (A).” The number 364 also stands in Charles’s English of 1 Enoch (in 5 verses, of days or of the year, and at 75:2 of the year’s stations) and of Jubilees (in 2); counted here, not connected. The A line stops at the sentence end because the file’s 16:5/16:6 split is wrong (Stage 5); B’s own 16:3/16:5 boundary is a genuine tie on the page, and either reading leaves the 364 in 16:5.
B 18:1 “And the men carried me up on to the fifth heaven, and I saw there many troops, Egoroi, and their appearance was like the human appearance and their size greater than that of great giants”
The fifth heaven: nine verses in A, one in B — 340 words against 43 in the file (35 once B’s first words of chapter 19 are given back to it). Everything A tells of the Grigori after this line — their prince Satanail (18:3), three of them going down to Ermon and taking wives (18:4–5), Enoch saying I prayed for them (18:7) — has no counterpart in B. Charles’s note: “Grigori. These are the Watchers”, of 1 Enoch 6–16. Both lines stop at giants: on the page images A’s 18:2 begins and their faces withered, and B’s next words open its chapter 19 — the file puts both at the end of 18:1 (Stage 5).
B 20:3 “They showed me from afar the Lord sitting on his throne, and all the heavenly troops in companies stepping on to the steps and they kept bowing down to the Lord,”
The first heaven above the seventh. A’s 20:3, still in the seventh heaven, reads For what is there on the tenth heaven, since the Lord dwells here? and goes on: On the tenth heaven is God, in the Hebrew tongue he is called Aravat — close to the name 22:1 gives the tenth heaven itself, Aravoth. B’s 20:3 has the same throne seen from afar and the same troops on the steps — and no tenth heaven, and no number on the steps (A: the ten steps). Their longest shared run here is 5 words, and all the heavenly troops. This is the first of the two passages Charles named in 1896 (Stage 4).
B 21:1 “and the glorious ones serving him do not leave him by night nor go away by day, standing before the Lord’s face, and working his will, and all the troops of cherubim and seraphim about his throne never leaving him, and the six-winged ones cover his throne, singing before the Lord’s face.”
A gives the seraphim words; B does not. A: Holy, holy, holy … heavens and earth are full of Thy glory. B: singing before the Lord’s face, and no words. Isaiah 6:3 has the whole earth only — in the Masoretic text (מְלֹ֥א כׇל־הָאָ֖רֶץ כְּבוֹדֽוֹ) and in the CATSS Greek (πλήρης πᾶσα ἡ γῆ τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ) — and Revelation 4:8 (Ἅγιος ἅγιος ἅγιος κύριος, ὁ θεός, ὁ παντοκράτωρ) has no clause about fullness at all. Each text is reported as it reads; no line is drawn between them.
B — no row: B passes from 21:5 straight to 22:4 —
The eighth and ninth heavens, in A alone. Charles’s note, read on the page image: “This verse is clearly an interpolation. It is not found either in B or Sok. Furthermore, throughout the rest of the book only seven heavens are mentioned or implied.” (Sok. is Sokolov’s text, not held here.) He takes both names to be Hebrew: Muzaloth the signs of the zodiac, a word that stands once in the 23,204 Masoretic verses held (וְלַמַּזָּל֔וֹת, 2 Kings 23:5, where the CATSS Greek writes τοῖς μαζουρωθ), and Kuchavim the stars.
B 22:4 “and I fell prone, and could not see the Lord God, and I bowed down to the Lord,”
A disagreement about whether Enoch sees. A, on the tenth heaven: Thus I saw the Lord’s face. B, at the point where it rejoins A: could not see the Lord God. B has no 22:1–3, and A has no such clause. Charles printed A’s 22:1–3 in full in 1913, and wrote of all but the first words of 22:1 that they “may in some form have belonged to the text. I have with some hesitation rejected them.” His 1896 note reports a version of 22:1–3 in Sokolov’s text too, beginning “I also saw the Lord face to face” — not held here and not checked.
B 22:6 “And the Lord’s archistratege Michael brought me before the face of God. The Lord tempted his servants, and said to them: ‘Let Enoch step up to stand before my face into eternity.’”
Michael the archistratege, in both texts. Forbes leaves the title untranslated: archistratege is the Greek ἀρχιστράτηγος in English letters. In the 30,348 Greek Old Testament units screened it stands 24 times in 23 units; four of those give it to a figure commonly read as heavenly (Joshua 5:14 and 5:15, Daniel 8:11 in both Greek texts), and none names Michael. The Greek New Testament has it 0 times, and calls Michael Μιχαὴλ ὁ ἀρχάγγελος (Jude 9).
B 22:11 “And the Lord summoned Vretil, one of his archangels, who is wise and writes down all the Lord’s works.”
The same office, two names. A: Pravuil (twice in this verse); B: Vretil (here, and twice in 22:12). Neither name occurs anywhere in the other recension’s file. And B reaches this point by another road: in A the Lord speaks (22:5), Michael presents Enoch (22:6) and only then anoints and clothes him (22:8–10); B prints its chapter 22 in the order 4, 8, 9, 10, 4b, 6, 7, 11, 12, so in B the anointing comes first, and the Lord’s Have courage (B’s second ‘4’, filed as 4b) after it.
Versification — a third state, stated because it is not the usual one. There is no Masoretic, no Septuagint, no King James, no Vulgate and no ESV 2 Enoch, so there is no Hebrew/Greek offset and no KJV or Vulgate shape to give: the shelf’s King James loader raises on 2 Enoch rather than return nothing, the Clementine Vulgate has no such book, and there is no CATSS file for it. And no Slavonic text is held. The only numbering is Charles’s, made for his 1896 edition and used by Forbes in 1913 for both columns; APOT prints it in the margin.
The two shapes, counted (verses per chapter, 1–22): A 10 · 4 · 3 · 2 · 2 · 1 · 5 · 8 · 1 · 6 · 5 · 3 · 4 · 3 · 4 · 8 · 1 · 9 · 6 · 4 · 6 · 12 (107, plus the unnumbered prologue, filed as 0:1); B 10 · 4 · 1 · 2 · 1 · 1 · 5 · 6 · 1 · 6 · 4 · 1 · 4 · 3 · 1 · 6 · 1 · 1 · 6 · 4 · 5 · 9 (82; B’s superscription is printed above 1:1 and not counted). A prints no 13:3 — its chapter 13 runs 1, 2, 4, 5 — and B prints a 13:3 of its own. B’s chapter 15 begins at verse 3 and its chapter 22 at verse 4, and B prints the numeral 4 twice in chapter 22; the file calls the second one 4b (its words parallel A’s 22:5).
The offsets between the two, measured: they share 80 labels; 28 labels are A’s alone (0:1, 3:2, 3:3, 5:2, 8:4, 8:6, 11:5, 12:2, 12:3, 13:4, 15:1, 15:2, 15:4, 16:4, 16:8, 18:2, 18:3, 18:4, 18:5, 18:6, 18:7, 18:8, 18:9, 21:6, 22:1, 22:2, 22:3, 22:5) and 2 are B’s alone (13:3, 22:4b). Agreement of label is mostly agreement of content: of the 80 B rows that share a label with A, 62 find their deepest A partner at that same label. Where they do not, the content often stands at another label — B’s 4:1–2 carries the sea greater than the earthly sea that A has at 3:3.
Every verse start is a margin numeral, and where a verse begins inside a printed line the split point in the file is an inference. In these chapters 17 of A’s starts and 17 of B’s are marked LOW. Twenty of those were read on the page images for this page: twelve stand, three are genuinely ambiguous on the page, four are wrong in the file (one, A 21:4, probably rather than certainly), and at one the file has the words themselves out of order (Stage 5). Every 2 Enoch line printed above was read on the page images, and each is cut so that none of the faults touches it.
The Shape of the Passage
Sequence (counted): seven ascents in both texts, three more heavens in AThis is a sequence, and it is not offered as a chiasm. The indentation shows height, not pairing; nothing in the second half answers anything in the first except the refrain and the paired places of chapters 9–10, and those are marked as what they are.
⚠️ Where this page sits. 2 Enoch is filed here under Pseudepigrapha & Second Temple. It is in no canon this church knows of and is not deuterocanonical. Charles wrote in 1913 that it has, “so far as is yet known, been preserved only in Slavonic”. It is not Scripture for us, and nothing taught at Pleasant Springs rests on it.
Author
Anonymous, writing as Enoch. From 1:1 the book is mostly Enoch’s own first person — he said, A puts in once, and then I — but not throughout: A 3:1 speaks of Enoch and him for one verse (B 3:1 has I), and the narrative of the closing chapters (64:1, 67:2 and 68:1, for instance) tells of him from outside. A’s prologue introduces him from outside too, as a wise man, a great artificer.
Charles’s account, reported and not tested: a Jew of Egypt, probably Alexandria, writing after 30 BC and before AD 70, most likely in the first half of the first century AD (APOT 2, introduction §5). Nothing on this page depends on that date, and nothing here can check it.
And two hands at least are visible in what survives: the longer text and the shorter. Charles thought the longer “very corrupt” yet nearer the original, with “many interpolations”, and the shorter “a short résumé of the work”. This page measures how they differ; it does not decide between them.
Audience
Readers who wanted the heavens mapped. What is kept on which floor — snow, dew, prisoners, paradise, the sun’s gates, the silent Grigori — and who serves where.
Readers who cared about the calendar. The fourth heaven, chapters 11–17, is the longest stretch of these twenty-two, and it is where the two texts’ numbers part company.
And, inside the story, Enoch’s sons. Before the journey he is told thou shalt tell thy sons and all thy household (A 1:9); his farewell is turn not from God (2:2), and the last verse of these chapters hands him the books and the reed.
Orient on 2 Enoch, its two recensions, and the heavens.
Search by topic: Enoch, Second Book of (Slavonic Enoch); Secrets of Enoch; heavens, seven; paradise; Watchers; Michael; Metatron; calendar, 364-day.
Which articles are relevant?
- Anchor Bible Dictionary — its entries on Enoch and the Enoch books, on heaven, on paradise and on Michael.
- Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism — its entries on 2 Enoch, on the heavenly ascent and on the calendars.
- Dictionary of New Testament Background (IVP) — its entries on the Enoch literature and on apocalypticism. These are subjects to look up; the exact entry titles were not checked, and none of these works is held on this disk.
- On the text — any article that keeps the two recensions apart. An article that quotes ‘2 Enoch’ without saying which recension, and in whose lettering, is not usable for these chapters — the tenth heaven and the vision of the face are in one of them only.
Bibliography surfaced:
- W. R. Morfill and R. H. Charles, The Book of the Secrets of Enoch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896) — one eclectic text, following A, with B and Sokolov in the notes. Held as OCR; quoted on this page for Charles’s introduction and notes only.
- N. Forbes and R. H. Charles, ‘2 Enoch, or the Book of the Secrets of Enoch’, in R. H. Charles (ed.), The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1913) — the English quoted here, A and B side by side.
- F. I. Andersen, ‘2 (Slavonic Apocalypse of) Enoch’, in J. H. Charlesworth (ed.), The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1 (1983) — where the longer text is J and the shorter A. Not held.
- A. Vaillant, Le livre des secrets d’Hénoch (Paris, 1952), and G. N. Bonwetsch, Die Bücher der Geheimnisse Henochs (Leipzig, 1922) — earlier editions and translations. Not held; what each contains was not checked.
- Grant Macaskill, The Slavonic Texts of 2 Enoch (Brill, 2013), and Andrei A. Orlov and Gabriele Boccaccini (eds.), New Perspectives on 2 Enoch: No Longer Slavonic Only (Brill, 2012). Not held; named as the obvious next step.
Watchers, layered heavens, a year of 364 days — and what Charles compared, reported as his.
Each parallel below is a comparison of content. Where Charles drew it, the page says so; where the page draws it, it says that too. No English is run against any other English.
Which parallels shed light on the world of the text?
On Charles’s identification, 1 Enoch’s Watchers are in A’s fifth heaven. A 18:4–5 tells, in two verses, a story 1 Enoch 6–7 tells at length: angels go down on Hermon (“to the place Ermon”), see “the daughters of men how good they are”, take wives, and giants are born. The Greek of 1 Enoch 6:6 in George Syncellus counts them: ἦσαν δὲ οὗτοι διακόσιοι οἱ καταβάντες, these were two hundred, who came down (the page’s gloss) — on Ἑρμονιεὶμ. A 18:4 says three of them. Charles’s note on the word three goes on to name a leader: “According to 1 En. ix. 6 the leader was Azazel”. B has none of this.
The Testament of Levi also climbs. In Charles’s English of it, Levi says he entered from the first heaven and saw there “a great sea hanging” (2:7). Charles’s own note on 2 Enoch 3:3 places that sea: “In Test. Levi ii. 7 this sea lies between the first and second heavens”. 2 Enoch has its sea in the first heaven (A 3:3, B 4:1–2). The file’s row for T. Levi 2:7 carries a line-break artefact at from, so only the words after it are quoted. Charles’s notes on 5:1, 7:1, 17:1, 18:1 and 19:6 all cite the Testament of Levi, and at the fifth heaven say the two “differ absolutely as to the inhabitants of the fifth heaven”.
Charles’s notes also point to a rabbinic list of seven heavens. He takes Aravoth to be the Hebrew ʿărābôt, “which according to Chagig. 12b was really the seventh heaven” — the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Ḥagigah, which is not held here. In his introduction he reports that a later Hebrew book of Enoch has the same three extra heavens, with a difference: “Muzaloth and Kuchavim are placed below the seven heavens and Aravoth above them”.
- 1 Enoch 6–16 ↔ 2 Enoch A 18 — the Watchers, Hermon, the daughters of men. Measured on the 1 Enoch Greek held here: the word ἐγρήγοροι and its forms stand 13 times in the 285 printable Greek rows. A’s Grigori; B’s Egoroi.
- 1 Enoch 72–82 and Jubilees 6 ↔ B 16:5 — the number 364 (of days or of the year; at 1 Enoch 75:2, of the year’s stations), in 5 verses of Charles’s 1 Enoch (72:32, 74:10, 74:12, 75:2, 82:6) and 2 of his Jubilees (6:32, 6:38). A has 365¼ and 354 at the same place; Charles took B’s 364 for an error.
- Genesis 5:21–24 ↔ A 1:1 — Enoch’s years; see Stage 4.
- Isaiah 6:2–3 ↔ A 21:1 — Charles’s note points there for the six-winged ones and the song.
- 2 Corinthians 12:2–4 ↔ 8:1 — Charles’s own note. Charles also wrote that “a few phrases in the New Testament may be derived from it”; this page reports that he said so, and neither adopts nor tests it.
Two Hebrew names, two Greek words, and one sentence said four times.
Hebrew counts are over the 23,204 Masoretic verses held; Greek over the 30,348 CATSS units screened (the Odes excluded, as on every page here) and the 7,927 SBLGNT verses; English over Forbes’s two files. A 2 Enoch word is only ever an English word here; a Hebrew or Greek form beside it is somebody’s identification, and the page says whose. Italic glosses of Greek or Hebrew are the page’s own.
Once in the 23,204 Masoretic verses held: 2 Kings 23:5, in the list of what the incense-burners Josiah put down had served — Baal, the sun, the moon, the mazzalot and all the host of heaven. The CATSS Greek does not translate it either: τοῖς μαζουρωθ. A 21:6 glosses it itself: changer of the seasons … and of the twelve signs of the zodiac. The identification of the name with the Hebrew word is Charles’s.
With these vowels the word stands twice in the Masoretic text held: Jeremiah 5:6 and Psalm 68:5 (Masoretic numbering; 67:5 in the Greek, 68:4 in English Bibles), where God is the one לָרֹכֵ֣ב בָּ֭עֲרָבוֹת, riding in the ʿărābôt. The CATSS Greek there has τῷ ἐπιβεβηκότι ἐπὶ δυσμῶν, the one mounted upon the west (the page’s gloss). The rabbinic seventh heaven, on Charles’s reading of Ḥagigah 12b; A’s tenth.
13 forms in the 285 printable Greek rows of 1 Enoch held here, all but one in the Akhmim codex (Codex Panopolitanus); the uncorrected OCR of Swete’s edition, which also carries Syncellus’s longer excerpts, is on disk and is not counted. In the Greek Old Testament units screened this form stands once, at Lamentations 4:14 (the token printed here) — of men in Jerusalem’s streets, not of angels. The two recensions do not spell the name alike: A has Grigori four times in chapter 18, B Egoroi once. That the English names stand for this Greek word is Charles’s identification.
24 times in 23 of the 30,348 Greek Old Testament units screened — mostly commanders of armies, Phicol, Abner, Joab, Holofernes. Four units give it to a figure commonly read as heavenly: the commander who meets Joshua (5:14, 5:15) and the prince of the host in Daniel 8:11, in both Greek texts. Michael is named in the two Greek Daniels and never with this title there. Zero in the Greek New Testament.
A 1:8, 20:2, 21:3, 22:5; B 1:8, 20:2, 21:3, 22:4b. The two men at the bedside, the two men at the seventh heaven, Gabriel, and the Lord. The refrain is not a number or a name — it is the same reassurance at four moments (not at each of the seven ascents), and both texts keep it.
Counted here, not assumed:
- 3,824 English words in A’s 108 rows; 2,363 in B’s 82 — B is 62% of A in these chapters (across the whole book, 54%: 6,025 against 11,200). Charles in 1896 called B “about half the length of A”.
- B is the longer text in 2 chapters of 22 (4, 9); the shortest, against A, is chapter 18: 43 words to 340.
- Names that differ between the two: Methuselah is Mathusal in A and Mefusailom in B (1:10), and A alone names a third son, Gaidad; the Grigori are Egoroi in B; the angel-scribe is Pravuil in A and Vretil in B; the seventh heaven’s Ioanit stations of light in A are the shining station of the Ostanim in B (20:1).
- Numbers that differ: “six Phoenixes and six Cherubim and six six-winged ones” (A 19:6) against “seven phoenixes, seven cherubim, and seven six-winged ones” (B 19:6); nine regiments at A 20:1, none in B; and the first day of the first month in A 1:2, a day of the second in B.
- A’s month list sums to a year. A 16:2 gives a length for each of the moon’s twelve gates — 31, 31, 30, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 28 (12 numbers) — and they add to 365. Charles noted the sum, and wrote: “This account cannot possibly apply to the moon, but applies perfectly to the sun”. B 16:2 has no list.
Two texts in one translator’s English, a count of heavens, and five numbers for Enoch.
Four measurements. (1) A against B, word runs both ways, with tie bands. (2) Every numbered heaven in both files. (3) Enoch’s years against every Genesis held. (4) The year-lengths of chapters 13–16. Then the Bible, named and not measured. Tokenisation, declared: Forbes’s glosses (sc. …), (lit. …) and (sic) removed; Charles’s brackets and daggers removed; words lower-cased; nothing else changed. A run is consecutive identical words; 0 means no two consecutive words shared (no single-word fallback).
1. A against B: the distribution first.
B’s 82 rows, each against all 108 of A’s rows in these chapters: 81 share two consecutive words or more, 78 reach 3, 68 reach 4, 50 reach 5, 31 reach 6, 22 reach 7, 17 reach 8, 8 reach 9, 6 reach 10, 3 reach 12, 2 reach 14, 1 reaches 16. The other way, A’s 108 against B’s 82: 107 reach two, 99 reach 3, 76 reach 4, 54 reach 5, 34 reach 6, 24 reach 7, 19 reach 8, 8 reach 9, 6 reach 10, 3 reach 12, 2 reach 14, 1 reaches 16. The median longest run between verses with the same label is 5 words.
Every one of the 8 runs of nine words or more joins two verses with the same number, with a tie band of 1 from both sides — and stays 1 when B’s row is screened against all 340 rows of A: 1:9 (16); 7:5 (14); 11:1 (12); 1:8 (10); 7:1 (10); 20:1 (10); 8:8 (9); 21:3 (9). The deepest is 1:9, sixteen words: in thy house and let no one seek thee till the lord return thee to them.
⚠️ Depth is not rarity, and three of those eight are one sentence. 7:1, 11:1 and 20:1 are the ascent itself — the same sentence with a different ordinal: me up on to the second heaven and showed me (7:1), me up on to the fourth heaven and showed me all the (11:1), and at 20:1 a run that begins only at on to: on to the seventh heaven and i saw there a. And the counter-example runs the other way: B 10:3 and A 10:3 describe the same armed, merciless angels and share no two consecutive words (codex). A deep run here means Forbes chose the same English twice; a zero does not mean the Slavonic differs.
What B lacks is not spread evenly. In the file 28 of A’s labels have no B row. The largest block is 18:2–9 — the Grigori, Satanail, Hermon, the daughters of men, I prayed for them. The next is the cluster this page is about.
2. Seven heavens or ten — Charles’s claim, tested on both files.
What Charles said, in 1896: “Thus in xx. 3 there is a mention of the tenth heaven, and in xxi—xxii. 3 a description of the eighth, ninth and tenth heavens, though the rest of the work directly speaks of and indirectly implies only seven heavens. B omits all reference to this addition in A.” And in 1913, on 21:6, that “throughout the rest of the book only seven heavens are mentioned or implied”.
Measured: every row in either file that names a heaven by its number —
| heaven | A — every row that names it, whole book (340 rows) | B — the same (228 rows) |
|---|---|---|
| first | 3:1, 3:2 | 3:1 |
| second | 7:1, 18:4 | 7:1 |
| third | 8:1 | 8:1 |
| fourth | 11:1 | 11:1 |
| fifth | 7:3, 18:1, 18:2 | 18:1 |
| sixth | 19:1 | 19:1 |
| seventh | 20:1, 21:2, 21:6, 40:12 | 20:1 |
| eighth | 21:6 | — |
| ninth | 21:6 | — |
| tenth | 20:3 (twice), 22:1 | — |
In all 340 rows of A, every eighth, ninth and tenth heaven stands in three verses: 20:3, 21:6, 22:1 — all of them inside the two passages Charles named, xx. 3 and xxi–xxii. 3. B names seven heavens, and each of them exactly once in its 228 verse rows. The chapter titles are left out of every count here; counted on their own, B’s titles name six of the seven a second time, and A’s title above 22:1 names the tenth — inside the same passage. As far as a count of named heavens can test it, his statement holds on this English without exception.
What the count cannot do is the second half of his claim. That these verses are interpolations — added to A, rather than dropped from B — is an argument about the history of the Slavonic text, and two English columns cannot settle it. The page reports his judgement beside the count and adopts neither direction.
3. The face.
Inside the same three verses stands a disagreement about whether Enoch sees. A 22:1: Thus I saw the Lord’s face, but the Lord’s face is ineffable, marvellous and very awful, and very, very terrible. B 22:4: and I fell prone, and could not see the Lord God. Both texts set Enoch before the Lord’s face (21:5, both) and have the Lord say stand before my face into eternity (A 22:5, B 22:4b). Only A says he saw it. On Charles’s 1896 report, Sokolov’s text has its own form of 22:1–3 (I also saw the Lord face to face); that text is not held, and the report is not checked.
The canon has its own sentences about God’s face and who sees it, on both sides — Exodus 33:20 and John 1:18 on one, Genesis 32:30 (32:31 in the Masoretic text), Exodus 33:11 and Revelation 22:4 on the other, among them. This page names them for the reader and runs nothing against them: there is no Greek or Hebrew 2 Enoch to run.
4. Enoch’s years: one recension, two numbers, a choice of Genesis.
| text | Enoch’s age at Methuselah’s birth | years after it | all his years |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 Enoch A 1:1 | 165 | 200 | 365 |
| 2 Enoch B 1:1 | — | — | 365 |
| CATSS Greek, Genesis 5:21–23 | 165 | 200 | 365 |
| Dillmann’s Ethiopic Genesis | 165 | 200 | 365 |
| Masoretic text | 65 | 300 | 365 |
| Samaritan Genesis (Chester Beatty 751) | 65 | 300 | 365 |
| Clementine Vulgate | 65 | 300 | 365 |
| Jubilees 4:16, 4:20 (Charles’s English; dates, not ages) | 65 (AM 522 to AM 587) | — | — |
A 1:1 has the Greek and Ethiopic Genesis numbers, both of them — 165, then 200 — and not the Masoretic, Samaritan or Latin 65 and 300. B’s 365 is the one figure every text in the table that gives a total shares, so B cannot be placed by it. The CATSS Greek’s 5:22 reads διακόσια ἔτη; Dillmann’s Ethiopic ፪፻ዓመተ; the Vulgate trecentis annis. Agreement in a number is not evidence of which Genesis anyone read; it is reported as what each column has.
5. The year: 365¼, 354 — or 364.
- A: three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter days (14:1, 16:4: the sun’s gates, and the solar year); the lunar year three hundred and fifty-four (16:5); the twelve gate-lengths of 16:2 adding to 365; a circuit of the sun of twenty-eight years (15:4) and a sevenfold course in nineteen (16:8); and one sentence in Charles’s square brackets, the great circle of five hundred and thirty-two years (16:5–6), which his note calls “a marginal gloss”.
- B: no 365¼ anywhere; three hundred and sixty-four days complete at 16:5; and in 13:3 day-counts for the gates (forty-two, thirty-five, thirty-five, thirty-five) that A does not have, with the third gate missing from the list.
- Charles: B’s 364 seems to be an error for 354. Counted: the number 364 also stands (of days, of the year, or at 75:2 of its stations) in 5 verses of Charles’s 1 Enoch and 2 of his Jubilees. Whether B’s figure is a slip or a calendar, the English cannot say; the page prints both possibilities and chooses neither.
⚠️ Named, not measured: the Bible beside these chapters.
- 2 Corinthians 12:2–4 — a man caught up ἕως τρίτου οὐρανοῦ and εἰς τὸν παράδεισον. Measured on the Greek alone: a word for third within three words of heaven stands in 1 of the 7,927 SBLGNT verses (2 Corinthians 12:2) and in 0 of the 30,348 Greek Old Testament units. Paradise itself stands in three: Luke 23:43, 2 Corinthians 12:4, Revelation 2:7. 2 Enoch puts paradise in the third heaven in both recensions; Paul numbers no heaven past the third, and says what he heard cannot be told.
- Revelation 2:7 — ἐκ τοῦ ξύλου τῆς ζωῆς, ὅ ἐστιν ἐν τῷ παραδείσῳ τοῦ θεοῦ. 2 Enoch 8:3 has the tree of life in paradise too, in both texts.
- Isaiah 6:3 and Revelation 4:8 — the threefold holy; set out at A 21:1 in the codex.
- Joshua 5:14–15, Daniel 10–12, Jude 9, Revelation 12:7 — the commander of the Lord’s army, and Michael; set out at 22:6 and in Stage 3.
- Genesis 6:1–4; Jude 6; 2 Peter 2:4 — angels and the daughters of men, angels kept for judgement. Charles’s note on 7:1, on the prisoners of the second heaven: “Cf. 2 Pet. ii. 4; Jude 6”.
It settles where the extra heavens are. In Forbes’s English, A’s heavens above the seventh are confined to three verses, B’s verse rows name each of its seven once, and the vision of the face stands inside A’s cluster. It does not settle which text is older, or whether the cluster was added to A or cut from B, or what the Slavonic says word for word. Those are the questions the editions in Stage 1 argue; this page has none of their evidence.
What this page could not check, six faults it found in its own source, and where it is weakest.
This is the section that makes the shelf trustworthy.
⚠️ Four verse boundaries the file has wrong — found on the page images, reported:
- A 16:5 / 16:6. The file ends 16:5 at contains five hundred and opens 16:6 with and thirty-two years.], splitting a number. On p. 438 the margin numeral 6 stands on the line tains five hundred and thirty-two years.] The; Charles’s note numbers 6. the quarter, and the 1896 text begins verse 6 at The fourth part. 16:6 begins The quarter.
- A 18:1 / 18:2. The file ends 18:1 with and their faces withered,. On p. 439 the numeral 2 stands at the start of the full-width line and their faces withered, and the silence …, and the 1896 text begins verse 2 And their countenances were withered.
- A 21:3 / 21:4. The file begins 21:4 at and said in myself. On p. 442 the numeral 4 stands at the line beginning and I answered him, and the 1896 text begins verse 4 And I answered him. Probable rather than certain: the numeral allows either.
- B 18:1 / 19:1. The file ends B 18:1 with And the two men took me from thence,. On p. 440 those words open an indented paragraph beside the margin numerals 19 1: they are the first words of B’s chapter 19. This one moves 8 words between chapters; every chapter count above is the file’s, and the one it touches (chapter 18) is given both ways.
- Read on the images and standing as the file has them: A 16:5, 18:4, 18:5, 20:3, 20:4, 22:3, 22:7, 22:12; B 1:2, 11:4, 16:6, 22:4. Genuinely ambiguous on the page: A 10:3, A 10:5, B 16:5. Of the 34 LOW starts in these chapters, the other 14 were not read; no line printed here begins or ends at one of them.
⚠️ And two places where the file’s WORDS are wrong — reported, with what they cost:
- A 10:3–4: words out of order. The file ends 10:3 “and I said: ‘Woe, how terrible is this place, woe,” and opens 10:4 “very and those men said to me:”. On the page image (p. 435) the line reads said: ‘Woe, woe, how very terrible is this place,’ and those men said to me, and the independent twentieth-century transcription of the A column (Platt) agrees with the page. The page prints none of the affected words. Measured with the page’s reading in their place, B 10:4’s deepest run rises from 5 to 6 (how very terrible is this place, with A 10:3, band 1); the count of B rows reaching 6 goes from 31 to 32, and of A rows reaching 5 from 54 to 55 and 6 from 34 to 35; the median, the same-label count, the zero at B 10:3 and every run of nine or more are unchanged.
- A 11:5: a heading taken into the verse. The file ends 11:5 with “Of the very marvellous elements of the sun.” On p. 436 that sentence is the heading printed above chapter 12, and the headings file has no heading for chapter 12. A’s word count above includes its 8 words (3,824; 3,816 without them); B is 62% of A either way.
⚠️ What this page could NOT check:
- The Slavonic. At all. There is no Slavonic 2 Enoch on this disk in any form, and no clean public-domain transcription to fetch. Every difference between A and B on this page is a difference between two English columns by one translator. Where Forbes rendered the same Slavonic two ways, or two different Slavonic phrases one way, the measurement cannot see it.
- Sokolov’s text, which Charles used in 1896 and cites at 21:6 and 22:1–3. Reported from Charles, not checked.
- Every modern edition — Andersen, Vaillant, Bonwetsch, Macaskill, the Brill volume. None is held and none was consulted. Their verse numbers were not compared with Charles’s, and their judgements on the recensions are not reported here because they were not read.
- The Talmud passage and the later Hebrew Enoch book that Charles cites for Aravoth and the three extra heavens. Not held; reported as his.
- Forbes’s italics. The file cannot show which English words he supplied; the page images show several in the lines quoted here (thirty-one days at 16:2, to it at 16:5, of in Ruler of Sabaoth at 21:1). They are quoted in roman, as the file has them.
⚠️ Where this page is weakest:
- The English is the only text, and it is one man’s. On a canonical page the shelf sets an English column beside a Hebrew or Greek one; here both columns are Forbes. The A-against-B screen is a measurement of his choices as much as of the manuscripts’.
- The interpolation question is untouched. The page confirms where Charles’s extra heavens are. Whether A added them or B dropped them is exactly what it cannot see.
- The identifications of Muzaloth, Kuchavim, Aravoth and the Grigori are Charles’s. The page counts the Hebrew and Greek words he names; it does not prove that the Slavonic names transliterate them.
- The date and place are Charles’s too, from 1913; nothing here tests them, and the later literature (Stage 1) was not read.
Commentaries & studies:
- W. R. Morfill and R. H. Charles, The Book of the Secrets of Enoch (Oxford, 1896) — introduction, p. xv; notes, p. 27.
- N. Forbes and R. H. Charles, in APOT 2 (Oxford, 1913), pp. 425–469 — introduction §§1, 2, 4, 5; notes on pp. 426, 432, 433, 438, 439, 440, 442.
- F. I. Andersen, in OTP 1 (1983); A. Vaillant (1952); G. N. Bonwetsch (1922); G. Macaskill (2013); A. A. Orlov and G. Boccaccini (eds.) (2012) — not held.
- Online Critical Pseudepigrapha (I. W. Scott et al.), 1 Enoch, Greek fragments (Codex Panopolitanus after Bouriant, 1892; Syncellus after Dindorf, 1829), CC BY 4.0.
Seven heavens or ten, a face seen or not — and a man who was told to write it down.
Name what you learned, why it matters, and one concrete response.
What should we carry away — and do?
- “2 Enoch says” needs a letter after it. The tenth heaven, the Hebrew names of the upper heavens and the vision of the Lord’s face are in one recension; the other climbs seven heavens and says Enoch could not see. When a book survives in two forms, ask which one is being quoted.
- Count before you trust an editor — and then say what the count confirmed. Charles’s sentence about numbered heavens above the seventh holds on every verse row of both files; whether those verses were added to A or dropped from B the count cannot say. Reporting that is as much a finding as overturning it would have been.
- The church’s view, labelled as such: Pleasant Springs reads 2 Enoch as a witness to how some Jews imagined the heavens, not as a map of them. Paul, caught up to the third heaven, numbers no heaven beyond it, says what he heard cannot be told, and boasts of weakness instead (2 Corinthians 12:4–10). And John 1:18: God no one has seen at any time; the only-begotten God, the one being in the Father’s bosom — that one has declared him (the page’s literal gloss of the SBLGNT, which reads μονογενὴς θεὸς).
- One concrete response. Four times in these chapters — at his bed, at the seventh heaven, from Gabriel and from the Lord — Enoch is told Have courage, do not fear. This week, read 2 Corinthians 12:1–10 slowly, and write down one place where you need that sentence.
2 Enoch 22:1 (A) and 22:4 (B) · to share
Forbes’s English, both recensionsB 22:4 “and I fell prone, and could not see the Lord God”
Every Deep Research page traces its passage across the whole sweep — the Old Testament, the Second-Temple world between the testaments (historical witnesses, not Scripture), and the New Testament. Follow the thread:
Pleasant Springs Church — Deep Research
Research method after Michael S. Heiser’s Bible Research Method (examine dictionaries → ancient literature → important words → textual connections → academic publications → share), with the Pleasant Springs “Author & Audience” foundation. Scripture set in the Hebrew, the Greek editions named on each page and the ESV (Old Testament), and the Greek New Testament and the ESV (New Testament), per the practice of Pleasant Springs Church. ⚠️ Status: 2 Enoch is not Scripture for Pleasant Springs and is not deuterocanonical; it is filed under Pseudepigrapha & Second Temple and read as a witness. English: N. Forbes’s translation of both recensions in R. H. Charles (ed.), The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1913), public domain, quoted verbatim and named A (longer) or B (shorter) on every line, in Charles’s lettering. Charles’s notes and introductions are quoted from that volume and from W. R. Morfill and R. H. Charles, The Book of the Secrets of Enoch (1896), both public domain. Greek: the CATSS morphological Septuagint; the SBLGNT; the Greek of 1 Enoch from the Online Critical Pseudepigrapha (ed. I. W. Scott et al.; Codex Panopolitanus after Bouriant 1892, Syncellus after Dindorf 1829; CC BY 4.0). Hebrew: the Masoretic text (Miqra according to the Masorah). Geʻez: Dillmann, Octateuchus Aethiopicus (1853); digitised by Ran HaCohen; Beta maṣāḥəft, CC BY-SA 4.0. Latin: the Clementine Vulgate. Also counted: Charles’s English of 1 Enoch, Jubilees and the Testament of Levi; the Samaritan Genesis 5 (MS Chester Beatty 751; Schorch/Halle transcription in the Text-Fabric Dataset of the Samaritan Pentateuch, Christian Canu Hoejgaard, Martijn Naaijer and Stefan Schorch, 2023; CC BY-NC 4.0). No Slavonic text is held. Direction of influence is nowhere asserted.
Scripture quotations marked ESV are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. ESV Text Edition: 2016. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license, and the ESV may not be translated in whole or in part into any other language. www.esv.org
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