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Comment by Minor49er | Hacker News Reader

"The Books of Enoch" by Paul C. Schnieders is an interesting read if you're curious about their contents. The general consensus from my understanding is that none of the ones we have today are the one referenced in The Bible

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Thanks for the reference. I have read Enoch 1 and it is a wild story that in my view is pure fantasy (e.g., giants were 300 cubits tall!?). I have always just assumed that Jude and Peter were quoting some authentic version from earlier and the version I have read was the creation of an imposter.

I mean, Genesis has people that are 900 years old, a talking serpent, a boat that can fit every type of animal, and you take issue with giants lol?

The style of the first 11 chapters of Genesis is very different than the remainder of the book. For instance, Genesis 3 is not meant to be historical prose like chapter 12 and following. Projecting my 21st century world view on an ancient text describing deep mysteries about creation and the fall of man is pure arrogance. For instance, the author of Genesis 3 doesn't expect the reader to think the serpent was merely a biological snake. This is a condensed poem that conveys truth in a much deeper way.

The oldest myths about the origin of death feature, particularly, a sacred tree, and a snake. The snake symbolized immortality, which they got to keep (shedding their skin) but humans lost.

Genesis authors had to retain all the old myth imagery in order to be taken seriously as an origin story, but stripped off the meaning to lay their own on top.

Noah and the dove are also from much older origin myths about where the Earth came from.

Cain and Abel, and also Esau and Isaac, recycle origin twin myths. One twin kills his brother and makes the world out of his body parts, and becomes the first priest.

So Genesis is largely a big mishmosh of origin-myth imagery with a narrative overlaid.

The imagery shows up in Vedic hymns, too, tracing to the same original source, with of course a different narrative overlaid.

I'm not making any judgements either way. Just saying that Enoch is no more fantastic than parts of Genesis. Also, Genesis references Enoch.

Have you read Enoch 1? Also, Genesis does not merely reference Enoch, it introduces him. He is seventh from Adam and the first man to break the pattern of death.

> Have you read Enoch 1?

Yes, among many other religious texts (whole Orthodox Biblical canon + a bunch of pseudoepigraphical works, most of the Buddhist canon, Taoist and Hindu works, some ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian texts, Quran, etc...). Got way too sidetracked in University. It's interesting though.

> Also, Genesis does not merely reference Enoch, it introduces him

Of course he was a character mentioned in Genesis but references to things from the book of Enoch (Nephilim/Giants/half-god humans) are more interesting.

Great. I have a hard to finding anyone whose has actually read these texts. I think we could have an interesting conversation, but HN threads are a bit constraining.

The talking snake most likely refers to a very-knowledgeable snake-people Nagi and their king Dagon. They supposedly lived 12 thousand years ago and had skills and knowledge deemed magical by laymen. India is probably the only nation old enough to have records of that period. "Be wise like a serpent" means "be wise like nagi".

You concluded a biblical text was fantastical, due to it's literal reading being physically impossible?

Right. Because everything in Genesis makes perfect sense.

That depends on interpretation.

Not to mention that the nephilim may not have even been giants to begin with. They are ambiguous

Giants usually refer to the atlantean period of very tall people. They supposedly co-existed with the current nation of 5-6 feet tall people, but died out around 12 thousand years ago. India has a story about Ravana, that suspiciously resembles the last atlantean king who went rogue.

My pet theory is that the Nephilim are a folk memory of the last Neanderthals.

Aren’t Neanderthals much shorter than humans?

They were, but also stronger, IIRC.

I figured "giant" could be a metaphor, after all it's in a collection of traditions of pastoralists, wherein God rejects the agriculturalist's offering, who then kills his sheep herding brother.

Then the farmer builds the first city, and his descendents are the first blacksmith, the first musician, the first dancer (debateably), and the first animal farmer - who also often conflicted with semi-nomadic herders.

Great metaphor for the Iron Age equivalent of the Range Wars.

Could Neanderthals be described as "heroes of old, men of renown"?

In my head canon, some Neanderthal managed to find acceptance in Homo sapiens societies through prodigious feats of strength or bravery. We know we interbred (although IIRC, DNA evidence suggests that mainly Neanderthal male and Homo sapiens female births were viable)

And IIRC, Neanderthal were far stronger than us.

Mind you, could be that they're where folk memory of dwarves arises, short, strong, like living underground.

Maybe elves were Homo floriensis?

I love speculating like this because it's entirely unprovable, much like evolutionary psychology.

Enoch is not a man. Enochion was the name of the famous third-eye that supposedly (if we believe the story in the book) existed in the pre-atlantian era of the super-giants, cyclopes, who peacefully co-existed with giant reptiles. The eye allowed them to see things thru, so it was called the eye of wisdom. As the civilization progressed and got immersed in sin, the visions that the eye saw became intolerable, and over time it had lost its function, depressed into the center of the brain and became hypophysis.

Have you read the Bible? Or the book being referenced at all? Enoch is very clearly a man.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enoch

It's a common technique to invent personalities to describe things you don't want to put in plain writing. Literal reading of the Bible, and similar books, won't reveal much.

It would be greatly appreciated if you could provide any scholarly evidence, or even a cited critical reading of the Book of Enoch, showing that this character (whom has been a noted point of contention and much thought and writing amongst theologians and secular researchers alike for millennia) is intended to be an invented metaphorical personality of the type that you described.

The academic literature is sterile in this regard: it's just circling around the theological dogma. I'm saying all this to evoke curiousity so others do some discovery on their own. I think that western scholars havent found much is because this kind of literature is fragmented across many nations and religions.

They are all metaphorical.

No one seriously imagines Adam, Noah, or Moses as historical, flesh-and-bone, people, any more than we imagine that of Paul Bunyan, Slue-foot Sue, or Hamlet.

Jesus, too, BTW. Everything written as if of real events came at least two generations after the cult began.

Username checks out

And karma at 666. But it was supposed to be "morlock-hai".

Uh.

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