Enochian Judaism: How an Ancient Vision of Things Took Over Our World

Christians, Jews, and Muslims are all spiritual heirs of a specific form of Judaism that arose and developed in the late 2nd Temple period. Along with Pharisees, Zealots, Sadducees, and Essenes—the Jewish groups that espoused a vision of the cosmos and the future such as that reflected in the apocryphal books of Enoch turned out to be one of the most formative influences in the West. Our sources today are fragmentary, but significant, including some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, various apocryphal writings, and archaeological evidence that appears to be related to a kind of astral-mysticism. This lecture explores the contours and main ideas in what broadly might be called “Enochian Judaism,” and traces its extraordinary influence within the three Abrahamic Faiths.