Open two copies of the Book of Enoch and you can find the same passage sitting under two different chapter numbers. One edition runs to 108 chapters. Another runs to 42. Nothing has been cut and nothing has been added; the same book has simply been divided twice, by two sets of readers, centuries apart.
Our own edition prints both. The 42 are the headings you navigate by, and Charles's numbering runs underneath. This is the note we put in front of the text explaining why, expanded a little for a reader who is not holding the book.
Almost every English Enoch a reader is likely to meet descends from R.H. Charles, whose translation has stood for more than a century. Charles worked from the Ge'ez, the Ethiopic, and that is the honest headline. But it is worth knowing what sits under it.
His English is already a step away from any single Ethiopic manuscript. Where he judged the Ge'ez to have gone wrong, he corrected it against the Greek and the Latin fragments that survive, and he was candid that some of his restorations were provisional. He was not copying one book. He was reconstructing what he believed the text had been.
That is the honest description of what is in your hands, and it is not a criticism of Charles. Every edition of Enoch in English rests on the same kind of work, because there is no other way to produce one.
Neither numbering is the author's. Both are ways later readers sectioned a long book, and they were made in different places for different purposes.
The 42 chapters are the divisions the Ethiopian commentary tradition uses. They are not a scholarly convenience invented for our edition; they are printed in Amharic editions of the book today, and they are how the book is divided by the church that never stopped reading it.
The 108 are the work of August Dillmann, the nineteenth-century scholar whose edition Charles inherited. When you see "1 Enoch 93:3" in a footnote, in a commentary, or in a Dead Sea Scrolls monograph, you are almost certainly reading a reference in Dillmann's sections as Charles carried them forward.
| The 42 chapters | The 108 sections | |
|---|---|---|
| Whose divisions | The Ethiopian commentary tradition | August Dillmann, inherited by Charles |
| Where you meet them | Amharic editions of the book today | English translations, footnotes, scholarship |
| Written by the author? | No | No |
| In our edition | The headings you navigate by | Kept underneath, so citations still land |
Neither system was written by the author. Both are ways later readers have sectioned a long book, which is why an edition can show you both without choosing between them.
Because dropping either one costs the reader something.
Print only the 108 and the book no longer looks like the book the Ethiopian church reads, which is the whole reason it is in this canon at all. Print only the 42 and every reference the reader will ever meet elsewhere, in a study, a commentary, a footnote, a sermon, points into a book that no longer has those numbers in it.
So the edition prints both, all the way down. The Ethiopian chapters are the headings and the Ethiopian verse numbers are the ones on the page. Charles's sections run beneath them as sub-headings, and his verse number sits in square brackets after each verse: [9], or [9-10] where one Ethiopian verse covers two of his. A reference you bring in from outside still lands where it should, and a reader following the Ethiopian divisions is reading the book the way the tradition divides it.
Earlier printings of this edition went only half that distance. The chapters were Ethiopian but the verse numbers inside them were Charles's, so an Ethiopian chapter-and-verse citation found the right chapter and the wrong verse, and, worse, found a verse of that number and appeared to have worked. That is fixed.
There is a second thing going on in Charles's text, and it is easy to miss until you try to look a verse up.
Charles did not always print the verses in the order his own numbering gives them. In six places he moved material, because he thought it had been displaced in transmission:
Our edition puts them back in numerical order, which is also the order the Ethiopic manuscripts have. Nothing is added and nothing is left out. The passages simply appear where their numbers say they belong, which means a reader who goes looking for a verse by its number finds it there.
The most famous of those rearrangements is the Apocalypse of Weeks, the vision that divides history into ten weeks.
In the manuscripts, the vision is not in one piece. The first seven weeks sit in chapter 93. The last three turn up later, in chapter 91, with other material in between. Charles argued that the vision had been broken apart in copying, that the ten weeks belonged together, and he printed them that way.
Decades after his death, fragments of Enoch in Aramaic were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, older by centuries than any manuscript he had seen. There the weeks run continuously, exactly as he had reasoned.
He had made an argument from the shape of the text alone, and a discovery he did not live to see agreed with him.
Our edition still prints the Ethiopian order, because that is the tradition this Bible follows. But the weeks are worth reading straight through once you know they belong together, and knowing why they are split is most of what you need to do it.
No Ge'ez was consulted in making this text. This is not a new translation from the Ethiopic, and it does not claim to be.
It is Charles's English, cleared of its Victorian diction and its scholarly apparatus, set out in the chapters the Ethiopian church uses. Where you want the Ethiopic itself, you want a different book than this one, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than letting the cover imply otherwise.
That is the same standard we apply to every other book in the volume, and the reason we publish a source note for each of them rather than one sentence for the whole edition.
Because two different sets of later readers divided the book. The 42 chapters are the divisions the Ethiopian commentary tradition uses, and they are printed in Amharic editions of the book today. The 108 sections are the work of August Dillmann, the nineteenth-century scholar whose edition Charles inherited. Neither system was written by the author.
Both numbers describe the same text, divided two different ways. Editions descending from Dillmann and Charles print 108 sections, which is where almost every English citation of Enoch comes from. Ethiopian usage divides the same book into 42. Ours prints the 42 as the headings you navigate by and keeps Charles's numbering underneath, so a reference in either system lands in the right place.
Charles worked from the Ge'ez, but his English is already a step away from any single Ethiopic manuscript. Where he judged the Ge'ez to have gone wrong he corrected it against surviving Greek and Latin fragments, and he was candid that some of his restorations were provisional. He was reconstructing what he believed the text had been rather than copying one book, and every English edition of Enoch rests on that same kind of work.
Because Charles moved material he believed had been displaced in transmission. In six places his printed order departs from his own numbering: a verse in chapter 60, a divided verse in chapter 89, a run of chapter 90, a line of chapter 91, a verse of chapter 106, and the large rearrangement across chapters 91 to 93. Ours prints those passages where their numbers say they belong, which is also the order the Ethiopic manuscripts have.
It is the vision that divides history into ten weeks. In the manuscripts the first seven sit in chapter 93 and the last three appear later, in chapter 91, with other material in between. Charles argued the vision had been broken apart in copying and printed the ten weeks together. Aramaic fragments found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, older by centuries than any manuscript he had seen, later showed the weeks running continuously, exactly as he had reasoned.
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