"And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him."
That's Genesis 5:24. One verse. That's all the canonical Bible gives us about Enoch — a man so righteous God apparently just... collected him. Like a library book before the due date. I've been teaching literature for twenty years, and I know a gap in the narrative when I see one. So when a text claims to fill that gap — a text supposedly lost for two millennia, resurfacing in Ethiopia in 1773 like some kind of theological cold case — well, I'm going to listen. And I did. Walking the lakefront with Denise on a Saturday morning that turned into Saturday afternoon, because four hours of apocalyptic visions and fallen angels will make you miss your lunch reservation.
When the Apocrypha Sounds Like Shakespeare's Stranger Cousin
Let me be clear about what you're getting into here. This is R.H. Charles's 1917 translation, which means you're dealing with language that sits somewhere between the King James Bible and an early modernist fever dream. The Book of Enoch isn't one coherent narrative — it's five loosely connected sections covering everything from the Watchers (fallen angels who taught humanity metallurgy, cosmetics, and weaponry, which is a wild curriculum) to astronomical observations about the movements of the sun and moon that go on for... a while. There are parables, there are visions of judgment, there's a surprisingly detailed section about the courses of heavenly luminaries that feels like someone tried to write an astronomy textbook in prophetic verse.
And honestly? Some of it is extraordinary. The opening sections about the Watchers descending to Mount Hermon and taking human wives — that material is genuinely strange and powerful in a way that most people don't associate with biblical-adjacent texts. You can feel why early church fathers argued about this book for centuries. The imagery of giants born from angel-human unions consuming everything and then turning on humanity — this is where a lot of our cultural mythology about fallen angels actually originates. Milton knew this text. Dante knew this text. If you've ever wondered where the popular imagination of angelic rebellion comes from, a lot of it traces back here.
But I won't pretend the whole four hours sustain that energy. The astronomical sections — the Book of the Luminaries, specifically — are repetitive in a way that tests your patience even at 1.0x. (Yes, I kept it at 1.0x. The author chose those words. Even the repetitive ones about the portals of the sun.) This is ancient liturgical writing, not narrative fiction, and some passages feel more like sacred inventory lists than literature.
Christopher Glyn and the Art of Making Ancient Text Breathe
Here's where this audiobook earns its keep. Christopher Glyn has been narrating biblical and devotional material for thirty-five years, and you can hear every one of those years in the best possible way. His British delivery brings a gravitas to the R.H. Charles translation that makes the archaic phrasing feel intentional rather than impenetrable. Where a lesser narrator would flatten the prophetic passages into monotone — "and lo, the seventh mountain was of nard, and the eighth was of cinnamon" — Glyn finds the rhythm inside the catalogues. He treats the lists like liturgy, which is exactly what they are.
The narrator understands that pause is punctuation. During the judgment visions, Glyn slows just enough to let the weight of Enoch's witness settle. There's a passage in the Parables section where the "Son of Man" figure appears — a figure that New Testament scholars have spent careers arguing about — and Glyn's delivery shifts into something quieter, almost reverent, that signals to the listener: pay attention, this matters theologically. That's not just reading. That's interpretation.
My one complaint: the production is clean but bare. No chapter markers that I could discern for the five distinct books within the text, which means if you want to skip the astronomical sections and jump to the Dream Visions, you're scrubbing blindly. For a text this structurally segmented, that's a real navigation problem.
Who This Is Actually For (And Who Should Run)
If you loved the stranger corners of the Hebrew Bible — Ezekiel's wheels, Daniel's visions, the wilder passages of Revelation — this is their spiritual ancestor. Literally. The Book of Enoch likely influenced all of them. My students would hate this. I love it. But I also teach a unit on Paradise Lost every spring, so my tolerance for apocalyptic cosmology is higher than most.
If you're looking for a casual listen or something narrative-driven, this will frustrate you. I thought about that frustration threshold a lot while writing up my notes on Breakfast with Buddha — a book that also asks you to sit with ideas rather than plot, and rewards you exactly as much as you're willing to slow down for it. If you're curious about the deep backstory of Judeo-Christian angelology and demonology, or you want to understand a text that shaped two thousand years of Western religious imagination, four hours is a pretty small investment for that kind of context.
The Lesson Plan, If I Were Assigning This
This is why we still read the classics — even the ones that didn't make the final cut. The Book of Enoch isn't canonical for most traditions, but its fingerprints are everywhere. Glyn's narration makes the R.H. Charles translation accessible without dumbing it down, which is exactly the balance this kind of text needs. Worth pausing the faculty meeting for. (Sorry again, Principal Martinez.)
