HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The Mephisto Club & The Book of Enoch

As an anthropology major at Stanford University, I was fascinated by myths from the ancient world. I like to think that there’s a nugget of truth to stories that have been passed down to us through the ages. The mists of time may have altered the details, but even the most improbable tale could well be based on real people and real events.

A few years ago, while browsing a bookstore in Oxford, England, I came across a copy of RH Charles’s translation of The Book of Enoch, and could not resist purchasing it. The Book of Enoch is an ancient text, dating back to perhaps two centuries before the birth of Christ. Though it contains the history of an Old Testament patriarch Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah, the book was struck from Hebrew scripture and discredited as apocryphal by early Christian fathers. It vanished from history, and for centuries, the text was thought to be forever lost.

But it was not, in fact, lost. Hidden in various secret places, The Book of Enoch, had survived. In the 1700’s, intact copies of the text, translated from Greek, were discovered in Ethiopia. And in 1947, in a cave on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, a Bedouin shepherd made a magnificent discovery: jars containing ancient scrolls. From that complex of caves emerged seven fragments of The Book of Enoch, written in Aramaic.

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