Gro 4.
This is the newest artificial intelligence system there is.
And it needs saying plainly, this is the moment where everything this technology promises and everything it threatens are going to collide.
Decades after the Dead Sea Scrolls were first found about 80 new pieces of scroll came out of a desert cave in Israel.
The first found in 60 years.
So what if the Book of Enoch isn’t only a myth, but a record of something real?
For hundreds of years, Enoch’s book has stayed one of the most disputed and mysterious texts ever uncovered.
It’s crowded with strange visions, beings from the heavens, and stories the mainstream Bible never took in.
Now, with Grock AI, researchers are taking apart its language, its patterns, and its hidden meanings like never before.
But instead of clearing anything up, the results are turning up connections that are making people rethink what this ancient text actually is.
I’m Ambrose Wild, and the first thing worth knowing about this so-called lost book is that a line from it already sits inside your New Testament, quoted almost word for word in a letter barely one page long.
So, how does a book end up quoted by the Bible and shut out of it at the same time?
Start with what it is.
The book of Enoch, usually called First Enoch, is a collection of Jewish writings credited to Enoch, the son of Jared, seventh in the line from Adam and greatgrandfather of Noah.
Genesis gives him a few lines.
365 years of life and one strange exit.
He walked with God and then he was not because God took him.
First, Enoch fills that silence with more than 100 chapters.
It follows Enoch up through the heavens, past angels and fallen angels into visions of judgment, the stars, and the end of the age.
The oldest parts go back a long way.
Scholars place the opening section in the 4th or 3rd century before Christ, and the oldest surviving fragments of it were copied somewhere around 200 to 150 BC.
Now, that letter, it’s the Epistle of Jude near the very end of the Bible.
And in verses 14 and 15, Jude writes that Enoch the seventh from Adam prophesied that the Lord was coming with his holy ones to judge everyone.
That prophecy is first Enoch 1:9.
Jude names Enoch outright and quotes him as a prophet.
Jesus and his first followers almost certainly knew this book and a lot of scholars think it shaped how the New Testament writers talked about angels, judgment, and the Messiah.
And yet in the West, the book simply vanished.
The complete text dropped out of circulation there for well over a thousand years.
The only place it kept its standing as scripture was Ethiopia where the Orthodox Tiwedo church copied it in the old liturggical language called Gaes.
Ethiopia’s Jewish community, the Beta Israel, still reads it in worship in that same language.
Then in 1773, a Scottish explorer named James Bruce came home after about 6 years in Ethiopia carrying three GZ copies.
One went to the Bodian Library at Oxford, one to the French Royal Library in Paris, and Bruce kept the third.
Even then, nobody did much with them for decades.
So why was it dropped in the first place?
Did it go too far, say too much, or carry ideas somebody wanted kept quiet?
That question is a big part of why people wanted to feed it to a machine that has no stake in any of the old arguments.
Which brings us to Grock.
Grock is the chatbot built by XAI, the artificial intelligence company Elon Musk founded.
The first version launched in late 2023, pitched as an assistant that would answer more bluntly and wander into odd territory than its rivals.
Grock 4 arrived on the 9th of July 2025 at a live stream where Musk claimed that on academic questions it was better than PhD level in every subject, no exceptions.
Whether that’s true is another matter.
What it can do is read a long text, pull out recurring themes, compare structures, and boil complicated ideas down.
Computers have combed through scripture for years.
What changed is who gets to ask.
With a chatbot, anybody can sit down with First Enoch and ask it to compare two chapters, track a symbol through the whole book, or explain what a passage meant to someone in the first century.
When the Book of Enoch was run through Grock, it didn’t stop at a summary.
It sorted the book into patterns, clusters of themes, and points of theological tension that had mostly been argued over in journals few people outside a university ever open.
It also tied the book to older writing from Mesopotamia.
And to be clear, the AI isn’t claiming anything supernatural.
A language model spots patterns and lays them out.
And when the text is this old and this layered, the patterns get very interesting.
The first one it flagged was the story the whole book is built on.
That story is the watchers.
Chapters 1 to 36.
The section scholars call the book of the watchers tell how a group of angels assigned to keep watch over humanity decided to come down, take human wives and father children with them.
Those children were the Nephilim.
That’s the opening premise of the entire book.
The name itself has a trail.
In the book of Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar sees a watcher, a holy one, coming down from heaven.
The Aramaic word is ear, which comes from a root meaning to be awake.
The name suggests beings who stay awake and keep watch.
Grock’s first flag was that the Watcher story picks up a few famously cryptic verses in Genesis chapter 6 where the sons of God take the daughters of men as wives and giants appear on the earth and turns four verses into a full account.
Enoch says exactly how many came down, 200 of them in the days of Enoch’s father Jared and exactly where on the summit of Mount Hermon.
The book even explains the mountain’s name.
The angels swore an oath on that peak and bound themselves with curses.
And that, it says, is why they called it Herman.
The leader is named as Seamjaza.
He’s worried the others will back out and leave him to take the punishment alone, so he makes them all swear.
Then the text lists their chiefs, each one in charge of 10, and the forbidden knowledge they brought down.
Grock also lined this up against something scholars have chased for a long time.
In Mesopotamian tradition, there were the appcall, the seven sages, often pictured wearing the skin of a fish who came before the great flood and taught humanity its crafts.
The Babylonian priest Barosus describes the first of them, Oannis, as a fishman sent to teach people letters, crafts, laws, and geometry.
In one Babylonian poem, the god Marduk banishes these sages after the flood.
Some researchers think a story like that traveling west helped give shape to the Nephilim verses in Genesis.
And there’s one match that’s hard to brush off.
A Cunia form list found at Uruk pairs the kings before the flood with their sages.
The seventh king, Enmedurani, is paired with a sage named Utuabzu, who is said to have gone up to heaven.
Enoch is the seventh from Adam, and he went up to heaven, too.
But the angels are only half the story.
The other half is what they fathered.
In first Enoch, the Nephilim are giants who eat everything humans can grow, then turn on the humans, then on each other.
When they die, their spirits don’t go anywhere.
They stay on Earth as evil spirits.
And that’s how the book explains where demons come from in the first place.
Grock looked at how that sits next to mainstream Jewish and Christian teaching.
The Bible mentions the Nephilim and then moves on.
It never says what became of them and it never really explains where evil spirits come from.
Enoch answers both questions in detail.
The scrolls from Kuman pushed this further.
Among them were pieces of a separate work now called the book of giants.
About 10 Aramaic copies from four different caves.
In it, two giant brothers named Ohhaya and Haya have dreams they can’t make sense of, and the giants send a messenger to Enoch to have them explained.
Enoch sends back tablets announcing their judgment.
And one of the giants in that book is named Gilgamesh, the hero of the oldest epic poem we have.
Another is Humbaba, the monster Gilgamesh kills in that same epic.
I mean, that’s a Jewish text kept by a Jewish community with Mesopotamia’s most famous hero cast as one of the doomed giants.
Grock also noted that the idea shows up in the Titans of Greek myth and the demigods of Sumer.
That doesn’t make the giants real, and the AI wasn’t claiming that.
What it does show is that a story about powerful half divine beings who wreck the world turns up almost everywhere in the ancient world.
Read that way.
Enoch is anything but a fringe curiosity.
It’s a detailed, consistent account of where evil came from, how the unseen world is arranged, and how history ends, far more specific than any book in the Bible.
There’s a part of the book where Enoch gives the names, and few readers ever reach it.
Samjaza leads, but the text lists the chiefs beneath him and their specialties.
Armoros taught how to undo spells.
Baracakeel taught the signs of the stars.
Cockabiel taught astrology.
Sariel taught the courses of the moon.
Shamsiel the signs of the sun.
And one of them, Penmu, is blamed for teaching people to write with ink and paper.
That’s not a typo, by the way.
In this book, writing itself is on the list of forbidden knowledge.
The one who gets the most attention is Aazil.
Enoch says he taught men to make swords, knives, shields, and breastplates, the whole toolkit of war, and showed women ornaments and cosmetics.
The text treats both as corruption.
When judgment comes, it lands hardest on him.
The angel Raphael is ordered to bind Aazil hand and foot, throw him into the darkness in a place called Dudale, and pile rough, jagged rocks on top of him until the final judgment.
Now, here’s what Grock connected that a lot of Bible readers never hear.
Leviticus 16 describes the day of atonement.
The high priest takes two goats and casts lots over them.
One lot for the Lord and one for Aazil.
The Lord’s goat is sacrificed.
The goat for Aazil is kept alive and sent away into the wilderness.
Ask a churchgoer who or what aazil is in that chapter and you’ll usually get a blank look.
Enoch gives an answer and the link runs deeper than a name.
The Mishna, the early rabbitic record of how the temple ritual was done says the goat was led to a cliff at a place called Bet Hadudo about 12 miles from Jerusalem.
Enoch buries Aazelle in the desert at Dudeel.
One scholar of the ritual has pointed out how close those two place names are and argued they probably share a common origin.
So on the holiest day of the Jewish year, a goat was sent to roughly the same spot where Enoch says, “The chief of the fallen angels lies chained under the rocks.”
So far, this is all angels and monsters.
The next section is something else entirely.
Chapters 72 to 82 are called the astronomical book or the book of the luminaries, and it may be the oldest part of first Enoch.
Fragments of it among the Dead Sea Scrolls were copied in the early 2nd century before Christ, which makes the 3rd century a reasonable guess for when it was written.
It tracks the sun, the moon, and the stars.
And for its time, it’s remarkably precise.
Grock pointed out that it lays out a solar calendar of 364 days split into four seasons of 91 days.
Each season is 3 months of 30 days plus one extra day.
That gives exactly 52 weeks.
So every year and every season starts on the same weekday, a Wednesday.
Jewish practice mostly followed the moon instead.
But this 364 day count shows up again in other texts from Kuman, including the calendar of the community.
Many scholars identify with the Essenes.
That match is one reason some scholars think the people who kept the scrolls had a direct link to the circle that produced Enoch.
The descriptions aren’t accurate by modern standards, but they come from somebody who watched the sky for years.
The book gives the sun 12 gates, six where it rises and six where it sets across the year.
That’s a real thing.
You can see the sunrise point creeps along the horizon from season to season.
And tracking it was how ancient calendars were kept.
So, a book about fallen angels also holds a serious attempt to map the sky.
And then the book turns from the sky to history and the history starts looking a little too accurate.
Chapters 83 to 90 hold the dream visions.
Enoch has two.
The first shows a flood wiping out the world.
The second retell of history with every figure as an animal.
Adam is a white bull.
Abel is a red calf and Cain is a black one.
Noah’s sons come out as a white bull, a red bull, and a black bull.
Israel becomes a flock of sheep and its enemies are wild animals and birds of prey.
This is where Grock used a term historians use prophecy after the fact.
Writing presented as a prediction but composed after the events it describes.
Parts of this animal apocalypse are so specific about Israel’s history that they read like they were written by someone who already knew how it turned out.
Late in the vision, a sheep grows a great horn and fights off the birds of prey.
And scholars generally read that horn as Judas Makabeus who led the revolt against the Seucid kings from about 167 to 160 BC.
That’s why most scholars date this section to somewhere around 163 to 142 BC.
Then the vision goes past known history into a last war, the end of evil and a world made new.
Grock noted that this end of the age vision has the same broad shape as the book of Revelation.
A time of great suffering, then judgment, then a renewed earth.
Did Revelation’s author draw on the Enoch tradition?
The overlap is close enough that most scholars say yes, and Grock matched specific passages from both books to show it.
But the passage that stopped people cold came next.
And it centers on a title.
Chapters 46 to 48 describe a heavenly figure called the son of man.
He sits beside God.
He’ll judge the wicked and rescue the righteous at the end.
And in chapter 48, the book says his name was spoken before the son and the signs were created before the stars of heaven were made.
He’ll be a staff for the righteous to lean on and a light to the Gentiles.
If that last phrase sounds familiar, it should.
Luke uses almost the same words about the baby Jesus in the temple.
Son of man is the name Jesus reaches for again and again when he talks about himself.
In the four gospels, the phrase appears 81 times.
30 in Matthew, 14 in Mark, 25 in Luke, and 12 in John.
And it’s nearly always Jesus saying it.
Nobody in the Gospels ever addresses him by it.
At his trial in Mark’s gospel, the high priest asks if he’s the Messiah, and Jesus answers that they’ll see the son of man seated at the right hand of the power coming with the clouds of heaven.
That’s the same kind of figure Enoch describes.
Grock’s comparison flagged that the traits Enoch gives the son of man, existing before creation, divine authority, the role of judge, the link with light and wisdom, line up with what the New Testament says about Jesus.
So closely that scholars have argued over the connection for decades.
Some think Jesus used the title on purpose to tell his listeners exactly what kind of figure he claimed to be.
Others think the influence was looser and cultural.
None of this is new or fringe.
It’s been debated in academic theology since the 1800s.
It just never reached the pews because Enoch isn’t in most people’s Bibles.
There’s a catch, though.
This section of Enoch, chapters 37 to71, called the parables, is the one part of the book that has never turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
So dating it is a fight.
The scholar who first published the Kuman Enoch fragments, Joseph Milik, argued it was written as late as the 3rd century after Christ.
Most scholars reject a date that late, and one widely cited range runs from about 50 BC to AD 117.
If it’s early, it’s a Jewish text that shaped how Jesus was understood.
If it’s late, the borrowing could run the other way.
And there’s one more line in the parables right at the very end that makes this debate a lot stranger, and we’ll get to it before the end.
So, why isn’t Enoch in the Bible?
Grock’s answer, when asked directly, was more careful than the usual story.
Enoch was never part of the Hebrew Bible to begin with, and different traditions left it out at different points.
The Jewish authorities who settled the Hebrew scriptures around the late 1st and early 2nd centuries didn’t include it.
One likely reason is that the Watchers story and all that detail about angels looked risky or close to heresy.
After the Romans destroyed the second temple, Jewish identity was under enormous pressure and the rabbis had reason to gather around books with clear boundaries.
Here’s where the popular version goes wrong.
You’ll often hear that the Council of Nika in 325 voted Enoch out.
It didn’t.
The historian Bartman puts it bluntly, writing that the Council of Nika did not debate or decide which books should belong in scripture.
Later meetings at Hippo and Carthage in the 390s did deal with the list of books, but man points out those were very regional affairs.
What actually happened was slower.
Early Christian writers were split.
The Epistle of Barnabas, Athanagaras, and Clement of Alexandria all treated Enoch as scripture.
Around the year 200, the writer Tertalian defended it outright.
He knew some people rejected it because it wasn’t in the Jewish cannon and others because a book from before the flood couldn’t have survived it.
His answer was that Noah was Enoch’s greatgrandson and could have preserved it.
And he suggested the Jews had rejected it for the same reason they rejected other passages because it spoke about Christ.
Even so, by the fifth century, most churches had dropped it.
Its fallen angels and its crowded heavens were hard to fit into the theology the church was building.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Church, one of the oldest churches anywhere, never went through that Roman process and it kept Enoch all along.
So whether the book was cut or simply never let in depends on which tradition you ask.
What nobody serious disputes is that the book is ancient and the proof came out of the ground.
The first Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947.
A few years later in cave 4 at Kumran, researchers found pieces of 11 separate Aramaic manuscripts of Enoch.
Milik’s official edition came out in 1976.
Add the Book of Giants copies and Enoch is one of the best represented works at Kuman with more copies than many books that did make it into the Old Testament.
Even Jude’s quote turns up there on one of those Aramaic fragments.
Those 80 new pieces from 2021, by the way, aren’t Enoch.
They came out of what’s called the Cave of Horror, south of Jerusalem.
And they’re Greek copies of the minor prophets, lines from Zechariah and Nah, hidden during the Bar Cockba revolt in the 130s.
The same dig turned up a woven basket about 10,500 years old.
That desert clearly hasn’t given up everything yet.
When Grock was asked how credible First Enoch is as a historical document, this was the evidence it leaned on.
The Kumran copies show that a major Jewish community read the book, copied it again and again, and took it seriously as religious writing in the very period when Jesus and his followers were alive.
That’s archaeology.
The astronomical fragments are older than the finished book, which tells you the sections had separate lives before somebody put them together.
And that’s normal for ancient religious writing.
And anyone can look at these fragments.
Now, in December 2012, the Israel Antiquities Authority opened the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls digital library with about 5,000 highresolution images in color and infrared.
So, the book is real and old.
But what kept people reading it was the way it talks about justice.
A huge share of First Enoch is about judgment, what happens to the wicked, how the righteous are vindicated, and how those who crushed God’s people finally fall.
Grock noted that Enoch’s picture of judgment is far more worked out than anything in the Old Testament.
The book describes holding places for the souls of the dead until the judgment with separate hollows for the righteous and the wicked and conditions that depend on how each person lived and died.
It’s one of the earliest clear examples of a developed afterlife in Jewish writing and it lines up closely with ideas that surface later in the New Testament.
Then there’s the Epistle of Enoch chapters 91 to 108.
Inside it is the apocalypse of weeks which splits all of history into 10 weeks and it’s usually dated to the first half of the second century before Christ.
The epistle pronounces woes on the rich and powerful who crush the poor and the language is blunt.
Several New Testament scholars have compared that tone to the letter of James and to the woes Jesus pronounces in the Gospels across every section.
Whoever wrote it and whenever the message holds, God takes the suffering of the innocent seriously and the powerful will answer for it.
Grock’s comparisons with other ancient traditions went further still.
The AI found parallel story shapes in cultures that, as far as mainstream history knows, never had direct contact with ancient Israel.
The flood Enoch foresees connects to Utnap Pishtim, the flood survivor in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a story older than the biblical flood account.
Grock also pointed to the Anunnaki, the Sumerian gods tied to the sky who deal with humans, and to the Greek Titans, who handed humans forbidden knowledge before Zeus locked them away.
But the AI was careful here.
Parallels don’t prove a shared historical event.
Either the stories traveled between cultures through trade and contact or different peoples kept arriving at similar stories to explain the same things where evil comes from what knowledge should stay off limits and uh what happens when beings cross a line they shouldn’t.
None of this means scholars have ignored Enoch.
George Nicholsburg wrote the standard commentary on it for the Hermana series.
In June 2001, Gabriela Bokachini of the University of Michigan brought a group of specialists together outside Florence for the first meeting of the Enoch Seminar, an international society that studies Judaism in the centuries when Christianity and rabbitic Judaism both took shape.
The first thing they took on was whether there had been a distinct Enoic form of Judaism.
Grock’s summary of where the field stands is that Enoch’s influence on early Christianity is well established.
The argument now is about how much and in which direction.
Did early Christians borrow Enoch’s ideas about the Son of Man and about angels?
Almost certainly.
Did the book shape how Jesus’s followers understood who he was?
Plenty of scholars think so.
The gap between what scholars know about Enoch and what the average person in a church pew knows is enormous.
And an AI walkthrough closed some of it, putting decades of library work into plain language.
Then there are the questions Grock couldn’t answer.
And it’s worth being fair about them because the bolder versions of this story claim far more than the machine actually did.
Grock finds patterns in text and links ideas based on what it was trained on.
It can’t verify history, confirm the supernatural, or tell you whether anything in Enoch actually happened.
When people say Grock proved the book true, or that AI confirmed the Nephilim existed, that’s a misreading of what the technology did.
It can’t settle arguments that scholars of history, archaeology, and religion have kept going for centuries.
Were the Watchers real beings, symbols, or pure myth?
No AI can decide that and asked carefully.
Grock says so itself.
Translation adds another layer.
Enoch was written in Aramaic and some think partly in Hebrew.
It survives complete only in GZ with Greek pieces of the first 32 chapters on two papyrie found at Akm in Egypt and published in 1892.
Every translation is a set of choices.
Grock was mostly working from English versions.
The 1,912 translation by RH Charles and the later one by Ephraim Isaac in the Old Testament pseudapigrapher.
Isaac himself calls the book clearly composite from many periods and many writers.
And that brings us back to the line in the parables.
At the very end of the parables in chapter 71, Enoch himself is spoken to in heaven.
In the translation by Nichollsburg and Vanderam, the words are, “You are that son of man who was born for righteousness.”
The heavenly judge, the one named before the stars were made, turns out to be Enoch himself.
Charles changed that line in his own version to this is the son of man.
Even though he admitted the manuscripts say you are the scholar John Collins calls that change clearly unacceptable.
So the book the western church let slip away with its oath on Hermon its goat sent toward Aazelle and its son of man named before creation ends its most famous section by handing that title to the man who walked with God and was taken.
Tertullian believed the book was pushed aside because it pointed to Christ and its own last line on the Son of Man names Enoch.
The AI didn’t uncover anything supernatural.
What it did was put a real ancient and deeply influential book in front of people who’d never been told it existed.
And that may matter more than any single thing it found.
I’m Ambrose Wild.
And if you want more journeys like this one into the books and ruins and records the official story skipped, stay with the channel because there’s a lot more of this still to
