Divine Encounters - Zecharia Sitchin-pages

Page 64 of 384

Page 64 of 384
Divine Encounters - Zecharia Sitchin-pages

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60 He was the first among men that are born on Earth who learnt writing and knowledge and wisdom, and who wrote down the signs of heaven according to the order of their months in a hook . . . And he was the first to write a testimony, and he attested to the sons of Adam by the generations on Earth, and recounted the weeks of the jubilees and made known the days of the years; And set in order the months and recounted the Sabbaths of the years as the angels made known to him. And also what he saw in a vision of his sleep, what was and what will be as it will happen to the children of men throughout their generations. According to this version of Enoch's Divine Encounters, "he was taken from amongst the children of men" by the angels, who "conducted him into the Garden of Eden in majesty and honor." There, according to the Book of Jubilees, Enoch spent his time by "writing down the condemnations and judgments of the world," on account of which "God brought the waters of the Flood upon all the land of Eden." Even greater detail is provided by the Pseudepigraphic Book of Enoch, in which the tale of Enoch is not part of the patriarchial tale but the principal subject of a major work. Composed in the centuries immediately preceding the Chris- tian era, and based on ancient Mesopotamian sources as well as the biblical ones, it embellishes the old material with an angelology common in the author's time. The Hebrew original of the Book of Enoch is lost, but had surely existed because fragments thereof, mixed in with an Aramaic dialect (Aramaic having become by then the lan- guage of common daily usage), have been found among the Dead Sea scrolls. Widely quoted and translated into Greek and Latin, it was considered as holy scripture by nearly all the writers of the New Testament. With all that, the composi- tion has survived mainly owing to much later translations into Ethiopic (known as "1 Enoch") and Slavonic ("2 Enoch," sometimes called The Book of the Secrets of Enoch). The Book of Enoch describes in detail not one but two celestial journeys: the first one to learn the heavenly secrets, DIVINE ENCOUNTERS