The Lost Pillars of Enoch: When Science and Religion Were One

PREFACE

Provenance

In the fall of 2018, Professor Gabriele Boccaccini of the University of Michigan kindly invited me to deliver a paper to the Enoch Seminar conference, to be held in Florence in June 2019. The invitation was fortuitous. Researching a paper for specialists in the ancient Book of Enoch transformed a longstanding idea about a book on religion for the future into something more epic, vital, and universal. Looking again into the enigmatic world of the Book of Enoch opened my eyes to new perspectives on how our species has approached the origins of human knowledge, religion, and civilization. That old esoteric conceit that at the beginning of civilization science and religion were one struck me again, not so much as a lament for the past but as a picture for the future. An ancient idea arose in all its grandeur: before the Flood, humankind possessed pristine knowledge, and that knowledge, enlivened by conscious intuition, was passed down to the worthy in fragments, whence it may be recovered.

This book describes the amazing voyage of how this idea has plowed through the waves of recorded history.

A Note about the Timing of This Book

Days before I began editing this manuscript, my family’s house was hit by a flood precipitated by Storm Dennis, whose tempest hit the UK on February 17, 2020. As if being made temporarily homeless was not woeful enough, then, even as we attempted to make good the damage, the world was hit by the coronavirus, spread from China by every modern amenity. Now we may all feel intimately the kind of reality shock that made so many cultures in the distant past relate legends of a great natural cataclysm, a story familiar to Judeo-Christian tradition as the Great Flood and the story of Noah and his ark. Presuming, doubtless rightly, that so much that was precious was lost in that flood, or for all we know, series of floods, a story developed that vital knowledge that had been discovered before the Flood had been inscribed on pillars to survive the coming catalclysm. One of the pillars survived. In time, the construction of the pillars was ascribed to Enoch, hero of the Book of Enoch, a man who, according to Genesis, never died but was taken directly to heaven. The story, or myth, of the pillars marks the beginning of this book’s journey.

While we may wonder today just what we might wish inscribed on pillars designed to testify to our knowledge before an obliterating catastrophe, I should like to suggest that if we make a start in attending seriously to what has been believed to have come down to us already in fragments from the distant past, we may yet find ourselves able to avoid the worst of what may yet come, much of which, it appears, is the product of our species’ own deliberate fault, the product of our political and social weakness, our spiritual confusion, and our unethical unwillingness to apply knowledge in a mature manner when it exists. He who does not confront facts will be haunted by phantoms. In the words with which I concluded my first-ever attempt at a history of the world, aged eleven: Knowledge is the prize we strive to win. We need knowledge, and we need to act on it.

I offer my heartiest thanks to Jon Graham, Ehud Sperling, Jeanie Levitan, Mindy Branstetter, Erica Robinson, Eliza Burns, and Ashley Kolesnik at Inner Traditions International for turning a rare idea into concrete reality.

PART ONE

THE LOST PILLARS IN ANTIQUITY

ONE

Saving Knowledge from Catastrophe

The World’s First Archaeological Story

Our investigation begins with a little-known story about the origins of knowledge—little known, but not without influence, and arguably the world’s first-ever story of archaeology. Jewish historian Flavius Josephus wrote it down in the 80s of the first century CE, which is about fifty years after his countryman Jesus was crucified.

A guest of the Flavian imperial dynasty in Rome (hence Flavius), Josephus hoped his history—The Antiquities of the Jews—would help Greek-reading Romans better appreciate Jewish people. This was timely. Thousands of Jewish warriors had been slaughtered during the previous two decades by imperial troops confronted with religiously motivated zealots trying to overthrow Roman jurisdiction. Having joined the rebels himself in the war’s early stages, Josephus shrewdly submitted to Rome, proclaiming that Roman general Vespasian fulfilled the East’s widespread expectation of a savior. When Vespasian established the Flavian dynasty as emperor in 69 CE, Josephus was rewarded.

Josephus wanted Romans to see that not all Jews were persistent rebels, nor were they habitually addicted to crazy beliefs. On the contrary, Josephus’s ancestors were, by Roman standards, rational people maintaining comprehensible traditions, supported by respectable ancient texts compiled long before Roman history began. Confident in his mission, Josephus believed that by presenting Jewish history, he was preserving truth for all humanity because Jewish history took everyone back to the beginning.

Fig. 1.1. Josephus (37–100 CE), a romanticized engraving

The progeny of the first human being is described by Josephus in Antiquities’ second chapter: Adam was not only the Jews’ ancestor; he was the Romans’ ancestor too.

The human race, however, got off to a bad start. Adam’s son Cain fathered a line of wicked reprobates, tainted by Cain’s outrageous murder of his pious brother, Abel. Fortunately, Adam and Eve produced a third son, Seth. Seth fathered a lineage distinguished by respect for God and honorable conduct toward God’s creatures: virtues rewarded by access to knowledge of higher things. Josephus describes the higher things in terms of awareness of God, farsighted inventiveness, and knowledge of astronomy.

They also were the inventors of that peculiar sort of wisdom which is concerned with the heavenly bodies, and their order. And that their inventions might not be lost before they were sufficiently known, upon Adam’s prediction that the world was to be destroyed at one time by the force of fire, and at another time by the violence and quantity of water, they made two pillars, the one of brick, the other of stone: they inscribed their discoveries on them both, that in case the pillar of brick should be destroyed by the flood, the pillar of stone might remain, and exhibit those discoveries to mankind; and also inform them that there was another pillar of brick erected by them. Now this remains in the land of Siriad to this day.¹

Josephus’s compelling image of antediluvian pillars is unique. Nowhere does it appear in the Hebrew Bible. In the Bible, pillars generally receive more bad press than good because Hebrew prophets perennially associated them with idolatry. We don’t know whence Josephus obtained his pillars story, or—and this is important—what the original story may have lost in Josephus’s rather casual telling of it. I say this because Josephus’s history frequently glosses over what non-Jews might find difficult. His pillars story utilizes his distinctive style of ameliorative, urbanely philosophical apologetic. For example, Josephus does not labor the point that conflagrations of fire and water were horrific punishments sent by an outraged deity determined to exterminate humanity—and practically everything else on earth. Josephus may have suspected that such an emphasis might offend his Gentile audience with the whiff of unrestrained or fanatical vengeance, and he knew very well that it was apocalyptic predictions of an imminent end of the world in favor of a national savior that had recently motivated Jewish zealots to rise against Rome. Such activities left Jews suspect, and heavily taxed, with Rome commandeering the old temple taxes even after Jerusalem’s temple ceased to exist.

In his rational, universalized account, Josephus’s pillars (or stelae) of brick and stone were erected to preserve discoveries that would otherwise have disappeared in the event of cataclysms, with survivors denied knowledge of them. Josephus emphasizes educative benefit to all human beings. He was aware that predictions of terrestrial deluges were not confined to Jews. Educated Romans knew Greek philosopher Plato’s account in the Timaeus, written in about 360 BCE, of how the great isle of Atlantis sank beneath unforgiving waves. In Plato’s account, an Egyptian priest informs the Greek Solon that Egypt had avoided vastations by flood that ruined other countries thanks to blessed geography and intelligent management of the Nile. Thus, in Josephus’s narrative, Adam’s predictions of water and fire deluges reveal Adam as wise soothsayer rather than unstoical fire-and-brimstone prophet. And, to add a sign of good faith—and a reminder that it was real history about real things the historian was attempting to convey—Josephus added an intriguing codicil: one of the Sethite pillars could still be found.

Given what Josephus says about the stone pillar being the likeliest to survive a flood, it was presumably the stone pillar that remained in Siriad. That God felt compelled to destroy human beings by water is presented by Josephus as proper punishment invited by provocation: all but Noah and his immediate kin had turned wicked, hell-bent on destruction. God would replace rotten seed with a purified race. Romans understood the necessity for imposing punitive measures upon any who failed to honor divine power, so Josephus was able to tiptoe the tightrope by showing that the Jews’ God likewise favored order, austere justice, and respectful honor and that God’s punishments, though severe, were nonetheless just, emblematic of an incorruptible judge of humankind. Indeed, the God of Genesis might be compared to stark Roman power as typified in a famous speech Roman historian Tacitus attributed to enemy Caledonian chieftain Calgacus: They make a desert, and call it peace.*1

THE NEPHILIM

Josephus’s rationalizing of what he took to be Moses’s account of early human history (Genesis) is evident in the way he handles the Flood’s buildup. Look at the Genesis account (6:1–8, King James Version). It shows distinct signs of having been edited or censored, possibly because of its curiously ambiguous, potentially disturbing contents.

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,

That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.

And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men [Hebrew: gibborim] which were of old, men of renown.

And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.

And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.

But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.

Here are the rudiments—or fragmentary remains—of a story first amplified (or reconstructed) in the apocalyptic Book of Enoch (ca. second to first century BCE). In our own time also, the story has provoked speculation, such that its peculiar nephilim (translated uncertainly in the King James Bible as giants, from the the Septuagint’s gigantes) have attracted multiple interpretations, unsurprising given the difficulties of the passage. It is unclear in Genesis whether a direct relationship exists between giants and later baleful copulations attributed to sons of God with daughters of men. It is often assumed that giants resulted from sons of God impregnating mortal women.

A son of God, in this context, is widely understood from other biblical sources to mean an angel (Hebrew malach = messenger), native to heavenly realms, functioning amid a host as spiritual governors of the stars (or the stars themselves; see Job 38:7), joined thereby to human destiny. Attempts to rationalize this Genesis myth have, however, led to seeing sons of God rather as Seth’s righteous descendants, those who still walked with God (as Enoch did), until overcome by lust for the daughters of men. On this interpretation, the daughters of men referred to Cain’s female descendants, so that it was mixing of Cainite and Sethite blood that corrupted humanity and provoked the Flood crisis.*2

Genesis then gives us abbreviated references to a time when there were giants on the earth. The sense, however, is obscured by the statement that they continued after the sons of God fell upon the women and were directly or indirectly connected with the offspring deriving from sons of God and daughters of men.

Compiled from at least five sources perhaps some two to three centuries after Genesis was assembled, the Book of Enoch understood the giants as evil offspring of miscegenation between women and angels (called Watchers). There seems to be a residue of mythological material behind the Genesis passages about mighty men, which were of old, men of renown, a description with no negative connotation about it, partly supported by a rare appearance of the Hebrew nephilim in a myth, or legend, alluded to in Ezekiel 32:37.

And they shall not lie with the mighty that are fallen [nephilim] of the uncircumcised, which are gone down to hell with their weapons of war: and they have laid their swords under their heads, but their iniquities shall be upon their bones, though they were the terror of the mighty in the land of the living.

Here, mighty warriors are fallen. While this translation might suggest that nephilim refers to fallen angels or souls, the Ezekiel passage seems to refer to men who had attacked Jews, and thus been trapped in the underworld (a theme perhaps adopted by the Book of Enoch regarding punishment of the Watchers). The warrior interpretation might have affected the Septuagint’s Greek translation of nephilim as gigantes (giants), implying a hero mythology Greco-Egyptians would have understood, for Greece’s mythic heroes—such as Perseus and Theseus—often had mixed divine and human parentage. Genesis may originally have intended nephilim to indicate the fallen status of sons of God who had left heaven—or a former blessed state—out of lust for daughters of men, while subsequently, with the mighty men of renown theme, engendering an etiological myth rooted in some now vanished reference to an ancient heroic, if bloodthirsty (Cainite?) warrior class. If nothing else, these questions highlight that the Hebrew Bible does not always display plain sense, at least to us.

Josephus offers his own spin on all this in Antiquities, chapter 3. He liberally smooths the rough edges of the biblical account with calm reasonableness. Recognizing this, we may realize that his Sethite pillars story may have lost something important in his retelling; that is, Josephus’s narrative may obscure a now lost mythic progenitor.

Now this posterity of Seth continued to esteem God as the Lord of the universe, and to have an entire regard to virtue, for seven generations; but in process of time they were perverted, and forsook the practices of their forefathers; and did neither pay those honors to God which were appointed them, nor had they any concern to do justice toward men. But for what degree of zeal they had formerly shown for virtue, they now showed by their actions a double degree of wickedness, whereby they made God to be their enemy. For many angels of God accompanied with women, and begat sons that proved unjust, and despisers of all that was good, on account of the confidence they had in their own strength; for the tradition is, that these men did what resembled the acts of those whom the Grecians call giants. But Noah was very uneasy at what they did; and being displeased at their conduct, persuaded them to change their dispositions and their acts for the better: but seeing they did not yield to him, but were slaves to their wicked pleasures, he was afraid they would kill him, together with his wife and children, and those they had married; so he departed out of that land.

Using a pseudepigraphical tradition of Noah pleading with the giants, and reference to familiar Greek giant legends, Josephus ironed out any problems in the narrative that might have caused a Gentile to shake his head on account of suspected credulity, save that stubborn aspect of the story referring to many angels joining themselves to human beings. Perhaps Josephus was familiar with the Book of Enoch Watchers story, but was wary of its apocalyptic character. Nevertheless, while intercourse twixt angel and human female was rare in the normal course of things, analogous combinations were familiar to Greek and Roman mythology.

So, Josephus’s account of the pillars stands with little mythological coloring and a practical rationale. Seth’s descendants had knowledge, and intended it to benefit all of humanity, taking intelligent, logical steps to preserve it from disaster, even when no obvious signs existed that disaster was imminent. They showed wisdom. And the proof of it, Josephus says, could still be seen, should readers choose to investigate further.

WHERE COULD JOSEPHUS’S SURVIVING PILLAR BE FOUND?

Josephus’s history was translated into English by mathematician William Whiston (1667–1752), sometime friend and colleague of the illustrious Isaac Newton. Whiston’s Anglicized expression for where the pillar could be still found (in Josephus’s day) was the land of Siriad. In his footnote to the word, Whiston takes Siriad to mean Syria, and, to push the Syria location further, informs his readers that Josephus confused Seth with the ancient Egyptian king Sesostris (Greek form of Senusret; possibly Senusret III, ca. 1862–1844 BCE). Familiar with references to stelae erected by Sesostris from book 2 (chapters 102–3, 106) of the Histories of Greek chronicler Herodotus (ca. 484–425 BCE), and ever keen to offer magisterial scientific explanations, Whiston puts his two and two together. This is Herodotus’s account of conqueror Sesostris’s pillars, referred to by Whiston in his footnote.

Passing over these, therefore, I will now speak of the king who came after them, Sesostris. This king, said the priests, set out with a fleet of long ships from the Arabian Gulf and subdued all the dwellers by the Red Sea, till as he sailed on he came to a sea which was too shallow for his vessels. After returning thence back to Egypt, he gathered a great army (according to the story of the priests) and marched over the mainland, subduing every nation to which he came. When those that he met were valiant men and strove hard for freedom, he set up pillars in their land whereon the inscription showed his own name and his country’s, and how he had overcome them with his own power; but when the cities had made no resistance and been easily taken, then he put an inscription on the pillars even as he had done where the nations were brave; but he drew also on them the privy parts of a woman, wishing to show clearly that the people were cowardly. Thus doing he marched over the country till he had passed over from Asia to Europe and subdued the Scythians and Thracians. . . . As to the pillars which Sesostris, king of Egypt, set up in the countries, most of them are no longer to be seen. But I myself saw them in the Palestine part of Syria, with the writing aforesaid and the women’s privy parts upon them. Also there are in Ionia two figures of this man carven in rock, one on the road from Ephesus to Phocaea, and the other on that from Sardis to Smyrna. In both places there is a man of a height of four cubits and a half cut in relief, with a spear in his right hand and a bow in his left, and the rest of his equipment answering thereto; for it is both Egyptian and Ethiopian; and right across the breast from one shoulder to the other there is carven a writing in the Egyptian sacred character, saying: I myself won this land with the might of my shoulders. There is nothing here to show who he is and whence he comes, but it is shown elsewhere. Some of those who have seen these figures guess them to be Memnon, but they are far indeed from the truth.²

If Herodotus knew of people who had misidentified the pillars, it was easy for Whiston to consider Josephus likewise mistaken. Besides, the pillars spoken of by Herodotus, like the one to which Josephus referred, could still be seen—and may be so today. One is at Karabel in Turkey, the other on the Nahr al-Kalb’s south bank, northeast of modern Beirut, Lebanon.

Unfortunately, Herodotus was also mistaken.

The relief by the Nahr al-Kalb (Dog River) was once one of three celebrating victories secured by Pharaoh Ramesses II (ca. 1279–1213 BCE), not Sesostris. Another relief there commemorates Assyrian king Esarhaddon’s seizure of Memphis in 671 BCE. Herodotus’s other pillar between Sardes and Smyrna, in the pass of Karabel, also has no claim to Sesostris’s campaigns. It is a carving of King Tarkasnawa of Mira, vassal of the mighty Hittites. Had Whiston been better acquainted with ancient Syria’s archaeology, he might also have referred to one of the obelisks from the still-extant Temple of Obelisks in what was once Byblos, Lebanon.

Fig. 1.2. William Whiston (1667–1752)

Fig. 1.3. Nahr al-Kalb inscriptions; engraving by Louis-François Cassas, 1799

Fig. 1.4. The rock relief Karabel, visited by Charles Texier in 1839

Whiston, however, was himself mistaken.

Whiston’s error probably derives from partial reliance upon the Latin version of Josephus’s Antiquities, first printed by learned humanist and publisher, Johann Froben (1460–1527). On page 7 of chapter 4 of Froben’s version of Flavii Josephi Opera (1524), we find that Josephus’s surviving Sethite pillar was still extant in terra Syria, which is Syria, unequivocally. However, the principal surviving Greek version of Josephus’s Antiquities has the following Greek phrase for the pillar’s whereabouts: kata tēn gēn Seirida.³ The Greek Seirida has apparently been taken by a Latin translator of the Greek original as being either an error for, or variant of, the land of Syria. In Greek there is all the difference between an upsilon (as in Suria or the English Syria) and vowels epsilon and iota (ei). The Greek -ida or -da ending of Seirida normally denotes a grouping or collective identity.

The meaning of the Greek Seirida almost certainly comes from seirios, which means scorcher: the Greek name given to the Dog Star, Seirios (Latin Sirius, the nose of constellation Canis Major—the Great Dog), the star so eminently vital to the Egyptians for the timing of the Nile’s annual life-giving inundation, anciently plotted (ca. 3000 BCE) in relation to the heliacal rising of Sirius, when the star returned at dawn in July (now August), after some seventy days’ obscurity in the daytime sky.

The word scorcher probably came from the very hot (dog) days of summer when Sirius and the sun rose together, or else from Sirius’s uniquely exceptional luminosity (it may even have appeared as red in ancient Egypt). Therefore, the Greek phrase kata tēn gēn Seirida means in the Siriusite land; that is, among the Sirius worshippers: Egypt and/or Kush (today Sudan and northern Ethiopia). Perhaps religious propriety, that is to say Jewish horror at anthropomorphic polytheism, prevented Josephus from referring directly to the Gentile goddess of Sirius, Sopdet (Greek Sothis). Seirida would be a familiar name for Egyptian culture, notably in keeping with the astronomical theme of Josephus’s pillars paragraph.

As well as the astronomy of flooding, Sopdet-Sothis was also identified with Isis, fertility goddess and fount of wisdom, and we may wonder whether such an identification may have had something to do with what was in Josephus’s mind when he chose to indicate the stele’s location while, perhaps unintentionally, obscuring it. Unsurprisingly, Sopdet was also identified with the dog-headed god Anubis, guardian of mysteries and the gates of death, whose terrors Isis traditionally overcame. Sopdet-Sothis-Isis was, anyway, the key divinity to a beneficent flooding, astronomically predicted. This link may give us a clue to what the stele referred to by Josephus may once have, or still, stood for.*3

Sopdet-Sirius’s summertime rising marked the Egyptian new year return of light and life. Egypt’s fertility was directly joined to the visible presence of Sirius—and in Josephus’s time, Egypt was known as the Roman Empire’s granary. Rome had the circuses, but Egypt had the bread, and the bread came thanks to Sirius.

It now seems clear that Whiston combined the Latin and Greek words and came up with an English blend, or compromise: Siriad, which to his mind, especially a mind informed—or misinformed—by Herodotus, must have meant Syria, a suitably biblical setting for a Sethite pillar. This being the most likely case, we can probably see why Josephus did not simply say Syria. While doubtless observing a scholarly translator’s reticence at superseding his text, Whiston nonetheless misled those who followed him.

We must look to Egypt.

TWO

Sethites in Egypt?

It may surprise readers that we have no way of knowing specifically where the authors of Genesis—or Josephus himself—thought the antediluvian leaders of the human race lived. The created world—at least as people of antiquity knew it—was their oyster, so to speak, and Josephus believed that when Seth appeared, there was no place called Egypt—or Judaea for that matter. According to Moses (Genesis’s supposed author), the world’s geographically diffused population, originally sharing one language and religion, derived from Noah’s children, Ham, Shem, and Japheth. Certainly, Josephus was aware that the Promised Land had no meaning until promised to Abraham. Following Genesis, Abraham is placed by Josephus in northern Mesopotamia (described anachronistically as Chaldaea), on the Euphrates side, around Harran or Padan-Aram, and somewhere called Ur, which I strongly suspect refers to the region of Urartu, the biblical Ararat, in what is now the Turkish, Syrian, and Iraqi borderland. Like the Mitanni royalty who ruled Urartu until Assyrian invasion in the thirteenth century BCE, Abraham also enjoyed important links—possibly diplomatic and/or military—with Egypt’s royal house, being on speaking terms with the pharaoh.

Perhaps Josephus knew of the Egyptian belief, rooted to Egypt’s south in the kingdom of Kush, that life first appeared at the Jebel- Barkal (Holy Mountain in Arabic) by the Kushite capital, Napata (now Karima, Sudan), where the ruins of a temple to Amun still stand and a stele was erected to commemorate Kushite king Piye’s victory over Egypt during his reign (744–714 BCE; the stele is now in Cairo). Perhaps Josephus did not, but I think he may have experienced awkwardness in dismissing Egyptian claims familiar to Romans from the Timaeus that Egypt held the most ancient records since it had avoided—thanks to divinely ordered inundations of the Nile—many deluges that periodically wrecked both valley and mountain people at sundry periods elsewhere. In circa 360 BCE, Plato has an Egyptian priest say this to Solon, a Greek visitor:

Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth, which recurs after long intervals; at such times those who live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more liable to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore. And from this calamity the Nile, who is our never-failing savior, delivers