In early 1946, in the region now known as the West Bank, a group of Bedouin teenagers were tending to their sheep and goats near the ancient settlement of Qumran. To pass the time, monotonous as it was, they threw around the rocks they found littered across the rugged desert terrain.
When one such rock was thrown into the dark expanse of a cave,
the teenagers were surprised to hear a loud shattering noise echoing
from within. Exploring, they found a collection of large clay jars, one
of which had been broken.
Though they did not know it at that
moment, these teenagers had made a historic discovery. Inside the jars
were a series of ancient scrolls. In the years that followed this
discovery, archaeologists, historians, and treasure hunters would find
additional scroll fragments in ten other caves in the area, their
composition forming some 800 to 900 manuscripts collectively known as
the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Among these manuscripts were large
portions of a mysterious non-canonical religious text which had long
been forgotten. It was called the Book of Enoch.
In its
entirety, The Book of Enoch is made up of five books – The Book of
Watchers, Book of Parables, The Astronomical Book, The Dream Visions,
and The Epistles of Enoch – containing some 100 chapters. These chapters
tell the story of the 7th patriarch in the Book of Genesis – Enoch, the
father of Methuselah and grandfather of Noah, the same Noah in the
biblical story of Noah’s Ark.
Yet, this was not the biblical
story of Noah’s Ark. In fact, the Book of Enoch provides an entirely
different recounting of the events leading up to the Great Flood of
Noah’s time, that is, a completely different doctrinal history. ...<<<Read More>>>...