1 Enoch 3
What Happens in This Chapter
This chapter is a single instruction to look at the trees. The speaker points out that in winter the trees appear withered and drop all their leaves, and that fourteen kinds of trees are the exception. Those keep their old leaves for two or three years until new leaves come.
Look closely and see how, in the winter, all the trees seem to have dried up and dropped all their leaves. There are fourteen trees that do not lose their leaves. They hold on to the old leaves for two to three years, until the new leaves come.
1Observe and see how (in the winter) all the trees seem as though they had withered and shed all their leaves, except fourteen trees, which do not lose their foliage but retain the old foliage from two to three years till the new comes.
The fourteen trees are evergreens, the trees that keep their leaves or needles through winter; ancient lists of such trees include the olive, cedar, pine, cypress, myrtle, laurel and date palm. The text gives the number without naming them, and no surviving list of exactly fourteen matches it, so which trees the author had in mind is unknown. Charles's parentheses around "(in the winter)" follow his usual practice of marking words he supplied to complete the sense rather than words standing on their own in the manuscript.
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