Genesis gives the sons of God four verses. The Book of Enoch gives them a rebellion, a list of names and a trial. The Watchers angels came down, taught what they were not meant to teach, and left the world with knowledge it had not earned; everything in this archive follows from that descent.

Start with who the Watchers were and with Azazel, the one blamed for metalwork, cosmetics and war. The angelic hierarchies in these texts are more crowded than the canonical ones, and the connection between Enoch and the Nephilim is where the giants enter the story. A general reading of the book shows how its five sections were assembled.

Enoch himself does not stay human. His transformation into Metatron is one of the strangest passages in Jewish literature. The visionary sections are stranger still: the Animal Apocalypse retells the history of Israel with livestock, the ten weeks divides time into fixed periods, and the Similitudes introduce a Son of Man before the gospels do. The 364-day calendar explains why Qumran kept different feasts from Jerusalem.

All three books of Enoch, translated and annotated, are collected in The Books of Enoch: Master Collection.