Book of Jasher

Introduction

There are books that shape civilizations, and then there are books that haunt them. The volume you are holding belongs to the second category — a text so ancient, so elusive, and so deeply woven into the fabric of biblical tradition that its very absence from the canonical scriptures has made it more compelling than many texts that were included. For centuries, scholars, theologians, mystics, and curious readers have searched for it, argued over it, dismissed it, and returned to it with renewed fascination. It is a book that the Bible itself cites by name, yet which vanished from common knowledge for so long that many people assumed it was purely mythological — a phantom reference to a text that never truly existed.

To understand why this ancient record matters, you have to first appreciate the world from which it emerged. The ancient Near East was not a world of silent, solitary reading. It was a world of oral tradition, of stories passed from generation to generation around fires and in great halls, of scribes laboring by lamplight to preserve on papyrus and parchment the accumulated wisdom and history of their people. In such a world, the boundary between history and legend was not a sharp line but a gradual gradient, and the most important stories were those that carried moral and spiritual weight alongside historical memory. The ancient Hebrews were no different from other peoples of their time in this regard — they preserved their heritage through narrative, and those narratives carried layers of meaning that purely factual accounts could never achieve.

What makes this particular text so extraordinary is precisely its relationship to the canonical Bible. The Hebrew scriptures do not merely hint at other records; in at least two famous passages, they cite this work directly by name as an authoritative source. In the book of Joshua, after describing the miraculous moment when the sun stood still over Gibeon, the author writes: 'Is this not written in the Book of Jasher?' In the second book of Samuel, when David laments the deaths of Saul and Jonathan, the text again directs readers to consult this same source. These are not casual references. They are the kinds of citations that ancient authors made when they wanted their readers to know that the account being described was documented, verifiable, and part of a larger tradition. The biblical authors assumed their audience knew exactly what they were talking about — which tells us that at the time of writing, this was a well-known and respected document.

And then it disappeared. Or rather, it receded. The precise history of how and why certain texts fell out of common circulation while others were preserved and canonized is one of the great ongoing debates of biblical scholarship. The process of canonization was neither swift nor simple; it unfolded over centuries, through councils and controversies, through the destruction of temples and the scattering of peoples, through the translation of texts into new languages and the inevitable losses that accompany such transitions. In this long and complicated process, some documents were deliberately set aside, others were simply forgotten, and still others survived in fragments or in traditions that preserved their essence even when the original texts were lost.

The text presented in this volume has its own complicated history of rediscovery, translation, and controversy. It first re-entered the awareness of the Western world in a significant way during the early modern period, when a Hebrew manuscript purporting to be the long-lost ancient record was published and translated. This reappearance was greeted with tremendous excitement by some and deep skepticism by others — a debate that has never entirely been resolved and that continues to animate scholarly discussion to this day. Some researchers have argued that the published text is a medieval composition that borrowed its name and some of its content from genuine ancient sources. Others have contended that it preserves authentic traditions of great antiquity, even if the manuscript itself passed through many hands and underwent revisions across the centuries. Still others take a middle position, suggesting that the text is a complex layering of genuine ancient material and later additions, a palimpsest of traditions that cannot be easily dated or attributed.

What is remarkable is that none of these debates ultimately diminish the text's value or its fascination. Even if every skeptical argument about its origins were correct, the document would remain an extraordinary window into the way ancient peoples understood their own history, the stories they told about their patriarchs and matriarchs, the legends they preserved about the dawn of human civilization, and the theological convictions that shaped their understanding of the relationship between humanity and the divine. And if even a portion of the more optimistic assessments of its antiquity are correct, then what we have here is something even more precious: a genuine echo of voices that spoke before the great canonical texts were assembled, a record of traditions that the compilers of the Bible knew and referenced but ultimately chose not to include in their final collection.

Reading this text for the first time is an experience unlike almost any other in religious literature. You will encounter familiar figures — Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses — but you will encounter them in ways that feel simultaneously familiar and startlingly new. The canonical Bible, for all its power and beauty, is often spare in its narrative detail. It gives us the essential arc of a story and trusts the reader to fill in the gaps. This ancient record takes a different approach. It lingers. It elaborates. It gives names to characters who remain anonymous in the Bible, provides motivations for actions that the canonical text leaves unexplained, and fills in the long stretches of time between major events with stories and episodes that feel as though they were drawn from a living tradition of storytelling rather than invented from whole cloth.

Consider, for example, the story of Abraham. In Genesis, we meet him as a fully formed adult, already receiving the divine call to leave his homeland. His childhood, his family background, his early spiritual development — all of this is passed over in near-total silence. In this expanded account, however, we are given a rich and detailed portrait of Abraham's early life: his birth, his recognition of the divine even as a young child, his rejection of the idolatry that surrounded him, his confrontations with the powerful figures of his time, and the long journey of faith and discovery that preceded the famous covenant. These are not idle embellishments. They are the kinds of stories that communities tell about their founding figures — stories that explain not just what happened, but why it mattered, what it cost, and what it meant.

The same expansive treatment is given to figures like Enoch, whose brief appearance in Genesis — just a few tantalizing verses — inspired centuries of speculation and apocryphal elaboration. Here, Enoch is given a full narrative presence, a life and a teaching ministry and a mysterious departure from the world that carries all the weight of legend. Noah's story, too, is expanded and deepened, the pre-flood world rendered in vivid and sometimes disturbing detail that helps the reader understand why the catastrophe that followed was understood as both judgment and renewal. The tower of Babel episode, which Genesis dispatches in a handful of verses, becomes here a complex political and spiritual drama involving ambition, hubris, and the fragmentation of a unified human community.

None of this is accidental. The traditions preserved in this text reflect a deeply theological understanding of history — one in which every event, no matter how seemingly mundane, is part of a larger pattern of divine purpose and human response. The characters who populate these pages are not merely historical figures or legendary heroes; they are types, exemplars, embodiments of virtues and vices that the text's original audience was meant to recognize and either emulate or avoid. Reading with this understanding transforms the experience of the text. What might initially seem like simple storytelling reveals itself as something more sophisticated: a sustained meditation on the nature of faithfulness, the consequences of pride, the endurance of covenant, and the mysterious ways in which the divine works through human history.

Legends, Lost Traditions, and the Edges of Scripture

To appreciate fully what you are about to read, it helps to understand something about the broader landscape of ancient Jewish literature in which this text exists. The canonical Hebrew Bible, as we know it today, represents the survivors of a much larger and richer literary tradition. Around and beneath and alongside the texts that made it into the final canon, there existed an enormous body of writing — histories, hymns, wisdom literature, apocalypses, commentaries, expansions, and retellings — that preserved traditions and perspectives that the canonization process ultimately set aside. Scholars refer to this broader body of material as the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and it represents one of the most fascinating and underexplored territories in all of religious studies.

The Apocrypha — from the Greek word meaning 'hidden things' — includes texts that were included in some versions of the Bible but excluded from others, texts that existed in the borderlands of canonical authority for centuries before different religious communities made their final determinations about what belonged in scripture and what did not. The Pseudepigrapha — literally 'falsely attributed writings' — is an even larger and more diverse collection, including texts attributed to biblical figures like Enoch, Abraham, Moses, and Solomon that were clearly composed well after those figures' lifetimes but that claimed their authority and drew on their legendary status. The text in this volume occupies a unique position in relation to both of these categories, being neither straightforwardly apocryphal in the traditional sense nor simply pseudepigraphical, but rather a complex document that draws on genuine ancient traditions while presenting them in a form that bears the marks of a long and complicated transmission history.

What is particularly striking about the world of ancient Jewish literature is how much of it was concerned with exactly the kind of expansion and elaboration that this text exemplifies. The rabbinical tradition developed an entire genre of interpretive literature called Midrash, which took biblical texts as starting points for creative and theologically sophisticated exploration. The great Midrashic collections — the Midrash Rabbah, the Tanhuma, the Pirke De-Rabbi Eliezer, and many others — are filled with stories and interpretations that parallel and sometimes overlap with the material found in this ancient record. This is not coincidence. It reflects the existence of a deep pool of shared tradition from which different communities and different literary projects drew at different times and for different purposes.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in the mid-twentieth century in the caves above Qumran, provided dramatic confirmation that the canonical Bible was always surrounded by a rich ecosystem of related texts and traditions. Among the scrolls were previously unknown works, expanded versions of canonical books, and community documents that revealed the extraordinary diversity of Jewish religious life and thought in the centuries around the turn of the common era. The scrolls did not include the specific text presented in this volume, but they confirmed beyond any serious doubt that ancient Jewish communities did indeed preserve and use a wide variety of texts beyond those that eventually made it into the canon — and that many of those texts contained exactly the kind of expansive legendary material that characterizes the work you are now reading.

Understanding this context changes how we approach questions of authenticity and authority. In the modern world, we tend to think of authenticity in fairly narrow terms: either a text is what it claims to be, or it is a forgery. But this binary is too blunt an instrument for dealing with ancient literature. Many of the most important texts of the ancient world were composite documents, assembled over long periods of time from multiple sources, revised and expanded by successive generations of scribes and editors, and attributed to authoritative figures of the past as a way of claiming legitimacy for traditions that the community considered genuinely ancient and genuinely important. By these standards, a text that preserves authentic ancient traditions, even if it was compiled and edited in a later period, is not a forgery but something more interesting and more complex: a living document, a tradition in motion, a record of how a community's understanding of its own history evolved and deepened over time.

The legends and traditions contained in this volume did not spring from nowhere. Many of them have clear parallels in other ancient Near Eastern literature — in Babylonian and Sumerian texts that predate the Hebrew scriptures, in Egyptian religious literature, in the mythological traditions of neighboring cultures. This is not a sign of inauthenticity; it is, on the contrary, evidence of genuine antiquity. The ancient world was not a collection of hermetically sealed cultures. Ideas, stories, and traditions flowed across borders and between peoples, were adapted and transformed to fit new theological frameworks, and emerged in new forms that bore the marks of both their origin and their destination. The presence of these parallels and echoes in the text before you is one of the strongest arguments for the antiquity of the traditions it preserves, even if the form in which we have them today reflects later editing and compilation.

There is also the matter of what scholars sometimes call 'the argument from embarrassment' — the observation that texts are unlikely to preserve material that is theologically uncomfortable or politically inconvenient unless that material is genuinely ancient and too well-established to be omitted. This ancient record contains a number of passages and episodes that are difficult to reconcile with later theological orthodoxies, that present familiar figures in morally complex or ambiguous ways, and that preserve cosmological and mythological elements that more conservative religious traditions would have preferred to suppress. The fact that these elements survived in the text is itself a kind of evidence for the antiquity of the traditions involved. Later forgers or embellishers would have been more likely to smooth over these rough edges than to preserve them.

All of this scholarly context is worth keeping in mind as you read, but it should not be allowed to overwhelm the reading experience itself. The text before you is not primarily a puzzle to be solved or a problem to be debated; it is a story to be experienced. And it is, by any measure, a remarkable story — rich, strange, morally serious, and filled with moments of genuine beauty and power. The questions of origin and authenticity are fascinating, and they matter for how we understand the text's place in the larger history of religion and literature. But they are secondary to the primary encounter with the text itself, which rewards attentive reading with insights and pleasures that no amount of scholarly apparatus can fully prepare you for.

How to Read an Ancient Record

Every text requires a reader, and every ancient text requires a reader who is willing to make certain adjustments — to slow down, to resist the urge to impose modern assumptions, and to enter as fully as possible into the world that the text itself creates. This is especially true of a document like the one you are about to encounter, which comes from a world so different from our own that some of its basic assumptions and conventions can seem alien at first glance. But the strangeness is part of the richness, and readers who persevere through the initial unfamiliarity typically find themselves drawn into a narrative world that, for all its antiquity, speaks to recognizably human concerns and experiences.

One of the first things to notice is the text's relationship to time. Ancient historical and legendary literature does not experience time the way modern readers do. Events that we might expect to be narrated quickly are dwelt upon at length; events that seem enormously significant are sometimes dispatched in a sentence or two. Genealogies that modern readers tend to skim — those long lists of begettings and lifespans — were understood by ancient readers as carrying important theological and historical information, establishing lines of descent, marking the passage of generations, and situating individual stories within the larger sweep of human history from creation to the present. Reading these sections with patience rather than impatience opens up dimensions of the text that would otherwise be missed.

The text's treatment of the supernatural is another area where modern readers may need to recalibrate their expectations. In the world this document describes, the boundary between the natural and the supernatural is permeable in ways that our post-Enlightenment sensibility tends to find uncomfortable. Angels appear and interact with human beings. Divine interventions alter the course of events in ways that are presented not as miraculous exceptions but as the normal operation of a world in which the divine is continuously and actively present. Dreams carry prophetic weight. Names have power. The cosmos is understood as a moral order in which human actions have consequences that ripple outward in ways that are sometimes immediate and visible, sometimes delayed and mysterious.

None of this requires the reader to adopt any particular theological position. You do not have to believe in angels or miracles or divine providence to read this text with full engagement and appreciation. What you do need is the willingness to enter into the imaginative world the text creates and to take seriously the assumptions and convictions that animate it. This is the same imaginative generosity we bring to any great literature from the past — to Homer, to Dante, to Shakespeare — and it yields the same rewards: a deepened understanding of human experience, a broadened sense of what it means to be alive in a world that exceeds our comprehension, and a recognition of the common humanity that connects us across the vast distances of time and culture.

It is also worth approaching this text with an awareness of its cumulative structure. Unlike a modern novel, which typically builds toward a single climactic resolution, ancient historical and legendary literature tends to accumulate — to pile story upon story, episode upon episode, in a way that creates meaning through sheer density and repetition as much as through dramatic arc. Themes and patterns that appear early in the text recur in different forms later on. Characters who seem minor at first reappear in unexpected ways. The moral and spiritual lessons that the text is concerned with are not stated once and then left behind; they are returned to again and again, each time with new variations and new depth. Reading with this awareness — watching for the patterns, noticing the echoes, attending to the way earlier episodes illuminate later ones — transforms the experience from a linear journey into something more like a meditation.

The figures you will meet in these pages are, in many cases, people you already know — or think you know. One of the most consistently surprising aspects of reading this ancient record is the way it defamiliarizes the familiar. Characters whose canonical versions have become so well-known as to feel almost like archetypes — Abraham the faithful, Joseph the dreamer, Moses the lawgiver — are here restored to something of their original complexity and unpredictability. They make mistakes. They experience doubt. They are shaped by specific historical circumstances and personal relationships in ways that the spare canonical narratives do not always make visible. This does not diminish them; if anything, it makes them more compelling, more human, more worthy of the attention and reflection that their stories have always demanded.

There is a particular pleasure in reading a text that exists in the shadows of a more famous work — the pleasure of discovery, of seeing familiar things from an unfamiliar angle, of filling in gaps that you may not have realized were there. Readers who come to this volume with a deep familiarity with the canonical Bible will find it a constantly stimulating companion, a source of alternative perspectives and unexpected elaborations that send them back to the original texts with new eyes. Readers who come with less biblical background will find it a rich and self-contained narrative world, demanding but rewarding, strange but strangely moving. And readers who come simply out of curiosity — drawn by the mystery of a lost book, the romance of rediscovery, the appeal of ancient voices speaking across the millennia — will find that their curiosity is amply rewarded.

What you are about to read is, at its heart, a story about origins — the origins of the world, of humanity, of peoples and nations, of faith and covenant and law. It is a story told by people who believed that the past was not merely prologue but the very ground of meaning, that to understand where you came from was to understand who you were and what you were called to be. In an age like ours, which is often uncertain about its own origins and anxious about its own direction, there is something both humbling and clarifying about encountering a tradition that faced the same uncertainties with such narrative confidence and such moral seriousness. The world this text describes is gone beyond recovery. But the questions it wrestles with — about justice and mercy, about human nature and divine purpose, about the meaning of suffering and the possibility of redemption — are as alive today as they have ever been.

Open these pages, then, with the patience that ancient things deserve and the openness that genuine discovery requires. You are about to enter a world that is both very old and, in the ways that matter most, entirely contemporary. The voices that speak here have been silent for a long time. It is time to listen to what they have to say.

The Book of Jasher

Chapter 1

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and God created man in his own image.

And God formed man from the ground, and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul endowed with speech.

And the Lord said, It is not good for man to be alone; I will make him a helper suited to him.

And the Lord caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and while he slept, took away one of his ribs, built flesh upon it, and formed it into a woman, and brought her to Adam. And Adam awoke from his sleep, and behold, a woman was standing before him.

And he said, This is bone of my bones, and she shall be called woman, for she was taken from man. And Adam called her name Eve, for she was the mother of all living.

And God blessed them and called their names Adam and Eve on the day that he created them, and the Lord God said, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.

And the Lord God took Adam and his wife and placed them in the garden of Eden to tend it and keep it, and he commanded them, saying, From every tree of the garden you may eat, but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for on the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.

And when God had blessed and commanded them, he departed from them, and Adam and his wife dwelt in the garden according to the command which the Lord had given them.

And the serpent, which God had created along with them on the earth, came to them to incite them to transgress the command of God.

And the serpent enticed and persuaded the woman to eat from the tree of knowledge, and the woman listened to the voice of the serpent and transgressed the word of God. She took fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and ate, and she took from it and gave also to her husband, and he ate.

And Adam and his wife transgressed the command of God which he had given them, and God knew it, and his anger was kindled against them and he cursed them.

And the Lord God drove them that day from the garden of Eden to till the ground from which they had been taken. They went and dwelt to the east of the garden of Eden, and Adam knew his wife Eve, and she bore him two sons and three daughters.

And she called the name of the firstborn Cain, saying, I have obtained a man from the Lord, and the name of the other she called Abel, for she said, In vanity we came into the earth, and in vanity we shall be taken from it.

And the boys grew up and their father gave them a possession in the land. Cain was a tiller of the ground and Abel a keeper of sheep.

And after the passing of some years, they brought an offering to the Lord. Cain brought from the fruit of the ground, and Abel brought from the firstlings of his flock, from the fat of it, and God turned and looked with favor upon Abel and his offering, and a fire came down from the Lord out of heaven and consumed it.

But toward Cain and his offering the Lord did not turn, and he did not look with favor upon it, for Cain had brought from the inferior fruit of the ground before the Lord. And Cain was jealous of his brother Abel on account of this, and he sought a pretext to slay him.

Some time after, Cain and his brother Abel went out together into the field to do their work. They were both in the field, Cain tilling and plowing his ground and Abel feeding his flock, and the flock strayed onto the part of the ground that Cain had plowed, and this grieved Cain deeply.

And Cain approached his brother Abel in anger and said to him, What is between you and me, that you come to dwell here and bring your flock to feed on my land?

And Abel answered his brother Cain and said, What is between you and me, that you eat the flesh of my flock and clothe yourself with their wool?

Now therefore, take off the wool of my sheep with which you have clothed yourself, and repay me for the flesh and fruit you have taken from them, and when you have done this, I will leave your land as you demand.

And Cain said to his brother Abel, Surely if I slay you this day, who will require your blood from me?

And Abel answered Cain, saying, Surely God, who made us and placed us on the earth, will avenge my cause and require my blood from you if you slay me, for the Lord is the judge and arbiter, and it is he who repays every man according to his evil, and the wicked man according to the wickedness he does upon the earth.

And now, if you slay me here, God knows your secret intentions and will judge you for the evil you have declared you mean to do to me this day.

And when Cain heard the words that his brother Abel had spoken, his anger blazed against Abel for saying these things.

And Cain rose up quickly and took the iron part of his plowing instrument and struck his brother with it suddenly and slew him. Cain spilled the blood of his brother Abel upon the earth, and the blood of Abel streamed out upon the ground before the flock.

And afterward Cain was filled with remorse for having slain his brother. He was deeply grieved, and he wept over him, and it tormented him greatly.

And Cain rose up and dug a hole in the field and laid his brother's body in it and covered it over with earth.

And the Lord knew what Cain had done to his brother, and the Lord appeared to Cain and said to him, Where is your brother Abel, who was with you?

And Cain dissembled and said, I do not know — am I my brother's keeper? And the Lord said to him, What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground where you slew him.

You have slain your brother and lied to me about it, imagining in your heart that I did not see you or know what you had done.

You did this thing — you killed your brother for nothing, simply because he spoke rightly to you. Therefore, cursed are you from the ground that opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand, the ground in which you buried him.

When you till it, it shall no longer give you its strength as it once did. Instead it shall produce thorns and thistles, and you shall wander and move restlessly across the earth until the day of your death.

At that time Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, from the place where he had been, and he went moving and wandering in the land toward the east of Eden, he and all who belonged to him.

And Cain knew his wife in those days, and she conceived and bore a son, and he called his name Enoch, saying that at that time the Lord had begun to give him rest and quiet in the earth.

At that time Cain also began to build a city, and he called the name of the city Enoch, after the name of his son, for in those days the Lord had given him rest upon the earth, and he no longer moved about and wandered as he had done before.

And Irad was born to Enoch, and Irad begat Mechuyael, and Mechuyael begat Methusael.

It was in the hundred and thirtieth year of Adam's life upon the earth that he again knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore a son in his likeness and in his image, and she called his name Seth, saying that God had appointed her another seed in the place of Abel, whom Cain had slain.

And Seth lived one hundred and five years, and he begat a son, and Seth called his son's name Enosh, saying that in that time the sons of men had begun to multiply and to afflict their souls and hearts by transgressing and rebelling against God.

It was in the days of Enosh that the sons of men continued to rebel and transgress against God, increasing the anger of the Lord against them.

The sons of men went and served other gods and forgot the Lord who had created them in the earth, and in those days they made images of brass and iron, wood and stone, and they bowed down and served them.

Every man made his own god and bowed down to it, and the sons of men forsook the Lord all the days of Enosh and his children, and the anger of the Lord was kindled on account of their works and the abominations they committed in the earth.

And the Lord caused the waters of the river Gihon to overwhelm them, and he destroyed and consumed them, laying waste a third part of the earth. Yet even so the sons of men did not turn from their evil ways, and their hands were still stretched out to do evil in the sight of the Lord.

In those days there was neither sowing nor reaping in the earth, and there was no food for the sons of men, and the famine was very great.

The seed they sowed in the ground in those days came up as thorns, thistles, and briers, for from the days of Adam this declaration had stood concerning the earth — the curse of God, which he had pronounced upon the earth on account of the sin Adam sinned before the Lord.

And as men continued to rebel and transgress against God and to corrupt their ways, the earth itself became corrupt.

And Enosh lived ninety years and he begat Cainan.

And Cainan grew up, and when he was forty years old he became wise and had knowledge and skill in all wisdom. He reigned over all the sons of men and led them to wisdom and knowledge, for Cainan was a very wise man with understanding in all wisdom, and with his wisdom he ruled over spirits and demons.

And Cainan knew by his wisdom that God would destroy the sons of men for having sinned upon the earth, and that the Lord would in the latter days bring upon them the waters of the flood.

In those days Cainan wrote upon tablets of stone what was to take place in time to come, and he placed them in his treasuries.

And Cainan reigned over the whole earth, and he turned some of the sons of men back to the service of God.

And when Cainan was seventy years old, he begat three sons and two daughters.

These are the names of the children of Cainan: the firstborn was Mahlallel, the second Enan, and the third Mered, and their sisters were Adah and Zillah — these were the five children born to Cainan.

And Lamech, the son of Methusael, became related to Cainan by marriage, and he took his two daughters for his wives. And Adah conceived and bore a son to Lamech, and she called his name Jabal.

And she conceived again and bore a son, and called his name Jubal. And Zillah, her sister, was barren in those days and had no offspring.

For in those days the sons of men had begun to trespass against God and to transgress the commandment he had given to Adam, to be fruitful and multiply in the earth.

Some of the sons of men caused their wives to drink a draught that would render them barren, so that their figures might be preserved and their beauty not fade.

And when the sons of men caused some of their wives to drink, Zillah drank with them.

And the women who could bear children appeared abominable in the sight of their husbands, like widows while their husbands yet lived, for the men were attached only to the barren ones.

But in the end of days and years, when Zillah had grown old, the Lord opened her womb.

And she conceived and bore a son, and she called his name Tubal Cain, saying that after she had withered away she had obtained him from the Almighty God.

And she conceived again and bore a daughter, and she called her name Naamah, for she said that after she had withered away she had obtained pleasure and delight.

And Lamech was old and advanced in years, and his eyes were so dim that he could not see. His son Tubal Cain would lead him about, and one day Lamech went out into the field with Tubal Cain beside him. As they were walking, Cain the son of Adam came toward them. Lamech was very old and could barely see, and Tubal Cain was still very young.

Tubal Cain told his father to draw his bow, and with his arrows Lamech struck Cain, who was still far off, and killed him, for they took him to be an animal.

The arrows entered Cain's body even at that distance, and he fell to the ground and died.

So the Lord repaid Cain for the evil he had done to his brother Abel, according to the word that the Lord had spoken.

When Cain had died, Lamech and Tubal went to look at the animal they had killed, and they found Cain their grandfather lying dead upon the earth.

Lamech was overcome with grief at what he had done, and in his anguish he struck his hands together and hit his son, killing him as well.

When the wives of Lamech heard what he had done, they sought to kill him.

They hated him from that day forward, because he had slain both Cain and Tubal Cain, and they separated from him and would not listen to him.

Lamech went to his wives and pressed them to hear him out in this matter.

He said to his wives Adah and Zillah, "Hear my voice, O wives of Lamech, attend to my words. You have imagined and said that I slew a man by my wounds and a child by my stripes, as though they had done no wrong to deserve it. But know this: I am old and grey-headed, and my eyes are heavy with age. I did this thing unknowingly."

The wives of Lamech listened to him in this matter and returned to him, following the counsel of their father Adam. Yet they bore him no more children from that time, knowing that God's anger was growing against the sons of men in those days, and that he would destroy them with the waters of the flood because of their wickedness.

Mahalalel the son of Cainan lived sixty-five years and fathered Jared, and Jared lived sixty-two years and fathered Enoch.

Enoch lived sixty-five years and fathered Methuselah. After Methuselah was born, Enoch walked with God, serving the Lord and turning away from the evil ways of men.

Enoch's soul was wholly absorbed in the instruction of the Lord, in knowledge and understanding, and he wisely withdrew from the sons of men and hid himself away from them for many years.

After many years had passed, while he was serving the Lord and praying before him in his house, an angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and Enoch answered, "Here I am."

The angel said, "Rise, go out from your house and from the place where you have been hiding, and appear before the sons of men, so that you may teach them the way they should walk and the work they must do to enter into the ways of God."

Enoch rose up at the word of the Lord and went out from his house, from his place, and from the chamber where he had been concealed. He went to the sons of men and taught them the ways of the Lord, and at that time he gathered the sons of men together and made known to them the instruction of the Lord.

He had it proclaimed in every place where men lived, saying, "Whoever wishes to know the ways of the Lord and to do good works, let him come to Enoch."

All the sons of men assembled to him, for everyone who desired this came to Enoch. Enoch reigned over the sons of men according to the word of the Lord, and they came and bowed before him and listened to his words.

The spirit of God was upon Enoch, and he taught all his people the wisdom of God and his ways. The sons of men served the Lord throughout all the days of Enoch, and they came to hear his wisdom.

All the kings of the sons of men, both early and late, together with their princes and judges, came to Enoch when they heard of his wisdom. They bowed down before him and asked him to reign over them, and he consented.

In all, one hundred and thirty kings and princes assembled, and they made Enoch king over them, and they were all under his power and authority.

Enoch taught them wisdom, knowledge, and the ways of the Lord, and he made peace among them, and there was peace throughout the earth all the days of Enoch.

Enoch reigned over the sons of men two hundred and forty-three years, doing justice and righteousness among all his people and leading them in the ways of the Lord.

These are the descendants of Enoch: Methuselah, Elisha, and Elimelech, three sons, and their sisters were Melca and Nahmah. Methuselah lived eighty-seven years and fathered Lamech.

It was in the fifty-sixth year of Lamech's life that Adam died. He was nine hundred and thirty years old at his death, and his two sons, together with Enoch and Methuselah his son, buried him with great ceremony, as kings are buried, in the cave that God had shown him.

In that place all the sons of men made great mourning and lamentation for Adam, and this is why the custom of mourning has continued among men to this day.

Adam died because he had eaten of the tree of knowledge, he and all his children after him, as the Lord God had spoken.

It was in the year of Adam's death, which was also the two hundred and forty-third year of Enoch's reign, that Enoch resolved to withdraw from the sons of men and to hide himself away once more, as he had done before, in order to serve the Lord.

And Enoch did so, but did not entirely hide himself from them. He kept away from the sons of men for three days and then went to them for one day.

During the three days he spent in his chamber, he prayed to and praised the Lord his God, and on the day when he went out and appeared to his subjects he taught them the ways of the Lord and answered all their questions about God.

He continued in this manner for many years, and afterward he concealed himself for six days and appeared to his people one day in seven, and after that once a month, and then once a year, until all the kings, princes, and sons of men longed to see his face again and to hear his words. But they could not come near him, for all the sons of men were greatly afraid of Enoch. They feared to approach him on account of the godlike awe that rested upon his countenance, and no man could look at him, fearing he might be struck down and die.

All the kings and princes therefore resolved to gather the sons of men together and come to Enoch, thinking that if they all came at once they might speak with him when he came forth among them, and so they did.

The day came when Enoch went out, and they all assembled and came to him. Enoch spoke to them the words of the Lord and taught them wisdom and knowledge, and they bowed down before him and cried, Long live the king! Long live the king!

Some time after this, while the kings and princes and the sons of men were speaking with Enoch and he was teaching them the ways of God, an angel of the Lord called to Enoch from heaven, wishing to bring him up to heaven to reign there over the sons of God, just as he had reigned over the sons of men upon earth.

When Enoch heard this he went and gathered all the inhabitants of the earth together, taught them wisdom and knowledge, and gave them divine instruction. He said to them, I have been called to ascend into heaven, and I do not know the day of my going.

Therefore I will teach you wisdom and knowledge and give you instruction before I leave you, showing you how to live and conduct yourselves upon the earth. And he did so.