Marks of the Chosen in the Book of Enoch and Dead Sea Scrolls

In chapter 38 of the Book of Enoch, there is a description of what happens when the righteous are finally revealed.

The kings and the powerful of the earth, it says, will no longer be exalted, and then it gives the reason, and the reason is strange.

They shall not be able to behold the face of the holy, for the Lord of spirits has caused His light to appear on the face of the holy, righteous, and elect.

His light on their faces. That is the first of three marks that these texts say the chosen carry.

One is on the face, one is on the forehead, and one is somewhere no one can see at all.

And the first thing to understand about the mark on the face is this.

In every account of it, the person who carries it does not know it is there.

Other people see it, they do not. So yes, these texts do describe marks on the chosen, but they are not what most people imagine when they hear that.

And the strangest part of the story is that 2,000 years ago, someone did try to find the chosen by the marks on their bodies, moles, birthmarks, the length of their fingers.

And we know this because their scrolls were found in the same caves as the Book of Enoch.

One of those scrolls was written in a code.

Another is known today by a title taken from its own words, The Elect of God.

We will open both of them, and then we will look at the three places your own Bible actually puts the marks and at the one counterfeit mark that is placed deliberately in exactly the same spot as one of them.

The Book of Enoch is not in the Bible you own.

It was left off the approved list in the fourth century.

When the Dead Sea Scrolls came out of the caves at Qumran, roughly 11 separate copies of it came with them, more than were found of most books that stayed in your Bible.

If forbidden biblical history is something you keep coming back to, subscribe.

Every week, we go through what was left out of scripture.

In cave four at Qumran, among the thousands of fragments found there, scholars identified a small Aramaic text that describes the birth of a child.

It is broken and parts of every line are missing.

It is cataloged today as 4Q534. Cave four was found in 1952, and it turned out to hold the largest collection of fragments of any cave at Qumran, tens of thousands of pieces, some no bigger than a fingernail.

This one was published in 1964 by the French scholar Jean Starcky, and he gave it a title that made headlines, an Aramaic messianic text.

And in the middle of it, the child is called by a title in Aramaic, Bechir Elaha, the Elect of God.

What makes this text so unusual is what it describes before it gives him that title.

It describes his body. The surviving lines speak of marks on his hand, of the color of his hair, of small marks like lentils on his body, and birthmarks on his thigh.

The translations differ because the fragment is damaged, but the subject is not in doubt.

These are physical signs listed one after another as if they could be checked, and then the text describes what this child will become.

In his youth, it says, "He will be like a man who knows nothing until the time when he comes to know the three books.

Then wisdom will come to him. Visions will come to him while he is on his knees.

He will reveal mysteries. His wisdom will reach all peoples because he is the elect of God."

Who is he? The text never names him. Some scholars have read it as a messianic figure, but many now think it is about Noah, and the reason why takes us straight back to the Book of Enoch.

Near the end of the Book of Enoch in chapter 106, there is the story of Noah's birth, and it is one of the strangest passages in the whole book.

Lamech, Noah's father, looks at his newborn son, and he is terrified.

The child's body is white as snow and red as a blooming rose.

The hair of his head is white as wool, and when the baby opens his eyes, the text says, "He lights up the whole house like the sun."

And Lamech runs to his father, Methuselah, and says, "I have begotten a strange son.

He is not like a man. He resembles the children of the angels of heaven.

I fear that in his days a wonder will be wrought on the earth."

Do you see what Lamech is afraid of? He is living in the generation of the Watchers, the angels who came down and fathered giants with human women.

And when he sees marks on his son that are not like other children, his first thought is that the child must be one of theirs.

So Methuselah travels to the ends of the earth to ask Enoch, and Enoch's answer is the key to this entire subject.

"This child," he says, "is truly your son.

He will be called Noah, and he and his sons will be saved when the flood comes."

The marks were real, but the man who saw them read them completely wrong.

He looked at the signs on his son's body and saw a threat when in fact he was looking at the one person on Earth who would be saved.

Hold on to that because it is the first lesson these texts teach about marks.

What is visible on a body can be misread, even by the person closest to it, and the scroll we are about to open shows what happens when people try to read the chosen that way anyway.

In the same cave, there was another scroll.

It is cataloged as 4Q186, and when scholars first looked at it, they could not read it at all.

It was written backwards, right to left as Hebrew is written, but with the letters of each word reversed.

And it mixed alphabets, ordinary Hebrew letters, the old Paleo-Hebrew script that had not been in common use for centuries, and Greek letters too.

Someone had gone to real trouble to make sure that a casual reader could not understand it.

When it was finally decoded, it turned out to be a list of human bodies.

One passage describes a man whose thighs are long and lean, whose toes are thin and long, and then it gives a verdict.

His spirit, it says, has six parts in the house of light and three parts in the pit of darkness.

Another passage describes a man with thick fingers, hairy thighs, short toes, and his spirit, it says, has eight parts in the house of darkness and one part in the house of light.

So here in the Dead Sea Scrolls is a real attempt to do exactly what the title of this video promises, to spot the chosen by their marks.

A portion of light and a portion of darkness read off the shape of a person's body.

Scholars think it may have been connected to deciding who could be trusted or admitted into the community, though no one can be sure.

But here is what I want you to notice. That scroll is not in the Book of Enoch.

It is not in your Bible. And the scriptures that are including the Book of Enoch go in a completely different direction.

When the prophet Samuel goes to anoint the next king of Israel, he looks at Jesse's eldest son, tall and impressive, and thinks, surely this is the one.

And God says to him, do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature.

For the Lord sees not as man sees. Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.

The marks your Bible describes are not on the thighs or the fingers.

There are three of them, and they are in three very particular places.

The oldest of the three is in the ninth chapter of Ezekiel.

The prophet sees Jerusalem just before its destruction, and six men come, each with a weapon in his hand, and with them is a seventh dressed in linen with a writing case at his side.

And God says to the man in linen, go through the city, through Jerusalem, and put a mark on the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in it.

The Hebrew word for that mark is tav. It is the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

And in the ancient script that was used in Ezekiel's time, the letter tav was written as a simple cross, an X, or a plus sign.