So this means that Enoch was in the spirit when he walked with God?
I think by Scriptural context "Enoch walked with God and was not" meant that at the end of his life God took Enoch to heaven as He'd taken Moses and Elijah.
Now historically Enoch was on the other side of the flood. There are Scriptures (in the New Testament) that speak of the world on the other side of the flood being "different" than this world. And by that I think Scripture is talking about the type and form of revelation that humans had received from Satanic influences. "Walking with God" as opposed to succumbing to "seducing spirits".
Prior to the flood we see what I call the "nephilim incident". This is where demonic entities exchanged information from the spiritual realm of what they knew, in exchange to try and corrupt the seed of Adam; in an attempt to prevent the birth of the Messiah. Because they are not carbon based life forms though; they could not accomplish this plan directly. They needed the cooperation of humans to conceive these children who indeed were 100% biologically human.
The difference was that the demonic world imparted to these men knowledge that other groups of humans at that time didn't have. And this is how they became "giants" and "mighty men of renown".
Now what was the content of that knowledge? We don't really know, because that world was destroyed by the flood. And the fact that humans had that knowledge is probably at least part of the reason why the world was destroyed. Scripture says the reason for the flood was that the hearts of men were evil continuously. Which the Hebrew there means that every motivation was of a wicked intent. So, what did that look like for humans living in that world; (besides the fact there were dinosaurs and other now extinct creatures) in relation to the behavior of other humans? I can only imagine they were very savage to each other in how they utilized the knowledge that had come from the demonic realm.
So, I don't think "giants" and "mighty men of renown" was necessarily a description of their physical size; even though we do see examples of "giantism" in humans. There are people born in the modern era who have a genetic disorder that they have accelerated growth and thus they reach 8 feet high. Obviously this happened in antiquity too; for we have Goliath as an example of a human with giantism.
Yet, we also have the opposite end of the spectrum. There is a rare form of dwarfism which isn't just dwarfism of the limbs. The person as an adult is actually 25% or more smaller than the average adult of their ethnic background yet their physiology is proportionally matched to a person of the same age. So as adults, they look like miniature adults. Primordial dwarfs don't get higher than about 3 feet. They are quite rare and generally don't live past 30 years old.
7 Oldest Primordial Dwarfs in the World | Oldest.org
Now we have Enoch, Moses and Elijah as examples of people taken directly to heaven prior to the crucifixion. Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus on the Mt. of Transfiguration. Now what role did Enoch play in the pre-flood world? I don't know. I speculate that likely he was an outstanding prophet such as Moses and Elijah.
Was there a "book of Enoch" written before the flood; that applied to that era? If there was, it has not survived into the post flood world. Post flood, we have the book of Job; which is the oldest book in the Scripture. Job, (as we can determine from things written in the book of Job) was not much more than a generation or two post Peleg.
Job lived in (one of) the ice age(s) (possibly the major ice age) post the flood. The flood was in part caused by an asteroid that created a title wave that washed across Pangea; which was the only continent that existed at the time on the planet. Geological evidence suggests that this asteroid created what would become the Gulf of Mexico; which means it would have hit the far western end of Pangea, assuming what would become North America was the far end of Pangea. Now where was Noah on Pangea when that happened? My hypothesis is that he was on the far eastern end of the continent. Which if "North America" was the far western end; Noah would have been in what to us would become China.
I hypothesis that Noah was on the far eastern end of Pangea because the initial tidal wave would have taken him directly out to sea in the Pacific ocean; leaving all the continental debris from the tidal wave on the Pacific end of the Asian plate. Which as the Atlantic Ocean formed in the days of Pelag; would have dragged all those debris under the Asian plate and destroyed them in the magma of the earth's inner layer. I hypothesis that the ark just continued to "sail" over the Pacific ocean until it came back to the western end of Pangea eventually "landing" on Mt. Ararat.
Now was "North (and South) America" on the west end of Pangea? or was it actually more in the "middle" / "bottom" / "top"? This raises a good question because most fossils of large land animals are found in Western North America, Argentina and China. So at the very least; these were the areas closest to the epicenter of the asteroid impact at the time Pangea existed.
The following (at least) 1 to 4 years; would have created "nuclear winter" conditions; thus creating ice ages and what ever "dinosaurs" would have been preserved on Noah's ark would not have been able to survive long term post flood. Thus we see in the fossil record the emergence of mammals as the predominant class of animal life on the planet. Some paleontologists estimate the "nuclear winter" from the asteroid hit was at least 10 years long. Thus the extended advance and retraction of ice ages.
We know warming and cooling of the planet has been happening for millennia. The last major "warm spell" on earth was about 1000 AD. The warming and cooling of the surface temperatures on earth are connected to solar flare activity and how much CO2 the oceans either absorb or release. Obviously human activity (industrialization in burning of fossil fuels) does impact the surface temperature of earth; but that is not the only, or the largest factor in the fluctuation of temperatures on the planet.
Now is my hypothesis correct as to the location of Noah's ark when the flood started? I have no idea. But it makes the most sense given what happened geologically to the planet.
Peleg was about 2000 years after the flood. The flood was about 5000 years after the creation of Adam and Eve. Abraham was about 1000 years after Peleg; (and 2000 years before the birth of Christ). Creation to Abraham is about 9000 years. Earth being now a little more than 13,000 years old.
Prior to Abraham, the only people we have more information about their lives are Job and Noah. Enoch was taken a little more than 1000 years before Noah was born. Between the two was Methuselah. And following Methuselah's era was Lamech who was the direct father of Noah. They were all in the same patriarchal line. Lamech died shortly before the flood came. Noah and 7 other family members were the only survivors of the flood (thus destroying this line of humans infused with Satanic knowledge). This marked the end of the "world of old" from Adam to Noah.
I really like the Book of Enoch and think it should have been in the Bible. It tells us things that could only have come from God because at the time when it was written man had no way of having the knowledge of the information given in it. They didn't have telescopes, or weather balloons or thermometers or ANYTHING to determine the information in that book.
Parts of "the Book of Enoch" allegedly date back to about 300 BC. We have no archaeological evidence of that though. The oldest copies of the earliest parts of the Book of Enoch are in the Dead Sea Scrolls; so we know those parts existed in the 1st century. But how much of the Book of Enoch existed by the 1st century; we don't know. The entire Book of Enoch doesn't show up until about 400 AD. and its part of Rabbinic literature.
The last book of the Old Testament was completed about 400 BC. Chronicles, Esther, Malachi and Nehemiah are believed to be the last ones completed. Chronicles and Nehemiah were probably in the "editing phase" in that era. As that was the point that the Hebrew text was codified. After this we have nothing else considered to be Hebrew Scripture that is written in Hebrew.
Much of what is called the Apocrypha; is post Babylonian captivity (into the 2nd century AD) Jewish folklore. No Apocryphal books were in the Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament) of Jesus's day. We have no copies of anything other than the Old Testament having been written in Hebrew. Although we do have fragments of Hebrew Scripture written in a primitive Hebrew script on pottery that dates back to King David's era.
The Book of Enoch was written in Aramaic; not Hebrew. Much of the rest of the Apocrypha was originally written in Greek. We know this because the oldest copies of Apocryphal writings we have are in the Septuagint and that was the Greek translation of the Old Testament Hebrew. The oldest parts of the Septuagint dates to about 200 BC.
It is generally accepted by Bible scholars that if the Book of Enoch was prescribed by God and meant to be in the Bible; it would have been written in Hebrew and contained in the Hebrew Old Testament that Jesus would have been familiar with. Clearly though the Book of Enoch was not considered part of the Hebrew canon in the 1st century. Nor was it ever part of Christian Scripture. It is not mentioned by any New Testament writer; nor is it mentioned in any of the documents of the early church. (1st to 2nd century).
They didn't have telescopes, or weather balloons or thermometers or ANYTHING to determine the information in that book.
You'd be surprised what the ancients observed and understood about the cosmos. Even the secular astronomers were pretty observant and have some insightful things to say. We know that at least by the days of the Etruscans and Greeks in the wast; that scientists, philosophers and astronomers knew the earth was a sphere and we existed in a heliocentric solar system. They'd even quite accurately estimated the size of planet earth. The Chinese on the other hand, were likely even ahead of the Greeks in their astronomical knowledge. The Chinese certainly kept more exacting records of astronomical events.
And it is so spiritually deep, I do not see how anyone could have came up with what that book says on their own. Even by todays standards that book is astonishing.
Which this brings me to my last question to you? What exactly is the "spiritual message" of the Book of Enoch? The reason I ask this is because Scripture itself states that it's entire content is related to the death, burial and resurrection of Christ.
Is the Book of Enoch "left over" remnants of pre-flood knowledge that had been originally disseminated by demonic forces? It's possible; seeing how the Book of Enoch comes out of literature of Rabbinic Judaism and Rabbinic Judaism does have ties to the occult.
Would demonic entities have some knowledge of the "construction" of the cosmos. Yeah, probably. Would they be telling humanity the truth about that though? No, because Satan is the father of lies.
