Do Jewish texts and the book of Enoch explain Revelation?

Hello, hello, welcome everybody to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Blino and I'm your host. And today's topic is going to be, does the book of Enoch and other Jewish texts explain revelation? This is one of those books that as a child I was terrified of.

And I've honestly never really gotten a clear answer of what all of the bowls and the lamps and the angels, I don't understand it. So today we have Dr. James Sedlicek back. I'm so happy that you came back on the show.

I'm so excited to discuss this. I feel like you are so well equipped to handle this discussion. Everybody buckle up. This is going to be a huge discussion. I think you're going to give us more than we even asked for.

So welcome back to the show. It's so great to have you back, Dr. Sedlicek.

It's good to be back and it's good to see you again. It's been a little while since we talked.

Yes, it's been a while. And I have been just, you know, everybody loved the episodes with the misinterpreted biblical texts. Everybody loved the bleeding woman. Everybody loved how did Judaism become Christianity.

Those are my top episodes. So I'm so excited to create more content with you and just continue learning from you. With Revelation, before we got on, you were talking about how you've been now teaching it at your university eight times, but you were reluctant to do so.

Why Revelation Is So Hard to Interpret

And now it's your best topic. You love talking about it. Do you mind just kind of overviewing how you got into this?

Sure, sure. Yes. Well, we were chatting and I was saying that my head of school asked me to teach Revelation this year. And my first feeling was, I don't know if I want to teach the book of Revelation.

And I'm sitting here thinking all of the books of the Bible, whether we're looking at the Tanakh or the New Testament, it's like, that's my least favorite book.

Just because it's so complicated?

Well, I think for me, it's all of the wide range of interpretations that everybody has as their favorite interpretation. And they're adamant about that interpretation and they're thinking what the possibilities are.

And I think for me, the level of certainty that people put on the interpretation that was given to them is the thing that makes it so hard to communicate about this book. Some of these interpretations are pretty far from certain.

And when we start thinking about it, the people who read Revelation in the first century wouldn't know about such things as often have been cited to be the interpretation of Revelation. For example, I've heard people say, United Nations is in there, the European community is in there, or the Union, or there's the League of Nations in there.

If you read the text sideways on the wrong day of the week, you can find it. And when I was growing up, there would be these little things on the wall that said the Pope was the Antichrist and the Catholic Church was in the book of Revelation.

And I thought to myself, this is insane. And so where does this stuff come from? And the other thing that I didn't like when I was asked was nearly every few months, three, four months, a new book rolls out, usually from a garage publication or a self-publication racket.

And I say that word carefully, trying to promote some kind of fear-mongering from the book of Revelation or similar books. And it isn't trying to explain the book. That's the thing that is hard for people to sort the difference.

They read what they read, they get terrified, and then why? They don't even know. They can't even verbalize why they're afraid.

Because they're just estimating what they think it's about, but they can't actually explain it because it's written in such a different language than the rest of the Bible.

Well, the recent books that come out that are producing fear and fear responses, I would say, because a lot of these are ran, I would say, I don't want to call them ministries, but sort of ministries that focus on this kind of new book every few months on something prophetic.

And it's like, they generate fear and they don't really tell you what to do with your fear. So what do you do? You buy the next book and you buy the next book.

And you buy the next book.

It's great sales.

It's sales, it's marketing. It's not explaining revelation. So I thought, this is my least favorite book, but I got the materials and I started going through the materials. They always like to give you a few, a couple of months to read over the materials.

And I probably got the materials around the time that we last had a connection, a Zoom meeting.

It's a while ago, yeah.

And so I was going over it, just still weighing it, not sure what I wanted to do. And then I got through the materials and I said, yeah, I want to teach this.

Why?

Because as I'm digging through the materials, they kept re-emphasizing Jewish information that has gotten lost in the shuffle that nobody's talking about on television.

No one is talking about that. When you mentioned this on our phone call that like, I think Jewish materials will help us understand revelation. That was like, my mind was blown.

And these first readers, whoever got the book of Revelation first, the people who it was written to, had to interpret this book. And they would not have known about League of Nations, United Nations, European Union, or the Pope for that matter.

None of this stuff would have been part of their reality. And so sometimes I think there's been a tendency to say nobody's really solved the meaning of the book yet. So let me look in my area and interpret the book as if it fits my circumstances.

Yes. Yes.

Whatever they are, and sometimes they're perceptive circumstances, not the real circumstances.

Well, it's all they have.

It's how people are perceiving their world.

I don't think people are meaning to mislead. I think that they're just using what they got.

I think so. Here's what I think's happened. Once the Jewish understandings of different phrases and different pieces get lost, and I want to say this happens right around the third century, third or fourth century, when the Jewish leadership of the church begins to minimize, and the Gentile leadership begins to be the majority in church leadership, somewhere along this trajectory, key things got lost.

And now people are interpreting all of these code phrases as if they meant something to my way of sorting code phrases into my world.

Do you think that like something lost was just the translation or like the lack of communication between two groups?

Once groups start disfellowshipping each other, then you already cut the cord, if you will, for communication to take place. And that was well on its way in about the third and fourth centuries. And once you do that, you can't interpret a Jewish text like a native Jew if you're not a Jew.

And when you say they interpret, it would be like the scribes that were studying the Septuagint versus the original Hebrew.

That's an interesting question. And some people make that claim. However, I'm reading Revelation in Greek and it doesn't read like other Greek books. When I pull out Paul's letters and read those in Greek, that sounds like Greek composition.

It's flowing just like somebody composed this in Greek. I start reading through the Greek of Revelation and I'm saying, that's not a typical way to put that in Greek. What's going on here? That is a very good way to organize the information in Hebrew, though.

So you're saying that a Hebrew that originally understood it maybe did the translation in Greek?

Something like this. And I think John's original isn't in Greek. And this is the shocker because we don't read about that in the early church fathers. We do for the Gospel of Matthew. They all said, the earliest ones all said that it was not in Greek, that everybody was translating it to the best of their ability.

Somehow one of those ended up as our Greek, Matthew, one of those translations. And that's what we have. Nobody mentions this for Revelation, but Revelation was one of those books up in the air for a few centuries before the churches were agreeing that it was a good book and belonged in the canon.

It was one of those that took a while, so to speak. I think Jude took a while. One of the Peter epistles took a while. Revelation took a while. And because of that, by this time, by the time this book is recognized, I think Greek copies have already circulated.

But I don't think it was written in Greek originally. And one of the reasons for that is the way and the frequency that John uses future tenses. There are several places where John, if he was composing this in Greek, would have chosen something else called an aorist subjunctive.

These are technical Greek grammar terms, but he would have used that instead. And there's been enough scholars, there's a Romanian scholar that I run into quite a few times at STL, who's always showing us something new in the future tenses of Revelation that doesn't quite fit.

And I'm sitting back there and saying, I know why it doesn't fit. It wasn't originally a Greek document. And somebody translated those into future tenses when they've had some other options.

They could have translated them to.

The other option is an alternative. There's one Hebrew verb, it's called a yirtel in the way we teach Hebrew grammar at Israel Institute, but it can be a future tense. It also can be a modal verb expressing something that should, could, or ought to be done.

And that's the difference. Greek does not use the same form for both of these, but the Hebrew yirtel can translate into both of those directly. Those are the natural options. So a translator's gonna see the yirtel in a Hebrew text and say, I don't know what else to do with it, so I'm gonna go with future, unless I see a reason to go with the other option.

Well, wouldn't they want to do future because these are prophetic passages, kind of like, like what would be the difference between these tenses for the future in Revelation versus what was used in Daniel?

Daniel's, even in the Septuagint of Daniel, it alternates the forms and uses a bit more variety. You don't see quite as many future tenses always in Daniel, like consecutively, just future, future, future, future, the same way that you do in the Greek of Revelation.

And I think because the Septuagint translators, they're aware that, yeah, some of this is future predictive, but the way that the rabbis thought about prophecy on some cases is the same as Deuteronomy.

This will come to pass if you don't do this, and this other thing will come to pass if you do do this. So there's always two paths, and you don't always use future tenses to describe that. You use modal verbs.

You say, this could happen if you do this, this could happen if you do that. Could happen is different than will happen.

And Revelation is saying this will happen.

Typically. In the Greek, that's what's there, but there's been enough debates over the meaning of some of those future tenses. A lot of scholars have questioned whether John even is handling Greek the way it's supposed to work over these future tenses.

And I'm sitting here thinking, yeah, but translation Greek, as opposed to composition Greek, might use a future tense where they see a Hebrew yiddle without ever thinking that they have the other options.

Really interesting.

Which the scholars were arguing for, the same option. So there's clues in Revelation that it might, at least in its original form, might not have been Greek but Hebrew. Now, there are existing Hebrew manuscripts of it.

So, you know, we found a few of them.

And do those make sense, or is there still confusion over the sentence structure?

The Hebrew yiddle would be used where you see future tenses in Revelation. The Hebrew yiddle would also be used for places where you see habitual present tenses. The Greek future, or the Hebrew yiddle would also be used for things that someone could, should, or ought to do.

That's helpful.

And so when you see the text in Hebrew with yiddle, yiddle, yiddle, yiddle, and you're thinking in a Hebrew mind, this can translate this way, that way, or the other way, suddenly some options emerge from the page that don't emerge when you're seeing.

Greek future, future, future, future.

Yeah.

And English. Future, future, future, future.

So anyway, that's just something that makes me wonder that maybe something has been lost in terms of how to understand what John's trying to say.

And that kind of explains why people struggle today if they don't consider Jewish texts or Jewish writings, because they read these confusing sentence structures and they're like, are these promises? Are these just visions?

Would you say that would kind of lead people to these discussions that are just so off point when it comes to understanding Revelation today?

Yeah, there's a number of places to get tripped up because how much faith do we put in someone's vision? That's one question. That's a separate question. But it's, one of my classes I taught, I've got this one guy that's always got his hand up and saying, yeah, but this was his vision.

Anybody can have a dream about something.

Mm-hmm.

How, why should we interpret it literally? It's a vision.

Solid point.

And he keeps saying that. And so it was like, yeah, I know. It's possible that this is all a metaphor for something in the sense it's a vision. But Daniel, on the other hand, had visions which were meant to do three things.

To tell the king that something big was about to happen. Secondly, what God's plan was for the restoration of his people. If the king was obstructing that, doom was coming to the king. If the king was helping the restoration of God's people at the time, then the king was part of the story over here.

So like the difference between Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus in Daniel. Nebuchadnezzar often found himself in a bad position in Daniel's vision. So it was actually Nebuchadnezzar's own visions that Daniel interpreted.

Yeah.

It's like this is at the end, but there would be elements in there that pointed to the restoration of the Jews. The Judeans going back to rebuild. Same thing with Darius, and then later Cyrus has the decree to go back and rebuild.

And a lot of times we forget that there's a goal in the prophetic utterance that God is doing something related to salvation or restoration. Either salvation like atonement, forgiveness of sins, or he's doing something to restore the damage that's been done to humanity because of sin, like Adam's fall and everything that's happened since then.

But restoring back to Genesis one, the created goodness that everything was. And it's interesting because both of these themes, salvation and restoration are all in Revelation in key places like intro, conclusion, culmination, climax.

So the restoration, not of Israel per se, it's there, but it's like the restoration of humanity, restoration of animals, restoration of the waters and the firmament and the heavens. And it's more than just a restoration of one people.

Yeah.

Apocalyptic Literature as a Shared Jewish Stream

Okay, well, I think that you've proposed a very organized approach to this discussion. I think that it would be the best way is essentially to review it in four segments that essentially takes a scripture from Revelation, looks at how it shows up in other Jewish texts, like the book of Enoch that wasn't in the biblical canon, and then other Jewish texts beyond that that were also not included in the biblical canon.

And then based on our understanding of those, extract the meaning within Revelation. So I appreciate you sending everything ahead of time. The first segment that we're gonna jump into is going to be, and do you wanna give any background as far as like the Jewish texts that were chosen?

Sure, sure. So when we think about apocalyptic literature, these are the literatures, everybody hears the word apocalypse, they think, you know, destruction. Well, that's not the meaning of the word. It's about revealing the hidden.

I didn't know that.

The word comes from

I thought like Armageddon.

Right, right, right. Yeah, the story of Armageddon is in the book, but that's not the apocalypse. The apocalypse is the son of man appearing on the clouds.

The revealing of the hidden?

The revealing of the hidden, yeah.

What?

Oh my gosh.

So this word comes from a kitchen word in the Greek household. You're cooking something in a pot, right? And it comes time to show the family what's cooking for supper. You take the lid off. That's the apocalypse.

There's no way.

Yeah, the American movie industry has really gotten that word wrong, but I'll tell you why they got it wrong. They were paying attention to some of these pseudo-prophecy end times books too much. They missed key meanings of things and they started putting meanings on things that aren't really there.

And so pop culture in English has really got the wrong idea of what an apocalypse is.

Is that, apocalypse is still a Greek word that's used today?

To lift off the lid.

That's hilarious.

Reveal what's cooking.

Wow, wow, okay.

The endings change because ancient Greek and modern Greek use different endings on the words, but the root is still the same.

Yeah.

Kalut is to cover and apokalut is to uncover.

Got it, got it, okay.

So what are the apocalyptic texts that you pulled for today that are also included in your curriculum?

Yes, so when we think about the whole range, Daniel is like the first one. Revelation is like the last one and the rest are in between. So you've got Daniel, pieces of Ezekiel. Well, you've got some chapters in Isaiah that are like this, but Isaiah as a book is not really got a lot of that in there.

Zechariah's got a little bit in there. So you've got a few of the Hebrew prophets in the Hebrew Bible that have this feature. Then you have a period of literature where the Jews are coming back to rebuild in the land and they're facing some extreme persecution.

Under the Greeks.

And they write a lot more of this kind of literature. And then you come to the New Testament and only one book in the New Testament has this flavor in its revelation. And a lot of people interpret revelation in isolation because it's a one of a kind in the New Testament.

And because they do that, they miss how it's interacting with the history of Jewish apocalyptic literature. The best class I ever had on revelation was from a professor who said, I will teach the class, but I won't do it unless you let me throw in Ezekiel and Daniel and revelation together.

And for me, that was eye-opening because he connected the stuff from Daniel and Ezekiel constantly to revelation. And so it was across both testaments, if you will, it was between the Tanakh and the New Testament.

And it helped to see the Jewish themes of revelation. But this material that I'm teaching now goes one step further because it shows in-between material and how John is really connected to that whole stream of literature as he writes.

Now, this raises a question. Why did these books not get in the canon?

Right, like the Book of Enoch for once.

Yeah, the Book of Enoch is kind of like one of the pinnacle books that I'll refer to a lot, but there's others, 4th Ezra, 4th Barak, Jubilees. We'll see some other sections of the Talmud that have similar things in it that ended up from the Jewish oral Torah and stuff like that.

In the first century, Jewish groups were using a lot of these books regularly.

Just to deepen their understanding of old prophecies. Or is it historical? What were the purposes?

I think some of it was historical, but some of it is they thought this was more like from the prophets and this was something to be paid attention to when it gave more details than what's in the older books.

The problem is that once the Orthodox, what became the Orthodox Jewish group, somewhere along the way, they had to make a decision on which books to include and which books to not include. And so when they made that decision, they decided to go with the organized list of Ezra and nothing since then.

So that excluded most of these books that are in between.

Ezra wasn't a book. It was like a list of books.

Ezra was an important person who sort of helped inaugurate the Second Temple worship and established the religious schools and probably helped with the early formations of what we now know as the synagogue.

Okay.

So Ezra is an important figure in that time period.

Got it.

So the list of books that he collected included from Genesis to Chronicles. And that's the full Old Testament in Jewish order.

Got it.

We think of, in Christian Bible, we think of Genesis to Malachi.

Right.

But Chronicles is actually the last book in the Jewish canon. But that was the list. And so to add something more to that list was like too much fussing, fighting over what should go in, what should not go in.

So they said, well, we're gonna cut it here. And this would not be the first time that somebody said, well, we're not including those books. Earlier, a century earlier, the Sanhedrin wouldn't include anything but the five books of Moses.

I mean, the Sadducees in the Sanhedrin. It was like, well, the Torah is it. The rest is, okay, somebody's opinion, but the five books are it.

And even at that time, we still had the Book of Enoch and Jubilee to choose from.

That was there. And so was Isaiah, Jeremiah, Psalms. Those weren't included by the Sadducees. The Pharisees included them.

Oh, I see.

The different groups had different ideas of what should be included and what should be not included.

So what we have today in the Bible was determined by Ezra.

The one that we have in the Hebrew Bible and also the Christian, typical Christian Bible is the canonical book of Ezra, the person who helped reform, formulate what is Second Temple Judaism. Because he's at a pivotal moment.

They just get back from Babylon. They start to rebuild, start to organize. And there's some things that he cleans up, basically, as he's instituting how this is gonna go forward. And so he's kind of at a pivotal moment.

And so it's like, okay, if you're gonna pick a place to just say we're stopping here, he's a good spot to stop.

With revelation.

With the Hebrew canon.

With the canon. Got it.

So that's why they picked him. I think some groups liked books like Barak, Jubilees, Enoch, and so forth. But it was contentious. So they sealed the Jewish Bible canon, if you will, with the same books that we see in the Christian Old Testament, most groups.

Now, within Christian traditions, there have been a few groups who kept a book like Enoch in their Bible. The Catholic Church did not. The Eastern Orthodox Church did not. The Egyptian Orthodox Church did.

And the Armenian Orthodox Church did. So you have groups that did. You have groups that did not. Some of the other books weren't included in, like, for example, there were some Bibles that said, Old Testament, Apocrypha, New Testament.

And some of these books were in the Apocrypha. But Enoch was never in that section. So if they didn't have two extra sections in the middle, they didn't have Enoch. So for the Bibles that had Old Testament, Deuterocanon, New Testament, then the books that were in the Apocrypha on the first model I gave you, those are in the Deuterocanon on these Bibles.

If these Bibles had another section called Apocrypha,.

Enoch would be there.

Interesting.

So it's not, they didn't exclude it because they were hiding certain things within that book. That book was well circulated at the time. And then in the final draft of what came to be the Bible that we know today, it just wasn't included, but it wasn't explicitly hid.

It wasn't excluded in the first century. It was a book that certain groups just didn't feel a use for and never canonized. And there's a difference between never canonizing it and rejecting it. Those are two different things.

And so because the council in 97 that settled on the New Testament books didn't include it doesn't mean that they didn't exclude it. It was before the New Testament. So were they using it? Were they not using it?

That's still an open question. But then once people started to put together whole Bibles in the West, and by West, Roman-centered churches would be the West, then that book doesn't show up. And then in the Eastern Orthodox traditions, it varied because the Armenian group kept it while the Greek group did not.

I see.

But the Greek group did keep some of the books that we would call Second Temple Jewish, like books like Maccabees, for example. That's in the middle section on Greek Orthodox and on Roman Catholic Bibles, but not many Protestant Bibles.

Interesting.

So we've had these things over the years, and then one of the things that's happened is that people will get a sense, well, my Bible doesn't have that book, so that book was forbidden.

Yes.

Yes, I've heard that many times.

That couldn't be further from the truth. There may be periods of time in history where somebody stood up and said, those are forbidden books, but they're doing so at a time when there was a lot of fighting about the books.

And the reason that they're not in the Bibles that many people carry are a lot of times related to economy, not theology, but what is necessary. They didn't think it was necessary, so they didn't put it in there.

But a number of traditions have had the idea, this is the Old Testament, this is the New Testament, and these are useful books. Read them, study them, know them. Just don't preach from them on Sunday.

That's kind of like the way that it is. Now, it varies. I know that there have been, for example, Roman Catholic sermons from the Deutero canon. It's possible, but usually it's not something deeply theological.

It's like, well, this is an example of a person. Let's look at his example and see what we can do with our lives because the Book of Tobit is one of these. It's really about how to live a pious life even when everything around us has given way, like all the social structures gone because he was in a conquered Northern Israel.

How was he supposed to be pious and do what was right with all this damage and destruction going on? That's what it's about, so you can pull a lot of moral examples from his life and his family's lives.

It's useful on Sunday.

I'm trying to think of, I might take this out because I'm just thinking out loud, but I'm trying to think of a modern-day equivalent of this, of what are we doing today that these Israelites were doing back in the day with all of these Jewish writings?

Maybe it's music that we listen to, that we know all of the songs, but in 100 years from now, you're only gonna remember the best hits of that artist, like what we do with Elvis. We know all of his songs.

Let's say we're in the 50s, and now we only know Jailhouse Rock because that was the top one, whereas, sure, we're just not gonna talk about all of his music. Do you feel like that's a good comparison?

I like that because I'm fond of a music writer named Charles Wesley. He wrote, it's either 1 ,200 or 12 ,000. I know it's one, two, and at least two zeros. He wrote that many songs, but today's hymn books have maybe a dozen.

It just happens.

And you're not hiding those hundreds of others.

It's because as a people, we culturally change from one generation to the next. And then the kind of music we like, the kind of songs that really hit us here change. And when they do, we wanna sing those songs and not the songs that we wonder, what are they talking about?

So that's the reason we change. And I suppose if nobody has stood up and explained the Bible using these books in any recent memory of somebody, then they think those books are not important.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, how could you? Because some things that I've heard, again, I haven't read Book of Enoch, but people are like, well, they're hiding Enoch because it's got aliens and giants and demons and they don't want us to know about that because that'll take it.

It's like, I can't speak to that, but based off what you just said, it just simply wasn't relevant to the conversation. It wasn't a type of hiding. I think if they wanted to hide a book, they could have by now.

I'm sure there's tons of books we don't know about.

The other thing to remember, there's been so many church fights in history that the leaders of the fights, they don't wanna deal with the things they can't defend because then they look bad. They gotta look good defending the thing that they're gonna defend.

How do they defend an opinion on Enoch chapter six? They can't because they don't know what's going on.

In Enoch chapter six.

And so they're not going to deal with it. They don't want people talking about it because they can't come to a conclusion and defend what they're saying on it.

I mean, in your honest opinion, how many people can defend Enoch chapter six? Like yourself included, like 1%, like five people. Like how would, like what is truly, truly? And like, how grateful am I that I get to talk to one of those people?

Cause it's like, where else? You can't Google this. I can't go to church and, you know, I'd probably be unlikely, unlucky to get a pastor to sit down and talk to me about it.

If you use an AI supported research tool, you can ask it to pull things from books and connect dots for you and spit out like,.

I don't know what you would call it.

You can do that sort of thing, but there is a problem. Most of these things get really wacky when it goes to actually connecting to original sources because they'll click on opinions and pull those in.

And there's been a lot of people who've had opinions. And so you've got to be very careful with that kind of stuff, but just to get an overview of some ways people are doing this, that would be a place to start.

Yeah, some way that you could only pull from those original texts and not pull from any modern opinions.

Yeah, so what you have to do, if you want to pull from the ancient texts only, you got to learn original languages and you've got to get the texts in front of you and see if what your AI generated thing is saying is actually true in that text.

Would you trust AI to translate original languages?

Possibly, but I'm the kind of guy that if I'm using any electronic anything to help translate anything, I'm going to look and see if it got it right.

Yeah.

That's just how I am.

Yeah.

And I feel like that's exactly what we're here to do today. The first segment is Revelation as an Apocalyptic Literature and it goes over Revelation 1, 1 and 2, Enoch 1, 1 and 2, and 3, Bruch 1, 1 and 8.

How does the opening of Revelation with Daniel's vision, it starts with, let's see if I can pull it up, as a revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave to him to show his bondservants of things that must soon take place and he signified and communicated it, communicated it by his angel to his bondservant, John, who testified to the word.