1 Enoch 37–71 · Featured Study · A Labeled Study Resource, Not Canon
The Son of Man in 1 Enoch
Sometime around the birth of Jesus — most specialists say a generation before, some a generation after — a Jewish writer described a figure he called that Son of Man: named before the stars were made, hidden with God from before creation, revealed at the end to sit on the throne of his glory while the kings of the earth fall on their faces before him. It is the boldest portrait of a heavenly Messiah anywhere in Jewish literature outside the Bible — and it was on Jewish tables when Jesus of Nazareth began calling himself the Son of Man. This page opens that portrait, verse by verse, and follows it honestly: what the Parables of Enoch claim, where the text gets strange, when it was written, and why the high priest tore his robes.
Two Throne Rooms, One Vision
— Daniel 7 beside 1 Enoch 46 — the Parables re-enter the night vision, on purposeThe Parables never mention Daniel by name. They do something more deliberate: they walk back into his throne room. The white-wooled Ancient One, the human figure beside him, even the seer turning to an attendant to ask what he is seeing — every beat of Daniel 7 is re-staged, and then the Parables begin to answer the question Daniel left open: who is this?
Left column: Daniel 7 in the American Standard Version. Right column: the resident R. H. Charles 1917 translation, quoted verbatim. That Daniel 7 stands behind 1 Enoch 46 is acknowledged across the whole field (Nickelsburg & VanderKam, 1 Enoch 2, on ch. 46).
- chs 37–71the figure's only home
- 4 namesone figure
- 0 copiesof the Parables at Qumran
- Geʽezthe only full surviving text
- Matt 25:31the phrase bridge
One Figure, Four Names
— Righteous One · Elect One · Anointed One · Son of Man — the Parables use them allThe Parables never argue that these four names belong to one person — they simply use them interchangeably, scene after scene, until the portrait assembles itself. Scholarship has long observed what that portrait is doing: it braids three older biblical threads— Daniel’s son of man, Isaiah’s Servant, and the Lord’s Anointed of the Psalms — into a single figure (VanderKam, “Righteous One, Messiah, Chosen One, and Son of Man in 1 Enoch 37–71,” in The Messiah, 1992).
the Righteous One
1 Enoch 38:2 · 53:6
“And when the Righteous One shall appear before the eyes of the righteous… it had been good for them if they had not been born.” (38:2)
the Elect One
1 Enoch 45:3 · 49:2 · 51:3 · 55:4 · 62:1
“On that day Mine Elect One shall sit on the throne of glory, And shall try their works…” (45:3)
the Anointed One
1 Enoch 48:10 · 52:4
“For they have denied the Lord of Spirits and His Anointed.” (48:10)
that Son of Man
1 Enoch 46:2 · 48:2 · 62:5–14 · 69:26–29 · 70:1 · 71:14
“This is the Son of Man who hath righteousness, With whom dwelleth righteousness… Because the Lord of Spirits hath chosen him.” (46:3)
The three biblical threads the portrait braids togetherDaniel 7 · Isaiah 42 and 49 · Psalm 2
Daniel’s son of mangives the scene: the Head of Days, the human figure beside the throne, dominion and judgment (Dan 7:13–14 → 1 En 46–48).
Isaiah’s Servantgives the mission vocabulary: 1 Enoch 48:4 calls him “the light of the Gentiles” — Isaiah’s own phrase for the Servant of the LORD (Isa 42:6; 49:6), the same phrase Simeon lays on the infant Jesus in Luke 2:32.
The Lord’s Anointedgives the title: twice the Parables call him “His Anointed” (48:10; 52:4) — the language of Psalm 2:2, where the kings of the earth set themselves “against Jehovah, and against his anointed.”
Three portraits Israel had always read separately, braided into one figure — a century or less before the Gospels present a person who is all three at once.
Named Before the Stars
— 1 Enoch 48 — pre-existence, worship, and salvation in his name“And at that hour that Son of Man was named In the presence of the Lord of Spirits, And his name before the Head of Days. Yea, before the sun and the signs were created, Before the stars of the heaven were made, His name was named before the Lord of Spirits.”1 Enoch 48:2–3 (Charles, 1917) — a labeled study resource, not canon
Read that slowly. A Jewish text, from before or around the time of Christ, says this figure was named before creation— and then keeps going: “he hath been chosen and hidden before Him, Before the creation of the world and for evermore” (48:6). Pre-existence was supposed to be the scandal Christianity invented. Here it stands in Second Temple Jewish ink.
What else chapter 48 claims
- A staff for the righteous, a light for the nations: “He shall be a staff to the righteous… And he shall be the light of the Gentiles, And the hope of those who are troubled of heart.” (48:4)
- Worship:“All who dwell on earth shall fall down and worship before him…” (48:5)
- Salvation in his name:“For in his name they are saved, And according to his good pleasure hath it been in regard to their life.” (48:7)
Every line above is the resident Charles text, quoted verbatim. The echoes a Christian reader hears — Luke 2:32, Acts 4:12, Revelation 13:8 — are real echoes of shared language and hope; which direction the influence ran is the dating question this page takes up honestly below.
The Throne of His Glory
— the exact phrase, on both sides of the Testaments' divideHere the parallel stops being general and becomes verbal. When Matthew’s Gospel pictures the Son of Man in judgment, it uses a five-word phrase — “the throne of his glory”— that appears nowhere in the Old Testament. It appears in the Parables of Enoch, of the same figure, in the same scene.
And the scenes match beyond the phrase. In 1 Enoch 62–63, the kings and the mighty watch the Son of Man take his seat, fall on their faces, “worship and set their hope upon that Son of Man, And petition him and supplicate for mercy at his hands” (62:9) — and are turned away, their faces “filled with darkness And shame before that Son of Man” (63:11), while the righteous “with that Son of Man shall… eat And lie down and rise up for ever and ever” (62:14). Enthronement, gathered nations, a division, a banquet, a too-late plea for mercy: it is the architecture of Matthew 25’s sheep and goats, a full scene-shape shared between the two texts (the standard monograph is Leslie Walck, The Son of Man in the Parables of Enoch and in Matthew, T&T Clark, 2011).
Said honestly
A shared phrase is not a citation. Because the Parables’ date is itself debated (next section), no one can prove Matthew read Enoch rather than both drawing one shared world of Jewish expectation. What the parallel proves is enough: when Jesus spoke of the Son of Man enthroned in glory, his hearers already had a category for exactly that figure— and it was not a merely human one.
Where the Figure Lives
— five books wearing one name — and the Son of Man in only one of themAnd Then the Book Turns
— 1 Enoch 70–71 — the strangest moment in the Parables, handled honestlyChapter 70 keeps the distinction the whole book has maintained: Enoch is carried up tothe figure he has been watching — “his name during his lifetime was raised aloft to that Son of Man and to the Lord of Spirits” (70:1). Two people: the seer, and the Son of Man. Then comes 71:14, and in the text this site hosts it reads:
“And he (i.e. the angel) came to me and greeted me with His voice, and said unto me: ‘This is the Son of Man who is born unto righteousness, And righteousness abides over him, And the righteousness of the Head of Days forsakes him not.’”1 Enoch 71:14 (Charles, 1917)
That parenthesis — (i.e. the angel)— is not in any manuscript. It is R. H. Charles’s own editorial judgment. The Ethiopic manuscripts have the greeting spoken to Enoch, in direct address — naturally read, the seer himself is being hailed as the Son of Man he has been seeing all along. Charles found that reading impossible to square with the rest of the book and rendered the verse away from it; his parenthesis is his honesty about having done so.
◈How chapter 71 is read — the positions, and who holds themcontested
The text as it stands: Enoch is identified with the Son of Man
The standard critical position (Nickelsburg & VanderKam, 1 Enoch 2, ad loc.; VanderKam’s 1992 essay): the climax is deliberate — the righteous seer discovers his own destiny bound up with the heavenly figure. Some who hold this add that the identification may belong to a later stage of the book’s growth.
Chapters 70–71 as an appendix; the identification secondary
R. H. Charles’s own view (1912 edition): the closing chapters stand apart from the three Parables, and the equation of Enoch with the Son of Man contradicts scenes like 62:5–9, where the kings see the figure enthroned — something never said of a mere ascended patriarch. Others resolve it differently again, reading 71:14’s “son of man” as the ordinary Semitic idiom — “you are a man born to righteousness” — rather than the title.
What this page does with it
Prints the resident text as it stands, names Charles’s parenthesis for what it is, and leaves the question open — because either way the point this study is tracing survives untouched: the portrait itself— pre-existent, enthroned, worshiped, judging — was in Jewish circulation. Whoever the Parables’ author thought the figure was, that is the portrait Jesus stepped into and filled.
When Was It Written?
— the one question everything else about this page leans on — laid out straightAmong the Dead Sea Scrolls, every section of 1 Enoch is represented in Aramaic fragments — except the Parables(J. T. Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4, Oxford, 1976). Milik concluded the Parables were a late Christian work of the third century AD. Almost no specialist followed him — the section shows none of the marks a Christian author would leave (no crucifixion, no resurrection, no name of Jesus), and its political horizon looks far older.
The field’s working consensus, hammered out at the Enoch Seminar’s 2005 meeting and published in Boccaccini (ed.), Enoch and the Messiah Son of Man (Eerdmans, 2007), dates the Parables to the late first century BC or the early first century AD— the Herodian generation. The internal clues: an allusion to the hot springs where Herod sought a cure (1 En 67, read against Josephus, Antiquities17.171), and an invasion scene naming “the Parthians and Medes” that fits the Parthian incursion of 40 BC (1 En 56).
One more honesty: the Parables survive in full only in Geʽez, the classical language of Ethiopia — no Greek or Aramaic copy of this section exists. The 1917 Charles translation this site hosts renders that Ethiopic text.
◈What follows for the Gospels — three positions, no verdict stampedcontested
The Gospels engage Parables-language
If the Parables circulated before Jesus’ ministry — the majority dating — then “Son of Man” spoken of a heavenly, enthroned judge was live vocabulary, and Matthew’s shared phrase and scene-shape read most naturally as engagement with that stream.
Both drink from one well
Others hold the two texts are independent witnesses to a shared Jewish reading of Daniel 7 in that generation — the parallel shows the category existed, not that either text read the other.
Jesus built from Daniel alone
A minority position: the title on Jesus’ lips needs nothing beyond Daniel 7 itself, and the Enochic parallels are later, convergent development. On any of the three, Daniel remains the bedrock — which is why the canon’s own Son of Man page stands beside this one.
The Title Jesus Chose
— Mark 14 — why the high priest tore his robes“Son of Man” was Jesus’ own name for himself — used more than eighty times in the Gospels, and by almost no one else. Readers sometimes take it as a humility title: the human one, the everyman. The Parables of Enoch are the strongest evidence that first-century ears heard something else entirely. In the Judaism of his day, that Son of Man was a figure named before the stars, hidden with God, destined for the throne of glory and the judgment of kings. Then, under oath before the high priest:
“And Jesus said, I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.” Mark 14:62 (ASV)
Caiaphas did not hear modesty. He heard Daniel 7 and Psalm 110 fused into a claim to the throne of God, made by the man standing in front of him — and he tore his robes and said blasphemy, because in the categories of his own generation, that is exactly what the sentence claimed. John says it plainly: the Father “gave him authority to execute judgment, because he is a son of man” (John 5:27, ASV) — the judgment scene of Daniel and of the Parables, claimed by Jesus as his own office.
Hold the two portraits side by side and the difference is the gospel itself. The Parables’ Son of Man is seen from a distance, in a vision, on a throne. The Gospels’ Son of Man has a face and a hometown; he forgives sins, eats with tax collectors, is betrayed into the hands of sinners, dies, and rises. Where a Jewish visionary could imagine the figure, God sent him — what the Parables could only picture, Christ came and did. Nothing on this page treats 1 Enoch as Scripture, and Jesus is nowhere recorded calling it that; the Bible remains the sixty-six books. But as a witness to what “Son of Man” meant when Jesus chose it, this old book is worth every reader’s hour.
The Voices on This Figure
— relevance-gated — cited to the specific work, so you can go to itA Companion to the Book of Enoch: A Reader's Commentary, Vol. II — The Parables of Enoch (1 Enoch 37–71)
Cite-only, ≤50 words, per the modern-voice rule. The one verse-by-verse commentary on the Parables from the site's roster — keyed to the very R. H. Charles translation MannaFest hosts. His Reversing Hermon (Defender, 2017) traces how the New Testament writers engage this literature.
Daniel (Koinonia House commentary)
Marcus Brown's formative teacher, on the night vision this whole figure is built from — Daniel 7's court scene read as the Old Testament's clearest window into the divine investiture of the Messiah.
The Book of Enoch (2nd ed., 1912; translation reprinted 1917)
The translator whose text this site hosts, public domain. His own critical judgment on chapters 70–71 — that they stand apart from the Parables proper — is part of the chapter-71 question this page lays out, and his editorial parenthesis at 71:14 prints in the text itself.
1 Enoch 2 (Hermeneia; Fortress Press, 2012)
The standard critical commentary on the Parables — the source for the four-titles observation, the dating survey, and the reading of chapter 71 as the book's deliberate climax.
The Book of Enoch: Paraphrase and Commentary (Seven Mountain Publishing, 2025)
A modern paraphrase-with-commentary covering the Son of Man visions, added to the roster by the founder's ruling of 2026-08-11. Named here so a reader knows a current devotional treatment exists; it is too new for this page to lean on for specific claims.
Marcus Brown's own commentary leads above all; within a tier, all voices are equal.
Read the Great Books
— the works that carry this study — go further than this page1 Enoch — the Parables (chs 37–71)
c. 1st century BC/AD — a labeled study resource, not canon
MannaFest’s own reader carries the full Charles text with chapter-by-chapter study commentary — start at chapter 37 and read the three Parables whole.
READ IT →The Book of Enoch
R. H. Charles · 2nd ed. 1912, translation reprinted 1917
The translation this site hosts, with Charles’s own introduction and critical notes — including his discussion of chapters 70–71.
READ IT FREE →The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, vol. II
R. H. Charles, ed. · 1913
The standard early critical edition of the whole Pseudepigrapha — 1 Enoch with per-chapter notes, beside Jubilees and the rest of the era’s literature.
READ IT FREE →