In chapters 43 to 68 of 2 Enoch, Enoch — back on earth for thirty days — teaches his sons, blesses and curses, says goodbye at a place called Achuzan, and is taken up in a darkness that lifts. The book survives only in Slavonic, in a longer text R. H. Charles called A and a shorter he called B, and this page reads both in the one English that prints them side by side, Nevill Forbes’s of 1913. Here B has 1,856 words to A’s 3,791 — and the difference is not spread evenly. Where something happens — the farewell, the gathering, the taking — B has 87% of A’s words, and a B verse shares a median run of 7 words with A’s same verse. Where Enoch teaches, B has 47%, and the median is 4. The two are far closer in the story than in the teaching. Among what only A has: the dates of chapter 68, and 49:1 — the one verse in the book with yea, yea and nay, nay, where the doubled word is what a man may swear by. 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 an apocalypse known from Slavonic manuscripts: Enoch carried through the heavens to the Lord’s face (chapters 1–22), told and writing there (23–37), then sent back to his sons (38–42), and, in these chapters, still on earth, teaching them before he is taken. Charles (1913) judged its final editor a Hellenistic Jew and placed its final form in Egypt about the beginning of the Christian era; 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 taught and hoped 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 — an oath by yea, yea, souls of beasts that accuse men at the judgement, a man acclaimed as the redeemer of sins — 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 and page images of APOT vol. 2, and the OCR of the Morfill–Charles edition of 1896 (Charles’s notes and introductions are quoted from these); the Greek Old Testament (30,348 CATSS units screened); the SBLGNT (7,927 verses); the Masoretic text; the King James Bible with its Apocrypha (1769); Charles’s English of 1 Enoch; a Wikisource transcription of Platt’s reprint of the A column (counted, never printed).
NOT HELD: any Slavonic text of 2 Enoch; Sokolov’s text, except where Charles reports it; every modern edition and translation (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 against 2 Enoch. 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 screened against any other English, because that would measure translators, not texts; where the page counts an English word in another translation, it says so and draws only that conclusion. What is measured in Greek and Hebrew is the canonical side of Charles’s claims — Deuteronomy 32:35 and its two New Testament quotations, the doubled yes, the word behind mansions.
2 Enoch 43:1–68:7 — nine places, both recensions named on every line
English: N. Forbes in Charles, APOT 2 (1913) · A = Charles’s longer text · B = Charles’s shorter textB — no 49:1: B’s chapter 49 begins at verse 2 —
B 49:2 “For I swear to you, my children, that before man was, a judgement-place was prepared for him, and a measure and a weighing-scale, in which man will be proved, and they are there already prepared.”
A only. The one verse in either text with yea, yea and nay, nay — and in A the doubled word is what a man may swear by, if there is no truth in men. A’s next verse opens “And I swear to you, yea, yea”. On the page (APOT p. 460) the B column is blank beside A’s 49:1. The file misplaces one quotation mark in A 49:1; the line is printed as the page has it (Stage 5).
B 50:4 “and if you are able to requite (sc. ill), do not requite your neighbour (sc. with ill) because the Lord is your requiter, and he (lit. who) will be the avenger on the day of the great judgement.”
One of the verses Charles used to argue that the book, or part of it, was first written in Greek — a day of avenging, as in the Greek of Deuteronomy 32:35 and not in the Hebrew’s opening clause. But B 50:4’s deepest contact with A is not A 50:4: it is the refrain on the day of the great judgement, 7 words, at three other A verses (Stage 4).
A 52:14 “Cursed is he who speaks peace with his tongue, while in his heart there is no peace but a sword.”
B 52:13 “Blessed is he who speaks peace, and he has peace.”
B — no 52:14 —
The last line of each series. A ends its seven blessings and seven curses on a curse; B, with six and five, ends on a blessing. The words he who speaks peace open both last lines — under a blessing in B, under a curse in A (a run of 5, is he who speaks peace).
A — “[Let us not say: ‘Our father is before God, he will stand forward for us on the day of judgement,’ for there father cannot help son, nor yet son father.]”
A 53:1 “And now, my children, do not say: ‘Our father is standing before God, and is praying for our sins,’ for there is there no helper of any man who has sinned.”
B 52:15 “All this will be laid bare in the weighing-scales and on the books on the day of the great judgement.”
B 53:1 “Say not, my children, that our father is with God, and will pray for us (sc. and obtain absolution) from our sins.”
Both texts: do not count on your father’s prayers. Between 52:15 and 53:1 A prints, in square brackets and set like a section title, a second form of the same warning; Charles’s note: “This verse has a duplicate reading in A.” The file folds that block, and the words And now, that begin 53:1, into 52:15; both are printed here as the page has them.
B 56:1 “Mefusailom answered his father Enoch: ‘What food (sc. meal) is agreeable to thy eyes, father, that we may make before thy face, that thou mayst bless our dwellings and thy sons, and all thy household, and glorify thy people, and thus after that depart?’”
The deepest agreement between the two texts in these chapters: 15 consecutive words, here and at 57:2, tie band 1 from both sides and against the whole of the other text. Methuselah offering his father food. Note the names: A Methosalam, B Mefusailom.
B 61:2 “He has prepared many mansions, very good dwellings, and bad dwellings without number.”
Both texts. Charles’s note: “many mansions. Cf. 1 En. xxxix. 4, 7, 8; xli. 2; John xiv. 2.” The words are an English translator’s; Stage 4 counts what can be counted.
A 64:5 “and redeemer of the sins of man”
B 64:2 “And these came together up to four thousand men, and they came to the place Achuzan, where Enoch was and his sons.”
B 64:5 “and appointed thee the taker away of our sins”
Even in the story the numbers part: two thousand in A, four thousand in B. And the people’s title for Enoch stands in both, eleven chapters after 53:1; Charles: “For Enoch as intercessor cf. 1 En. xiii. 4. Contrast 2 En. liii. 1.” A says that Enoch answered all his people and B that he said to all the people; in neither does the reply take up the title: the next words begin the account of creation (65:1).
B 67:3 “Glory be to our God into eternity. Amen.”
B ends here, with a doxology. A has one more chapter. The file drops the closing quotation mark after God, in A; the page has it.
B — no chapter 68 —
A only. The month of the first ascent here is Tsivan; A’s own 1:2 says “the first day of the first month” and B’s 1:2 “a certain day of the second month”. Sixty days in heaven and thirty on earth make 90; yet the second taking is on the sixth of Tsivan, five days later in the month than the first. The text names no year for either.
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: the shelf’s King James, Vulgate and CATSS loaders each raise on 2 Enoch rather than return nothing. And no Slavonic text is held. The only verse numbering is Charles’s, made for his 1896 edition and used by Forbes in 1913 for both columns, printed in the margin; the sixty-eight chapters are the division Morfill and Bonwetsch used, as Forbes says (APOT 2, p. 426).
The two shapes, counted (verses per chapter, 43–68): A 3 · 5 · 3 · 3 · 5 · 9 · 2 · 5 · 5 · 15 · 4 · 1 · 3 · 2 · 2 · 6 · 5 · 5 · 5 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 10 · 8 · 3 · 7 (128); B 3 · 3 · 2 · 0 · 0 · 0 · 1 · 5 · 3 · 13 · 4 · 1 · 3 · 2 · 2 · 6 · 2 · 2 · 3 · 2 · 4 · 5 · 10 · 1 · 3 · 0 (80). B has no chapters 46, 47, 48, 68, and its chapters 45 and 49 begin at verse 2.
The offsets between the two, measured: they share 78 labels; 50 are A’s alone and 2 are B’s alone (52:16, 65:11). In these chapters B’s printed order never departs from A’s. Agreement of label is mostly agreement of content: of B’s 78 shared rows, 58 have the same label among their deepest A partners (43 of them uniquely; the rest tie with other A rows).
The headings are editorial. A carries 24 section titles in these chapters (none before 53 or 68), and the one over chapter 60 stands between 60:1 and 60:2; B carries none. Every verse start is a margin numeral, so where a verse begins inside a printed line the file’s split is an inference: 14 of A’s starts here and 9 of B’s are marked LOW (Stage 5).
⚠️ A reader with another English will find other numbers. The Wikisource transcription of Platt’s reprint of the A column in The Forgotten Books of Eden (held here, not printed) re-divides the verses: in these 26 chapters its verse count matches Charles’s in 8 (45, 52, 56, 57, 62, 63, 64, 66), and it has no 60:1 at all, so its 60:1 is Charles’s 60:2. Later editions that print a 69–73 are numbering the Melchizedek appendix, which is not in this text.
The Shape of the Passage
Sequence (counted): three teachings, three turns of the story, and a coda only A hasThe book’s refrain marks the teaching. The great judgement stands in 10 A rows and 5 B rows of these chapters, and every one of them is inside a teaching block; none is in the story or the coda.
This is a sequence, and it is not offered as a chiasm. The only frame is a place-name: Achuzan stands at A 64:2, 68:5 — the gathering and the altar — and in B only at 64:2, since B has no chapter 68.
⚠️ 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. It is not Scripture for us, and nothing taught at Pleasant Springs rests on it.
Author
Anonymous, writing as Enoch, and in these chapters almost all speech. The vocative my children stands in 14 A rows and 10 B rows of chapters 43–68; the narrator steps in only to move the story — Methuselah, the gathering, the darkness.
Charles’s account, reported and not tested: “Its final editor was an Hellenistic Jew, and the place of its composition was Egypt.” On the sacrifices of 59:2–3 he wrote: “These verses suggest a date earlier than the destruction of the Temple, A.D. 70.” The page tests none of it; there is no text here to test it with.
Two texts, not an author’s drafts. Charles’s A and B are two manuscripts’ forms of the book, printed by different editors in 1880 and 1884. This page measures what each carries and does not say which came first.
Audience
His sons, then the elders, then everyone. The instruction begins to my children (43:1), widens to the elders of the people (57:1–2, both texts), and at Achuzan to “all people far and near” (A).
And the books are for handing on. Both texts: “Hand them to all who want them” (A), “tell them to all that want” (B). A alone goes further, in a chapter B lacks: “amongst the nations who shall have the sense to fear God, let them receive them” (48:6–7; the file’s split between them is marked LOW) — and, for those who do not, “a terrible judgement awaits these” (48:8).
A people who will lose a father. The farewell is the frame of everything: thirty days on earth, and then gone. What do you tell your children when you know the date?
Orient on the book, on its two Slavonic forms, and on how the editions letter them.
Search by topic: 2 Enoch; Slavonic Enoch; Book of the Secrets of Enoch; Enoch; Methuselah; testament (literary form); beatitudes; oaths; Melchizedek.
Which articles are relevant?
- Anchor Bible Dictionary — entries on Enoch and on the books of Enoch. Subjects to look up; the exact entry titles were not checked, and the work is not held on this disk.
- Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism — the 2 Enoch entry, and the entries on testaments and on oaths. Not held; that such entries exist was not checked.
- Dictionary of New Testament Background (IVP) — on the Enoch literature. Not held; that such an entry exists was not checked.
- On the text — any article that says which recension it is quoting. An article that speaks of ‘2 Enoch’ without naming the longer or shorter text, or that uses Andersen’s letters without saying so, cannot be checked against this page.
Bibliography surfaced:
- 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), pp. 425–469. Held; the English of this page.
- W. R. Morfill and R. H. Charles, The Book of the Secrets of Enoch (Oxford, 1896). Held as OCR; an eclectic text following A, quoted here only where the page says so.
- F. I. Andersen, “2 (Slavonic Apocalypse of) Enoch”, in J. H. Charlesworth (ed.), The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1 (1983). Not held; its J and A are Charles’s A and B.
- A. Vaillant, Le livre des secrets d’Hénoch (1952). Not held.
- Grant Macaskill, The Slavonic Texts of 2 Enoch (2013). Not held.
- Bonwetsch’s German translation, named by Forbes in APOT (p. 426) as using the same sixty-eight chapters. Not held.
A father’s farewell, a list of blessings and curses, and the books Charles thought the author read.
Every Greek and Hebrew line in this stage is a CATSS, SBLGNT or Masoretic row, quoted from the corpus and checked by the self-check. No 2 Enoch line is measured against any of them: the 2 Enoch side is English. Italic English beside Greek or Hebrew is this page’s own literal gloss.
Which parallels shed light on the world of the text?
A testament. A father who knows he is going gathers his sons, teaches them, blesses them and is taken. Set beside it on this shelf: Genesis 49, Deuteronomy 33, Tobit 4 and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs — farewells that instruct. 2 Enoch ends in a vanishing, and only A gives a date. Named, not measured.
Blessings and curses, counted in the Greek held here. Deuteronomy 27 sets twelve consecutive verses (27:15–26) under ἐπικατάρατος (13 occurrences, all in that form); Deuteronomy 28 has εὐλογημένος 6 times counting every form (4 in this one; 28:3–6) and then ἐπικατάρατος 6 times, likewise (4 in this form; 28:16–19). Luke 6 has 4 Μακάριοι (6:20–22) and then 4 οὐαὶ (6:24–26). Matthew 5:3–11 has 9 Μακάριοι and no woes. 2 Enoch 52 in A does what none of these does: it alternates, line by line, seven blessings and seven curses. Charles: “For these beatitudes cf. xlii. 6–14. They are derived mainly from Sirach.” Counts only; the page sets no 2 Enoch line against any of these.
Sirach and Wisdom, on Charles’s word. Among his reasons for thinking the book partly Greek in origin, Charles wrote: “The writer frequently uses Sirach, and often reproduces it almost word for word” — and “So far as we can judge, it was the Greek Versions of Sirach and Wisdom that our author used.” His list for these chapters names 43:2–3, 47:5, 51:1 and 3, 61:2, 65:2 and (from Wisdom) 65:4. Four of them, with the Greek he pointed to:
| 2 Enoch | Forbes’s English | Greek Charles named (CATSS, the page’s gloss) | In B? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 47:5 | A: “the sand of the sea, or the drops of the rain” | Sirach 1:2 ἄμμον θαλασσῶν καὶ σταγόνας ὑετοῦ … τίς ἐξαριθμήσει — sand of seas and drops of rain … who will count? | No — B has no chapter 47 |
| 51:1 | A: “Stretch out your hands to the poor according to your strength.” B: “Stretch forth your hands to the orphan and to the widow, and according to your power help the poor,” | Sirach 7:32 καὶ πτωχῷ ἔκτεινον τὴν χεῖρά σου — and to the poor stretch out your hand | Yes |
| 61:2 | A: “good for the good, and bad for the bad” B: “very good dwellings, and bad dwellings” | Sirach 39:25 ἀγαθὰ τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς ἔκτισται ἀπ' ἀρχῆς οὕτως τοῖς ἁμαρτωλοῖς κακά — good things for the good were created from the beginning; so, for sinners, bad things | Yes |
| 65:4 | A: “their alternation, beginning, and end” B: “the changes and end of the seasons” | Wisdom 7:18 ἀρχὴν καὶ τέλος καὶ μεσότητα χρόνων τροπῶν ἀλλαγὰς καὶ μεταβολὰς καιρῶν — beginning and end and middle of times, the alternations of the solstices and the changes of the seasons | Yes |
The table measures nothing: English on one side, Greek on the other. What it can show is the one countable thing — which recension carries the verse. Of the seven places Charles names in these chapters, six stand in both texts; 47:5 stands in A only.
A father who will not pray for you. Both texts have Enoch forbid his sons to say that their father before God will pray away their sins (53:1). Charles’s long note there surveys where the belief that the departed pray for the living appears, quoting 2 Maccabees 15:14 in Greek — Jeremiah who prays much for the people — and, near its close, “Finally this doctrine is recognized and apparently accepted in certain parts of the N.T.” Checked here: his Greek of 2 Maccabees 15:14 is the CATSS row, 19 of 19 words in an unbroken run after normalisation. The page reports his survey; it does not adopt his reading of the New Testament passages, and 2 Enoch 53:1 itself says the opposite of the belief he traces.
Taken. Genesis 5:24 in the Masoretic text: וְאֵינֶ֕נּוּ כִּֽי־לָקַ֥ח אֹת֖וֹ אֱלֹהִֽים, and he was not, for God took him; in the CATSS Greek: καὶ οὐχ ηὑρίσκετο ὅτι μετέθηκεν αὐτὸν ὁ θεός, and he was not found, because God moved him. Hebrews 11:5 has μετέθηκεν αὐτὸν ὁ θεός: from Hebrews’ side its deepest run into the screened Greek Old Testament is 4 words, tie band 1, and that one unit is Genesis 5:24; from Genesis 5:24’s side the deepest New Testament run is 4, band 1, Hebrews 11:5. 2 Enoch 67 tells the same taking with a darkness, the highest heaven and a light that returns. Scripture gives the fact in a sentence; 2 Enoch narrates it. The page does not put the two on one level.
A blessing and a curse, a refrain, a doubled yes, a word for rooms, and a place-name.
2 Enoch counts are over Forbes’s English of chapters 43–68 (A 128 rows, B 80), or over the whole book where the page says so. Greek counts are over the 30,348 CATSS units screened (the Odes excluded, as on every page here) and the 7,927 SBLGNT verses. Italic English beside Greek is the page’s own gloss.
Blessed is or Blessed are stands in 12 A rows of these chapters and 9 B rows; Cursed stands in 7 A rows and 5 B rows, all in chapter 52. A: 44:4, 48:9, 52:1, 52:3, 52:5, 52:7, 52:9, 52:11, 52:13, 61:3, 62:1, 66:7. B: 44:4, 52:1, 52:5, 52:7, 52:9, 52:11, 52:13, 61:3, 62:1. Over the whole book the count turns round: A 13, B 17 — because A has no 42:2–13, where B has six more (42:6, 42:7, 42:10, 42:11, 42:12, 42:13), and A’s 42:14 has no beatitude where B’s has one: seven in B’s chapter 42 in all. Charles called those “Nine rather colourless beatitudes.” That is nine verse numbers, 42:6–14; the formula itself stands seven times in them. Matthew 5:3–11 has 9 μακάριοι. Counts, set side by side; no run.
10 A rows and 5 B rows of these chapters (A 44:3, 44:5, 48:9, 50:4, 52:15, 58:6, 60:4, 65:6, 65:8, 66:7; B 44:2, 50:4, 52:15, 58:6, 65:7), and the full phrase day of (the) great judgement in A 44:5, 48:9, 50:4, 52:15 and B 50:4, 52:15. All of them stand inside Enoch’s teaching; the story chapters never use it. This is the refrain Stage 4 finds under Charles’s Greek argument for 50:4.
Twice in the whole of A (49:1, 49:2), and not once in B. In the Greek held here the doubled ναὶ ναί stands in three of the 7,927 New Testament verses (Matthew 5:37, 2 Corinthians 1:17, James 5:12) and in one of the 30,348 Greek Old Testament units: Judith 9:12, where it opens the closing appeal of Judith’s prayer (9:2–14) — ναὶ ναὶ ὁ θεὸς τοῦ πατρός μου, yes, yes, God of my father. 2 Enoch has no Greek, so whether its Slavonic word would be ναί cannot be asked.
The noun stands twice in the Greek New Testament (John 14:2, John 14:23) and once in the 30,348 Greek Old Testament units: 1 Maccabees 7:38, μὴ δῷς αὐτοῖς μονήν, give them no staying. It is told from the adjective μόνη, alone (Lamentations 1:1), by its printed accent; an accent-blind search returns 31 Greek Old Testament units. The English word mansions stands once in the King James Bible held here, Apocrypha included: John 14:2; and in Charles’s English of 1 Enoch at 41:2 only. Those are counts of English words, and say nothing about the Slavonic of 61:2.
The gathering (64:2, both) and, in A, the altar (68:5). B has a brother called Azuchan at 57:2 — the place-name’s letters in another order. A’s brothers at 57:2 are five (Regim, Riman, Uchan, Chermion, Gaidad), B’s four (Regim, Rim, Azuchan, Chermion). Charles: “Riman, Uchan, and Chermion are not mentioned in i. 10.” And on 68: the place “called Achuzan in i. 3, but Aruzan in ii. 17” — of the Melchizedek fragment appended to his 1896 edition. The English spelling of Methuselah is not the same throughout A, either: Mathusal at 1:1, 1:10, 38:3, Methosalam at 56:1, 56:2, 57:1, 57:2, 68:5; B’s is Mefusailom throughout (1:10, 56:1, 57:2).
Over the whole book, for all time stands in 8 A rows (all of them in these chapters) and 0 B rows; into eternity in 3 A rows (0 here) and 9 B rows (6 here). At 60:1 the two texts share 9 consecutive words and then end apart — A “nor pardon for all time”, B “no cure for him into eternity”. Whether the Slavonic differs there, or only the English, these files cannot say. A phrase put into English two ways would cut a shared run short, which is why every A-and-B run on this page is read as a lower bound on shared content.
Chapter 52, both texts, as printed:
A alternates exactly: blessing, curse, blessing, curse, fourteen lines. B has no 52:3–4 and no 52:14, so its series runs six blessings and five curses and ends on a blessing. Several B lines are not the same sentence as A’s at the same number — 52:7 and 52:8 above all; the table prints them, it does not pair them.
| 52 | A | B |
|---|---|---|
| 52:1 | “Blessed is the man who opens his lips in praise of God of Sabaoth and praises the Lord with his heart.” | “Blessed is he who opens his heart and mouth for the Lord’s praise.” |
| 52:2 | “Cursed every man who opens his lips for the bringing into contempt and calumny of his neighbour, because he brings God into contempt.” | “Cursed is he who opens his mouth for the humbling of his neighbour.” |
| 52:3 | “Blessed is he who opens his lips blessing and praising God.” | — no 52:3 — |
| 52:4 | “Cursed is he before the Lord all the days of his life, who opens his lips to curse and abuse.” | — no 52:4 — |
| 52:5 | “Blessed is he who blesses all the Lord’s works.” | “Blessed is he who glorifies all the Lord’s works.” |
| 52:6 | “Cursed is he who brings the Lord’s creation into contempt.” | “Cursed is he who brings a creature of the Lord into contempt.” |
| 52:7 | “Blessed is he who looks down and raises the fallen.” | “Blessed is he who beholds the labour of his hands.” |
| 52:8 | “Cursed is he who looks to and is eager for the destruction of what is not his.” | “Cursed is he who looks to undo the labours of others.” |
| 52:9 | “Blessed is he who keeps the foundations of his fathers made firm from the beginning.” | “Blessed is he who keeps the foundations of his fathers.” |
| 52:10 | “Cursed is he who perverts the decrees of his forefathers.” | “Cursed is he who distorts the decrees and limits of his fathers.” |
| 52:11 | “Blessed is he who implants peace and love.” | “Blessed is he who goes (sc. with others) and brings (sc. others) together in peace.” |
| 52:12 | “Cursed is he who disturbs those that love their neighbours.” | “Cursed is he who disturbs what is in peace.” |
| 52:13 | “Blessed is he who speaks with humble tongue and heart to all.” | “Blessed is he who speaks peace, and he has peace.” |
| 52:14 | “Cursed is he who speaks peace with his tongue, while in his heart there is no peace but a sword.” | — no 52:14 — |
The two recensions measured against each other; then three sayings, and what can and cannot be counted.
The A-and-B screen: every B row of chapters 43–67 against every A row of 43–68, and the reverse, in Forbes’s English, on the tokeniser stated in the code and above (Forbes’s (sc. …) glosses and Charles’s signs removed; no stemming). Contiguous runs of whole words; the tie band is how many rows of the other text reach the same depth, and 0 here means no two consecutive words shared. The Greek screens are the shelf’s usual ones, on normalize.grk_seq_cmp, against the 30,348 CATSS units and the 7,927 SBLGNT verses.
The two recensions, distribution both ways:
B rows against A (80 rows): all 80 reach 2, 79 reach 3, 69 reach 4, 48 reach 5, 30 reach 6, 21 reach 7, 17 reach 8, 14 reach 9, 10 reach 10, 7 reach 11, 4 reach 12, 2 reach 15, and nothing reaches 16. A rows against B (128): all 128 reach 2, 111 reach 3, 86 reach 4, 53 reach 5, 35 reach 6, 24 reach 7, 17 reach 8, 14 reach 9, 10 reach 10, 7 reach 11, 4 reach 12, 2 reach 15, and nothing reaches 16. No row of either text shares fewer than two consecutive words with the other. At the same label the median run is 5, and of the 78 shared labels none is identical word for word — even with one translator.
The deepest: 15 words, at 56:1 and 57:2 — Methuselah’s offer and the summons — tie band 1 from both sides, and band 1 against the whole of the other text.
Where the difference lies. A has 3,791 words here and B 1,856 (49%). Over the 78 shared labels B has 81% of A’s words; 81% of A’s surplus stands in the 50 labels B lacks — chapters 46 (121 words), 47 (199 words), 48 (261 words), 68 (252 words) among them. And it is not spread evenly:
| block | chapters | A words | B words | B as % of A | median same-verse run |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Teaching I | 43–54 | 1685 | 681 | 40% | 4 |
| Farewell | 55–57 | 235 | 201 | 86% | 7 |
| Teaching II | 58–63 | 781 | 437 | 56% | 5 |
| Gathering | 64 | 154 | 119 | 77% | 4 |
| Teaching III | 65–66 | 586 | 313 | 53% | 4.5 |
| Taken up | 67 | 98 | 105 | 107% | 12 |
| Coda | 68 | 252 | 0 | 0% | — |
Story and teaching are the page’s division (see the structure note). The pattern is in the measurement; why the two manuscripts differ this way is not something English columns can settle.
⚠️ Counter-examples — three runs that are not what they look like:
- B 50:4 → A 44:5, 48:9, 52:15 — run of 7, tie band 3. B’s avenger verse finds its deepest A contact not in A 50:4 (a run of 5, avenger on the day of) but in the refrain on the day of the great judgement, which three other A verses carry. The deepest run is a formula; the counterpart is shallower.
- B 44:4 and 61:3 → A 52:3, 52:5, 52:7, 52:9, 52:11, 52:13 — run of 4, tie band 6. Two B beatitudes reach deepest into A’s chapter 52, on blessed is he who, rather than into their own A verses. The beatitude formula, not the beatitude.
- A 60:1 ↔ B 60:1 — run of 9. A strong contact that stops where A has his flesh, nor pardon and B has him; only after that do the endings part, for all time in A, into eternity in B (Stage 3). The run measures the first difference, not the whole of what the two verses share.
The oath saying — A only:
What A says. Enoch will not swear by heaven, by earth or by any other creature; the Lord has no oath in him, but truth; and “If there is no truth in men, let them swear by the words ‘yea, yea’, or else, ‘nay, nay.’” Then he does: “And I swear to you, yea, yea”. In A’s English the doubled word is not set against swearing; it is the form an oath may take.
What the New Testament says. Matthew 5:34 μὴ ὀμόσαι ὅλως, do not swear at all, and 5:37 ἔστω δὲ ὁ λόγος ὑμῶν ναὶ ναί, οὒ οὔ, let your word be yes, yes; no, no. James 5:12: μὴ ὀμνύετε, μήτε τὸν οὐρανὸν μήτε τὴν γῆν μήτε ἄλλον τινὰ ὅρκον· ἤτω δὲ ὑμῶν τὸ Ναὶ ναὶ καὶ τὸ Οὒ οὔ, do not swear, neither by heaven nor by earth nor any other oath; but let your yes be yes and your no no. The same three refusals — heaven, earth, anything else — and, in A’s English, a different use of the doubled word. Charles put the weight elsewhere: he counted 49:1–2 among the places where “swearing is reprobated by both, xlix. 1, 2” — 2 Enoch and Philo (the 1896 introduction has the same sentence). Paul has it once more, in a question about his own plans: τὸ Ναὶ ναὶ καὶ τὸ Οὒ οὔ (2 Corinthians 1:17).
What can be measured. B has no 49:1. From Matthew 5:37’s side the deepest run into the screened Greek Old Testament is 3 words, tie band 3; from James 5:12’s, 3, band 3 — short ordinary phrases in both cases (your word, what is more; my brothers), none of them the doubled yes. And 49:1 is not one translator’s turn of phrase: Morfill’s translation of 1896 has “let them swear by a word, yea, yea, or nay, nay”. Whether the Slavonic says swear by cannot be checked; two English translators read it so.
What Charles said, in 1896 and again in 1913. The 1896 introduction set 49:1 beside Matthew 5:34, 35, 37 and judged the New Testament likeness “sufficiently large to establish a close connexion, if not a literary dependence”; the 1913 introduction keeps the sentence, “sufficiently large to establish a close connexion if not a literary dependence”, again with 49:1 beside Matthew 5:34, 35, 37 and with 61:2 beside John 14:2 (APOT 2, p. 428). Both introductions also say, a few lines after dating the book, that “it was not to be expected that it exercised a direct influence on the writers” of the New Testament (1913: “it was not to be expected that it should exercise a direct influence on the writers of the New Testament”), though “it occasionally exhibits striking parallelisms in diction and thought”, and that “a few phrases in the New Testament may be derived from it”. And both notes on 49:1 read the saying as common Jewish stock: in 1896, from this passage and from Philo, Matthew 5:34–35 “was a Jewish commonplace”; in 1913, “Cf. Matt. v. 34, 35.” … “This appears to be a Jewish commonplace (Conybeare).” Charles held these judgements together at both dates; what differs between the two notes is the verdict’s wording, it is clear in 1896 and appears in 1913. The page reports them as his and asserts no direction.
Deuteronomy 32:35 — the Greek half of Charles’s argument, tested:
The claim. “In l. 4 the writer reproduces the LXX text of Deut. xxxii. 35 against the Hebrew.” (APOT 2, p. 426; l. 4 is 50:4.) His note on the verse: “avenger . . . day of great judgement. Cf. Deut. xxxii. 35 (LXX).”
The half this disk can test holds. The CATSS row opens ἐν ἡμέρᾳ ἐκδικήσεως ἀνταποδώσω, in a day of vengeance I will repay; the Masoretic row opens לִ֤י נָקָם֙ וְשִׁלֵּ֔ם, to me vengeance and recompense. The Greek row has no to me anywhere in it; in its opening clause the Hebrew has no day. Both recensions of 50:4 put the avenging on a day: “be your avenger on the day of great judgement” (A), “will be the avenger on the day of the great judgement” (B).
The half it cannot test is the half that matters. There is no Greek or Slavonic 2 Enoch here, so whether the Slavonic at 50:4 reproduces any Greek cannot be asked. And the day is the book’s own: the day of (the) great judgement stands in A at 44:5, 48:9, 50:4, 52:15 — three times in these chapters besides 50:4 — and B 50:4’s deepest contact anywhere in A is that refrain, not A 50:4 (the counter-example above). The one word 50:4 shares with the Greek row’s opening clause against the Hebrew’s — the Hebrew has its own day later in the verse, י֣וֹם אֵידָ֔ם, the day of their calamity — is a word this book reaches for on its own. The page does not decide what that does to Charles’s argument.
The New Testament quotes the verse twice, with citation formulas, and goes the other way. γέγραπται γάρ … Ἐμοὶ ἐκδίκησις, ἐγὼ ἀνταποδώσω, λέγει κύριος (Romans 12:19) and οἴδαμεν γὰρ τὸν εἰπόντα· Ἐμοὶ ἐκδίκησις, ἐγὼ ἀνταποδώσω (Hebrews 10:30): to me vengeance; I will repay. Charles: “Rom. xii. 19; Heb. x. 30 agree partly with Mass. and partly with LXX.” Measured: against the CATSS row each shares a run of one, ἀνταποδώσω; the pair Ἐμοὶ ἐκδίκησις stands in 0 of the 30,348 Greek Old Testament units and in two New Testament verses, Romans 12:19 and Hebrews 10:30. So the verb’s form is the Greek row’s; the noun’s stem stands in the Greek row too, in another case (ἐκδικήσεως); and the to me answers the Hebrew row’s first word in sense, not in any shared form — the shape of Charles’s sentence. One shared form is verbal contact only; whether the New Testament words agree with the Hebrew is a matter of sense, which no run can measure.
Two counter-examples on the New Testament side. From Romans 12:19 the deepest run into the whole screened Greek Old Testament is 2 words with a tie band of 636 — λέγει κύριος, τῇ ὀργῇ, τόπον τῇ: formulas, not the quotation. From the Greek row’s side Deuteronomy 32:35’s deepest run into the 7,927 New Testament verses is 2 words, tie band 103, and neither quotation is among them. And Hebrews 10:30 is its own control: the same verse goes on to quote the next verse of Deuteronomy, Κρινεῖ κύριος τὸν λαὸν αὐτοῦ, and that clause measures 5 — κρινεῖ κύριος τὸν λαὸν αὐτοῦ — tie band 2 (Deuteronomy 32:36 and Psalm 134:14; the psalm is 135:14 in the Hebrew numbering), and from Deuteronomy 32:36’s side band 1, Hebrews 10:30. One verse, two adjacent quotations: one word shared with the Greek row of 32:35, then five with the row of 32:36.
“Many mansions” — both texts, and an English question:
Both recensions have it (61:2, printed above), and Charles pointed to John 14:2. The Greek there is ἐν τῇ οἰκίᾳ τοῦ πατρός μου μοναὶ πολλαί εἰσιν, in my Father’s house are many dwellings; the King James has “In my Father’s house are many mansions”. Forbes in 1913 has the King James word for 2 Enoch, and so has Morfill in 1896: “there are many mansions prepared for men”. The Wikisource transcription of Platt’s reprint of the A column does not: at this verse it has another phrase, and the word mansion stands in it nowhere (counted on the file, which this page does not quote; Platt’s printed book was not seen). From John’s side the deepest Greek Old Testament run is 4 words, band 1 — in the house of. A reader who meets many mansions in 2 Enoch is meeting an English translator’s word; what Slavonic stands under it is not held here.
It settles what each recension carries in one man’s English. The story of the farewell and the taking: both, and closer to each other than anywhere else in these chapters. The teaching: both, with B at about half of A’s length. The oath by yea, yea, chapters 46–48, the last curse of 52, most of 66 and the whole of 68: A only.
It tests one scholar’s Greek claim on its Greek side, and the Greek side holds; the 2 Enoch side cannot be tested, and the word that carries it is a refrain of the book. It settles no contact between 2 Enoch and the New Testament in either direction: every New Testament line on this page is set beside 2 Enoch because Charles or a reader set it there, and none is measured against it.
What this page could not check, what was wrong in its own file, and where it is weakest.
This is the section that makes the shelf trustworthy. For 2 Enoch it is long, because the text itself is not on the disk.
⚠️ Faults in the English file, found on the page images — reported, not buried:
- A 52:15 / 53:1 — a boundary and a block. On p. 462 52:15 ends at the great judgement.; a bracketed sentence follows as a block of its own, set like a section title and ending father.]; and 53:1 begins And now, my children, the numeral against that line. The file folds the block and the words And now, into 52:15 and starts 53:1 at my children. The headings file does not have the block either. Measured both ways: the 30 words of the block are counted in A’s figures above. Moving them out of A’s figures changes these, and no other figure on the page: A’s total (3,791 to 3,761 words); the share of A’s surplus in the labels B lacks (81% to 83%); B’s share of A’s words over the shared labels (81% to 83%); the B rows whose single deepest A partner is the same label (43 to 44); A rows whose deepest run into the other text reaches 4 (86 to 87); Teaching I’s A words (1,685 to 1,655 words); Teaching I: B as a share of A (40% to 41%). The story and teaching percentages and medians, every median and the deepest run stay as printed.
- Quotation marks: A 49:1, A 67:3, B 56:1 (printed corrected), A 44:5 and A 64:1 (not printed). The file has or ‘else, nay, nay.’ where p. 460 has or else, ‘nay, nay.’; drops the closing mark after the invisible God, (p. 469), the opening mark before B’s What food (p. 463) and the closing mark after kiss Enoch, (p. 467); and gives A 44:5 an opening mark before they that p. 458 does not print.
- A 53:4 and A 68:6 (not printed). The file ends 53:4 us?? where p. 462 has us?’, and reads al] people at 68:6, where the second l of all is damaged type on p. 469. Both OCR text files held (two of the four passes the file was voted from) read both the same way.
- Verse starts marked LOW. 14 in A here (43:3, 44:3, 44:5, 48:2, 48:7, 50:2, 53:1, 58:2, 58:6, 61:2, 64:2, 65:7, 66:8, 68:3) and 9 in B (50:4, 58:1, 58:2, 61:2, 64:4, 64:5, 65:1, 65:4, 67:3). Twelve were looked at on the page images for this page: six agree with the file (A 44:3, A 44:5, A 68:3, B 50:4, B 64:4, B 64:5); one is wrong (A 53:1, above); five cannot be settled from the page, because the numeral’s line holds the end of one verse and the start of the next (A 43:3, A 50:2, A 64:2, A 66:8, B 67:3). No line printed above begins or ends at one of the unsettled five.
- The Wikisource transcription of Platt’s reprint is unproofread, re-versed and modernised; this page counts it (Versification, Stage 4) and prints nothing from it.
⚠️ What this page could NOT check:
- Any Slavonic. No clean public-domain Slavonic 2 Enoch exists to fetch. Every statement on this page about what 2 Enoch ‘says’ is a statement about Forbes’s English of it, with Morfill’s 1896 English as the only second translator consulted. Charles’s notes calling the text corrupt in these chapters (at 48:2, B 60:3 and 61:4), and his two glosses of Slavonic words — that A’s relate at 53:3 may be a slip (his note begins “B has ‘distort’.”), and that the vessel of 60:4 may be a mistake for a word meaning judgement — are reported, not checked.
- Charles’s square brackets at 54:1 and 66:2 ([At that time, not understanding this]; [but bow down to his picture]). The notes on those verses do not explain them, and the page found no statement of what the brackets mean in the parts of the introduction it read. They are reported as Charles’s brackets and are not counted as interpolations.
- Forbes’s italics. Words he supplied are italic on the page and plain in the file; a reader cannot tell them from translated words here.
- Whether the beatitudes of 52 come from Sirach, as Charles judged, or the oath saying from a common Jewish stock, as both his notes on 49:1 have it: a question about Greek and Slavonic sources, and neither is held. His Greek for Wisdom 1:11, ἀπὸ καταλαλιᾶς φείσασθε γλώσσης, is in the CATSS row word for word; his Greek for Sirach 39:14, εὐλογήσατε κύριον ἐπὶ πᾶσι τοῖς ἔργοις αὐτοῦ, is not quite the CATSS row, which reads εὐλογήσατε κύριον ἐπὶ πᾶσιν τοῖς ἔργοις and ends there, its next verse beginning δότε τῷ ὀνόματι αὐτοῦ. Which Greek Sirach Charles quoted is not stated in the note.
- The modern editions. Andersen, Vaillant, Macaskill, Bonwetsch: none held, none consulted. A reader who checks a verse there must translate the sigla first.
⚠️ Where this page is weakest:
- The thesis rests on a division the page made. Story and teaching are assigned by content, chapter by chapter. The structure note gives the one doubtful case (55) both ways; the figures move by a point or two and the contrast stays. A reader who draws the lines elsewhere should rerun the table.
- English against English. The A-and-B screen is one translator’s English, and Stage 3 shows the same man rendering what may be the same phrase two ways. Every run here is a lower bound on shared content and says nothing about Slavonic wording.
- Charles’s notes are quoted from OCR checked against page images, of one copy of the 1913 volume and the OCR of the 1896 one. The 1896 quotations were not read on its page images; all three OCR passes held agree on them.
- The date puzzle of chapter 68 is reported, not solved. Sixty days and thirty make ninety; from the first of Tsivan to the sixth is five. The text names no year for either ascent, and the page adds none.
Commentaries & studies:
- R. H. Charles (ed.), APOT 2 (1913), 2 Enoch introduction and notes — held, and the source of every Charles quotation above unless marked 1896.
- W. R. Morfill and R. H. Charles (1896) — held as OCR.
- F. I. Andersen in OTP 1 (1983) — not held.
- A. Vaillant (1952) — not held.
- Grant Macaskill (2013) — not held.
A farewell told much alike, teaching twice as long in one copy, and a yes that becomes an oath.
Name what you learned, why it matters, and one concrete response.
What should we carry away — and do?
- Two copies can agree on what happened and differ on what was said. In these chapters the shorter text has 87% of the longer’s words where Enoch says goodbye and is taken, and 47% where he teaches. When someone quotes an ancient book, ask which copy.
- A parallel can belong to a translator. Many mansions is the King James word for John 14:2; both translators of 2 Enoch held here have it, and the one transcription held of a later reprint of the A column does not. Measure before you repeat.
- Scripture’s yes is not an oath. In A, Enoch lets men swear by yea, yea when there is no truth in them; Matthew 5:37 and James 5:12 put the plain yes in the oath’s place. Reported as each text reads; the page does not make either depend on the other.
- The church’s view, labelled as such. The people at Achuzan call Enoch “redeemer of the sins of man” (A) and “the taker away of our sins” (B), eleven chapters after he told his sons not to count on his prayers. Pleasant Springs reads 2 Enoch as a witness, not Scripture, and tests it by the canon, where the one who takes away sin is named: ὁ αἴρων τὴν ἁμαρτίαν τοῦ κόσμου, who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), and there is εἷς καὶ μεσίτης θεοῦ καὶ ἀνθρώπων, one mediator, too, between God and men (1 Timothy 2:5). The page reports 2 Enoch’s acclamation and does not adopt it.
- One concrete response. For one week, when you say yes or no, add nothing to it — no I swear, no honestly. ἔστω δὲ ὁ λόγος ὑμῶν ναὶ ναί, οὒ οὔ.
2 Enoch 49:1 (A) · to share
Forbes’s English, both recensionsB — no 49:1 —
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; five lines printed as the page images have them, against the file, and recorded. 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. Hebrew: the Masoretic text (Miqra according to the Masorah). Also counted, not printed: the Wikisource transcription of Platt’s reprint of A; Charles’s English of 1 Enoch; the King James Bible (1769), from which seven words of John 14:2 are quoted. No Slavonic text is held. No ESV verse is printed on this page; italic English beside Greek and Hebrew is the page’s own gloss. 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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