Before Noah’s Flood, the world was growing.
Humanity spread across the Earth, generations multiplied…But all the while, the civilization was moving towards a catastrophe whose full causes remained unexplained.
Genesis offers only a few cryptic lines about the sons of God, the daughters of men, and the mysterious Nephilim.
Then the story turns to the corruption of the Earth and the decision to destroy it.
But what if there was more to this saga?
This is not simply a story of human wickedness, but a chain of rebellion, forbidden knowledge, bloodshed, and divine judgment that begins long before the first rain falls.
Today, we’ll show what the Ethiopian Bible revealed about what happened before Noah’s Flood… And It’s TERRIFYING!
A World on the Edge of Something Terrible “And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them.
That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.
And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.
There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.”
Such are the words of Genesis six, verses one through four.
From here on, the text moves towards the Flood.
But these lines leave behind a mystery.
It says that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, took wives from among them, and that the Nephilim were on the Earth in those days.
It also refers to the mighty men of old, the men of renown.
Then the story moves on.
There is no explanation of who these heavenly beings were, how the Nephilim came to exist, or what happened in the world before God decided to destroy it.
For those details, we have to turn to a much larger account preserved in an ancient work known as the Book of Enoch.
The Book of Enoch survives in its entirety in the Ethiopian Ge’ez tradition and remains scripture in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, although it was gradually excluded from most other Jewish and Christian biblical canons.
Biblical canons developed over centuries, and Enoch’s status became increasingly contested as Christian communities debated which writings carried scriptural authority.
The book was known to some early Christians, and the New Testament letter of Jude even quotes a prophecy attributed to Enoch, yet acceptance of that passage did not mean that the entire book was accepted as Scripture.
By the fourth and fifth centuries, influential Christian writers were treating Enoch as non-canonical, and the work gradually disappeared from circulation in much of the Christian world.
Ethiopia followed a different path.
The text was translated into Ge’ez and preserved within the Ethiopian Christian tradition, where it came to hold canonical status.
The exact history of canon formation in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is more complex than a single official list: scholars have noted differences between traditional descriptions of its eighty-one-book canon and the lists found in historical church sources.
For centuries, readers in much of Europe knew the work only through references preserved by earlier writers, until Ethiopian manuscripts reached Europe in the eighteenth century.
Then, in nineteen forty-seven, fragments of ancient copies were identified among the Dead Sea Scrolls, confirming that the work’s traditions circulated centuries before the surviving medieval Ethiopian manuscripts.
In Enoch’s account, the trouble began, not on Earth… But descended from above!
The Two Hundred Who Descended from Heaven In the Book of Enoch, the turning point comes when two hundred heavenly beings decide that observing humanity is no longer enough.
These are the Watchers.
They are heavenly beings whose story becomes inseparable from the world before the Flood.
Their descent is described in First Enoch, chapter six, like this: “And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters.
And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: ‘Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us, children.’” The narrative gathers them together on a mountain before the plan is carried out.
The location is Mount Hermon, a real mountain associated with the borderlands of the ancient Levant.
In Enoch’s account, it becomes the place where the Watchers bind themselves to a decision that none of them can easily abandon.
At the centre of that gathering is Semjaza, whose name appears in different spellings across translations and manuscript traditions.
He fears that the others may refuse to follow through, leaving him alone to bear the consequences.
But the others respond by swearing a collective oath, committing themselves to the decision before carrying it out.
The number is specific: two hundred.
Semjaza is mentioned as a leading figure and then lists other chiefs, with spellings that vary between editions and translations.
Among the names commonly rendered are Araklba, Rameel, Kokabiel, Tamiel, Ramiel, Danel, Ezeqeel, Baraqiel, Asael, Armaros, Batariel, Ananel, Zaqiel, Samsapeel, Satarel, Turel, Jomjael and Sariel.
The list is not identical in every rendering, and some names are difficult to standardize across languages.
Their descent marks the point where the story changes direction.
The Watchers do not remain distant witnesses to human life.
They enter it, choose partners from among human women, and begin to pass knowledge to people.
In the following chapter, the consequences become clearer.
First Enoch seven, verses one through five read as follows: “And all the others together with them took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one… and they taught them charms and enchantments, and the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants.
And they became pregnant, and they bare great giants, whose height was three thousand ells: Who consumed all the acquisitions of men.
And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind.
And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another’s flesh, and drink the blood.”
First Enoch eight, verse one elaborates on the Watchers’ forbidden teachings: “And Azazel taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals of the earth and the art of working them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all colouring tinctures.”
Interestingly, ancient Mesopotamian texts describe apkallu, legendary sages associated with the god of wisdom, Ea, also known as Enki.
These figures were remembered as guardians and transmitters of knowledge, including the specialized learning later preserved by scribes, priests, healers, and diviners.
Some traditions portrayed them as supernatural beings connected to the divine order, belonging to an ancient world that existed before the Flood.
The connection appears explicitly in the records of Mesopotamian scholarship.
One ancient scholarly tablet, preserved in a translation discussed by Assyriologist Amar Annus, describes medical knowledge as having been passed down from the sages of the antediluvian age.
It reads like this: “Salves and bandages: tested and checked, which are ready at hand, composed by the ancient apkallus from before the flood, which Enlil-muballit, apkallu of Nippur, bequeathed in Šuruppak in the second year of Enlil-bani, king of Isin.
He who does not know may show it to one who knows; one who knows must not show it to one who does not know.”
Other Mesopotamian scholarly traditions connected the sages with knowledge believed to originate with the gods.
A catalogue of learned texts attributes several bodies of specialized learning to the authority of Ea, describing them as coming “from the mouth of Ea.”
These traditions included divination, the interpretation of omens, medicine, and ritual knowledge.
In other words, the apkallu were not simply wise men in the ordinary sense.
They occupied a place in a mythical history in which the foundations of human knowledge were linked to divine sources and an exceptionally distant past.
Sounds familiar, right?
Well, the comparison with the Book of Enoch is undeniable… The idea, thus, was never isolated to one people or one tradition… So, what did the Watchers do after they descended?
The Children Who Should Never Have Been Born The first sign that the Watchers’ descent has changed the world is not a battle.
It is the birth of a race of beings that the human world cannot sustain.
In chapter seven of the Book of Enoch, the heavenly beings take human wives, and their children grow into giants.
But the text does not treat their size as the only problem.
Their real threat is what their size allows them to do.
They consume food on a scale that ordinary people cannot meet, exhaust the world’s resources, and eventually turn on the very humans who feed them.
When humanity can no longer sustain them, the text says, “the giants turned against them and devoured mankind.”
But how big are these giants supposed to be?
Enoch gives a startling answer.
In R.
H.
Charles’s translation, their height is “three thousand ells.”
Other English editions render the figure as three thousand cubits, while another ancient textual tradition gives three hundred cubits.
These are enormous measurements, far beyond any ordinary human scale, but the disagreement matters.
The surviving versions do not preserve one consistent figure.
But how big is three thousand ells or cubits?
Well, a cubit was an ancient unit of length based roughly on the distance from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger.
It was commonly around forty-five to fifty-two and a half centimetres, although the exact measurement varied between cultures.
An ell was another traditional unit of length, also associated with the arm, but its precise value depended on the region and historical period.
When converting the giants’ heights in the Book of Enoch into modern measurements, we run into one problem: the surviving textual traditions do not all give the same figure.
Still, if we use a cubit of approximately forty-five to fifty-two and a half centimetres, three hundred cubits, which is on the lower end of the estimation, would equal roughly one hundred and thirty-five to one hundred and fifty-eight metres.
That is an extraordinary height.
Robert Wadlow, the tallest reliably documented man in history, stood at approximately two point seven two metres.
Even the smaller figure would make Enoch’s giants roughly fifty to fifty-eight times taller than Wadlow!
To put that scale into perspective, the Eiffel Tower, including its antenna, stands approximately three hundred and thirty metres tall.
A giant measuring three hundred cubits would therefore reach around halfway up the tower.
The Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, stands eight hundred and twenty-eight metres tall.
At three thousand cubits, the giants would measure approximately one thousand three hundred and fifty to one thousand five hundred and seventy-five metres, making them taller than the Burj Khalifa!
The smaller figure describes beings taller than many modern skyscrapers, while the larger version imagines creatures exceeding a kilometre in height.
A fragment of the Aramaic Enoch manuscripts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls adds another disturbing detail: the giants are described as growing in keeping with their extraordinary stature.
The surviving wording is damaged, and its translation is uncertain, but the tradition suggests that their immense size was not simply a feature they possessed at birth.
Their mothers were human, after all.
They grew that large, at a pace and a scale that the human world cannot accommodate!
And their needs would expand!
In the Ethiopic version preserved in Charles’s translation, they consume “all the acquisitions of men.”
The Greek and Aramaic textual traditions vary in their wording, but the central idea remains: the giants consume the fruits of human labour until feeding them becomes impossible.
As scholar Henryk Drawnel notes in his study of the Enochic giants, their appetite is central to the story’s depiction of their violence.
People cannot grow food quickly enough, gather enough supplies, or produce enough to satisfy them.
Then the violence escalates.
The giants turn against humanity and devour people.
Enoch also describes them harming birds, beasts, reptiles, and fish, before adding that they consume flesh and drink blood.
The story is not confined to one account of the giants.
The Book of Giants, preserved in fragmentary Aramaic manuscripts among the Dead Sea Scrolls, develops the Watchers’ offspring as characters in their own right.
Some fragments name giants such as Ohyah and Hahyah and describe troubling dreams and warnings of coming destruction.
Because so much of the work has been lost, it cannot fill in every detail of their lives or explain exactly how their bodies grew.
But it shows that the giants’ fate and the catastrophe surrounding them were explored in Jewish literature beyond the surviving chapters of Enoch.
In some passages, a giant named Mahaway is sent to seek Enoch and obtain an interpretation of the dreams.
So, what happened next?
Well, we don’t know… The episode is incomplete.
What we do know is that the giants are portrayed as overwhelming the world around them, but they are not beyond judgment themselves.
The Book of Giants gives them foreboding, dreams, and a search for answers, while the Book of Enoch describes the devastation associated with their existence.
So, what happens when beings with immense power consume everything around them and mistake that power for permanence?
The Knowledge That Changed the World In chapter eight of the Book of Enoch, the giants are no longer the only source of danger.
The narrative turns to what the Watchers teach humanity, beginning with Azazel.
In First Enoch eight, verse one, Charles translates the passage as follows: “And Azâzêl taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals of the earth and the art of working them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all colouring tinctures.”
For context, antimony was used in ancient cosmetics applied around the eyes.
The text makes that judgment explicit in the next verse.
First Enoch eight, verse two, states: “And there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and they were led astray, and became corrupt in all their ways.”
Azazel is not the only Watcher named in the chapter.
Verses three and four describe other heavenly beings passing on different kinds of knowledge.
Charles’s translation of First Enoch eight, verse three, reads: “Semjâzâ taught enchantments, and root-cuttings, Armârôs the resolving of enchantments, Barâqîjâl, taught astrology, Kôkabêl the constellations, Ezêqêêl the knowledge of the clouds, Araqiêl the signs of the earth, Shamsiêl the signs of the sun, and Sariêl the course of the moon.”
The chapter ends by showing the consequences of this transformation.
First Enoch eight, verse four, states: “And as men perished, they cried, and their cry went up to heaven…” That final line leads into the next chapter, where the archangels respond to the suffering on Earth.
In First Enoch nine, verse five, Charles’s translation describes the accusation against Azazel: “You have seen what Azâzêl has done, how he has taught every species of iniquity upon earth, and has disclosed to the world all the secret things which are done in the heavens.”
He is accused not only of teaching humanity harmful practices, but also of revealing secrets associated with the heavenly realm.
Interestingly, the passage does not identify every secret he disclosed… There could be a lot more… Thus, he stands at the centre of the Watchers’ corruption of the world.
The judgment comes in chapter ten.
In verses four through eight, God orders the archangel Raphael to seize Azazel, bind him, and cast him into darkness until the day of final judgment.
Charles’s translation of First Enoch ten, verse four, begins: “And again the Lord said to Raphael: ‘Bind Azâzêl hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness: and make an opening in the desert, which is in Dudael, and cast him therein.’” The command continues by ordering Raphael to cover Azazel with rough and jagged rocks and leave him in darkness.
The reason for this punishment appears in verse eight, where the Lord declares: “And the whole earth has been corrupted through the works that were taught by Azâzêl: to him ascribe all sin.”
The name Azazel also appears in Leviticus sixteen, in the biblical ritual involving two goats on the Day of Atonement.
One goat is sacrificed, while the other is sent into the wilderness for Azazel.
Interestingly, the precise meaning of the name in that passage remains debated, and Leviticus does not describe Azazel as a Watcher who taught metalworking.
The ancient people did not necessarily separate knowledge of the natural world from divination or religious practice in the way modern readers might.
Observing the stars, tracking the Moon, interpreting clouds and studying plants could all carry practical, ritual or predictive meanings.
Enoch groups these forms of knowledge within a narrative of transgression.
It does not follow that every practice mentioned was considered evil in every ancient society.
Learning them was not inherently corrupt… But the knowledge was passed down by rebellious heavenly beings… That is the core of the disorder…
By this stage, the crisis has spread far beyond the giants… The Watchers have crossed the boundary between heaven and Earth… Their offspring have overwhelmed the world’s capacity to sustain them… Their teachings have spread corruption among the masses… When Heaven Finally Looks Down The moment the violence reaches heaven, the story takes a decisive turn.
In the Book of Enoch, the victims are no longer suffering beyond anyone’s notice.
Their cries rise to the heavenly realm, where four powerful figures, Michael, Uriel, Raphael, and Gabriel, look down and see bloodshed and lawlessness spreading across the Earth.
They bring the matter before God, describing a world corrupted by the Watchers and their offspring.
The rebellion has damaged the order of creation itself.
Now heaven must decide what to do about it.
First Enoch nine, verse one, states: “And then Michael, Uriel, Raphael, and Gabriel looked down from heaven and saw much blood being shed upon the earth, and all lawlessness being wrought upon the earth.”
The next verses make clear that the suffering has reached the gates of heaven.
In First Enoch nine, verses two and three, the text reads: “And they said one to another: ‘The earth made †without inhabitant cries the voice of their crying† up to the gates of heaven.’ And now to you, the holy ones of heaven, the souls of men make their suit, saying, ‘Bring our cause before the Most High.’” The four heavenly figures then bring their complaint directly before God, addressing him as “Lord of lords, God of gods, King of kings.”
In verses six through nine, they identify the Watchers’ actions and the corruption associated with them.
Of Azazel, they declare: “Thou seest what Azâzêl hath done, who hath taught all unrighteousness on earth and revealed the eternal secrets which were (preserved) in heaven, which men were striving to learn.”
They then describe the Watchers’ unions with human women and the birth of their offspring.
Verse nine states: “And the women have borne giants, and the whole earth has thereby been filled with blood and unrighteousness.”
Raphael is then ordered to seize Azazel, bind him hand and foot, and cast him into darkness in a place called Dudael, where rough stones are to cover him until the day of final judgment.
The order also calls for the healing of the Earth… Semjaza and the Watchers who followed him face a different sentence.
Michael is instructed to bind Semjaza and his associates, the beings who took human wives and fathered the giants.
They are to remain confined for seventy generations, according to the text, until the appointed judgment.
Their punishment is tied to what happens to their children: the Watchers will witness the destruction of the offspring they brought into the world.
Gabriel is sent against the giants, and in First Enoch chapter ten, verse nine, he is commanded to send them against one another so that they destroy each other in battle.
Thus began the war before the Flood!
The detail is easy to miss because the command appears within a larger sequence of punishments.
Yet it changes the way the giants’ fate is understood.
They are not simply swept away by an impersonal disaster.
In Enoch’s account, their destruction is deliberately ordered, and their own capacity for violence becomes the instrument of their defeat.
A related tradition survives in the Book of Giants, fragments of which were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Here, the doomed beings are given another dimension.
The fragments describe giants troubled by dreams that seem to foretell destruction.
Among the named figures are Ohyah and Hahyah, while Mahaway is sent to seek Enoch and obtain an interpretation of the visions.
The manuscript evidence is incomplete, and scholars must reconstruct parts of the narrative from damaged fragments and comparisons with later versions.
Thus there was fear and attempts to understand what was coming… But what was coming would be beyond any imagination!
The Flood Was Not the Only Judgment The Flood was supposed to end the violence.
Yet in the Book of Enoch, the catastrophe is only one part of a much larger judgment.
The Watchers have been condemned, the giants are destined to destroy one another, and the world that produced them is approaching its final collapse.
Another ancient Jewish work, the Book of Jubilees, makes that connection especially clear.
Retelling the early chapters of Genesis, it describes angels taking human wives, the birth of giants, and corruption spreading across the Earth.
Its fifth chapter links three judgments: the rebellious angels are bound, the giants are ordered to kill one another, and the Flood is sent against the corrupted world.
This is not simply a copy of Genesis.
Jubilees expands the biblical account to explain how the episode of the heavenly beings belongs to the same unfolding crisis as Noah’s survival.
The Book of Jubilees, chapter five, verses one through two, read: “And it came to pass when the children of men began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born unto them, that the angels of God saw them on a certain year of this jubilee, that they were beautiful to look upon, and they took themselves wives of all whom they chose, and they bare unto them sons and they were giants.
And lawlessness increased on the earth, and all flesh corrupted its way, alike men and cattle and beasts and birds and everything that walks on the earth, and they began to devour each other.”
Jubilees five, verses six and seven, describe God’s response to the rebellious angels and their children.
It reads: “And against their children went forth a word from before His presence, that they should be smitten with the sword, and be removed from under heaven.”
Jubilees five, nineteen, then highlights Noah’s prophesied survival: “And as for all those who corrupted their ways and their thoughts before the flood, no man’s person was accepted save that of Noah alone; for his person was accepted in behalf of his sons, whom God saved from the waters of the flood on his account, for his heart was righteous in all his ways, according as it was commanded regarding him, and he had not departed from aught that was ordained for him.”
The Flood therefore arrives after the old order has already been shattered.
The narrative presents divine judgment as a response not to one isolated act, but to a world where violence has become pervasive.
Yet this is not the only ancient account in which a god or group of gods decides that humanity has become a problem.
In Mesopotamia, the Epic of Atrahasis offers a strikingly different explanation for the Flood.
Its story begins with the creation of humanity to take over work previously performed by the lesser gods.
As the human population grows, the noise of human life becomes intolerable to the god Enlil.
He first sends disasters to reduce the population, but the attempts do not resolve the problem.
Eventually, the gods decide to send a devastating flood.
The god Enki, who opposes the plan, warns Atrahasis and tells him how to survive by building a vessel.
The story survives in cuneiform tablets… Copies from the Old Babylonian period were written centuries before many of the later surviving manuscripts of other ancient traditions.
The contrast with Enoch is revealing.
In Atrahasis, the crisis is driven by population growth and noise, not by a rebellion of heavenly beings who father giants.
The gods’ decision to destroy humanity emerges from a different set of concerns, and the survivor is preserved through the intervention of a sympathetic deity.
Both narratives imagine a world facing divine destruction, but their explanations for why the catastrophe occurs are not the same.
The resemblance lies in the larger pattern: a divine decision, a warning that reaches one person, and a vessel that allows life to continue after the waters recede.
The Epic of Gilgamesh preserves another version of this flood tradition.
In its eleventh tablet, Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh how the gods decided to send a flood and how the god Ea revealed the plan to him.
Utnapishtim builds a boat and survives the catastrophe, eventually receiving a status that separates him from ordinary human life.
The tablet became especially significant in modern scholarship when nineteenth-century researchers recognized its flood story and its parallels with Genesis.
The British Museum preserves fragments of the clay tablets on which the Mesopotamian account was written.
These parallels show that flood narratives circulated in the ancient Near East in different forms, each shaped by its own understanding of the gods, humanity, and the reasons a world might be destroyed.
There is one more complication… In First Enoch chapter fifteen, the giants’ spirits are said to remain on Earth after their bodies die, becoming evil spirits that afflict and attack humanity.
Within this tradition, the Flood can destroy the old world without erasing every consequence of the Watchers’ rebellion.
The physical giants perish, but their legacy persists in a different form.
Noah’s survival now carries a meaning beyond escape.
In Genesis, he is instructed to build an ark, preserve his family and bring animals aboard before the waters overwhelm the Earth.
In Enoch and Jubilees, his story sits alongside the binding of the Watchers and the destruction of the giants.
The texts differ in emphasis, and the Book of Giants survives too incompletely to supply a continuous account of every event, but together these traditions portray the antediluvian world as a place where rebellion, violence and judgment have become inseparable.
By the time the Flood arrives, the old world has already been condemned within the story.
The waters do not begin the crisis… They bring its final chapter to an end… Well, that’s it for now, thanks for watching!
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