1 Enoch 19
What Happens in This Chapter
Uriel tells Enoch that this is the place where the angels who joined themselves with women will stand. He says their spirits take many different forms, make people unclean, and will lead people astray into offering sacrifices to demons as gods, until the day of the great judgment, when they will be judged until they are brought to an end. He also says the women of the angels who went astray will become sirens. Enoch says that he alone saw this vision, the ends of all things.
And Uriel said to me: ‘This is where the angels will stand who joined themselves with women. Their spirits take many different forms, and they make people unclean, and they will lead people astray into offering sacrifices to demons as if the demons were gods. (This is where they will stand.) They will stand here until the day of the great judgment, when they will be judged until they are brought to an end.
1And Uriel said to me: ‘Here shall stand the angels who have connected themselves with women, and their spirits assuming many different forms are defiling mankind and shall lead them astray into sacrificing to demons as gods, (here shall they stand,) till the day of the great judgement in which they shall be judged till they are made an end of.
Uriel is one of the archangels who guides Enoch through this tour of the hidden places of the earth. The angels "who joined themselves with women" are the Watchers of chapters 6 and 7, heavenly beings who came down, took human wives and fathered the giants. "Their spirits" are the spirits that came out of the dead giants, which chapter 15 describes as roaming the earth. The repeated "this is where they will stand" is a fixed formula in these tour chapters: Uriel is pointing at a specific place and saying what it is for, here the holding place of these beings until judgment. "Make people unclean" translates a word about ritual defilement, being rendered unfit to approach what is holy, rather than about dirt or moral squalor. Sacrificing to demons "as if the demons were gods" echoes a standing charge in older Israelite texts, that the powers people sacrificed to were not the gods they took them for.
2And the women who belonged to the angels who went astray will become sirens.’
2And the women also of the angels who went astray shall become sirens.’
"Sirens" is the actual word in the Greek text behind this line. In Greek stories sirens were female creatures whose singing lured sailors to their deaths. The word also had a second life in Greek-speaking Jewish circles: the Greek translators of Isaiah used it for the wild creatures that howl in ruined cities. So the line can be heard either way, as the women becoming seductive demonic singers or as their becoming wailing creatures of the wasteland, and the text does not settle which.
3And I, Enoch, was the only one who saw the vision, the ends of all things. And no one will see what I have seen.
3And I, Enoch, alone saw the vision, the ends of all things: and no man shall see as I have seen.
"The ends of all things" carries both senses at once here. The tour Enoch has been taken on is a tour of the physical ends of the earth, its outer edges and boundaries; the same phrase also means the final outcome of everything. Enoch's claim to be the only one who saw it is a standard feature of this kind of vision writing, which presents itself as knowledge given to one ancient figure and to no one else.
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