The Watchers: Mount Hermon, the Book of Enoch and the Fallen Angels

Genesis 6 gives the “sons of God” four verses. The Book of Enoch gives them names, a headcount, a landing spot, a list of crimes and a sentence. Those beings are the Watchers, and once you’ve read about them, it’s hard to read Jude, 2 Peter or the Gospel demon encounters the same way again. On Nephilim Death Squad, Sean Griffin of Kingdom in Context walked the Raven and TopLobsta through the Watcher story as he reads it, and he makes a claim you won’t hear in most churches: Satan is the one rebel who wasn’t locked up.

Most of this article follows “Fallen Angels, UFOs & Biblical Secrets the Church Won’t Teach w/ Kingdom in Context” (above). The interpretations are Sean’s unless noted. For the Genesis 6 basics, start with Who Were the Nephilim?

Who were the Watchers?

“Watcher” (Aramaic ir, Greek egrēgoroi) is a title for heavenly beings. The Bible itself uses it in Daniel 4, where “a watcher and an holy one came down from heaven” (Daniel 4:13, KJV). Sean pointed out that ancient writers called these beings “holy ones” or “watchers,” and that the Hebrews did not see evil as an impersonal force. They saw it as persons: real, rebellious spiritual beings.

In 1 Enoch 6–7, two hundred Watchers led by Semjaza (Sean pronounced it “Samyaza”) bind themselves by an oath, come down, and each takes a wife. According to 1 Enoch 6, they descended on Mount Hermon in the days of Jared, which is why Hermon sits at the center of so much Nephilim lore. Their children are the giants. Sean read chapter 7 on air and stressed how physical it is: actual angels showed up and took actual women. It wasn’t, in his words, “some unseen mystical” ritual.

Chapter 8 adds the other crime: teaching. The Watchers passed on forbidden knowledge about the sun, the moon, the clouds and astrology, along with weapons and sorcery. Sean said the rest of Enoch describes the rebel angels teaching people to worship their sons, the Nephilim, as gods, and he called that “the beginning of idolatry.”

Azazel vs. Semjaza: two different judgments

This is the heart of Sean’s case. In 1 Enoch 9–10, he said, you get “a separation of judgment.” Semjaza and his associates, the ones who took wives, are judged as one group. Azazel is addressed separately, charged with different sins, and not counted among the ones who took wives.

Sean ties this to Leviticus 16. On the Day of Atonement, the high priest puts Israel’s sins on a goat “for Azazel” (the KJV says “scapegoat”) and sends it into the wilderness. To Sean, that shows Israel already knew a specific rebel angel who lived out in the waste places. His conclusion: Azazel is Satan, “the antagonist to whom we must resist,” and that’s why he was “not sent away to Tartarus like the rest of them.” He fits that with Job 1–2, where Satan is “going to and fro in the earth” and can still appear before God.

That identification is Sean’s view. Plenty of Enoch readers treat Azazel and Satan as different figures. But it explains a lot about how he reads the rest of the Bible.

Tartarus: “basement two”

Jude 6 says the angels “which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation” are reserved “in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.” Second Peter 2:4 says God cast the angels that sinned “down to hell,” and the Greek verb there is built on Tartarus. Sean’s picture of it: if we’re on the ground floor, Sheol is the basement and Tartarus is “basement two.” He said the ancients described Tartarus as being as far below Sheol as Sheol is below the surface. (He thought Josephus was one of those sources but said he could be wrong.)

Sean also noted what he sees as the timeline in 1 Enoch 10. The sentence is announced right away, but it isn’t carried out until the Watchers have watched their sons destroy each other. He also pointed to 1 Enoch 15. The Watchers ask Enoch to take their petition to God, and the answer comes back: no. They were made for heaven and “defiled” themselves, so they can’t go home. He added that in Enoch, even the archangel Michael trembles at how severe the judgment is.

What happened to the Nephilim spirits?

If Enoch is right, the giants were more than oversized men. Sean pointed out that Enoch calls them spirits, specifically unclean spirits. When their bodies died, those spirits stayed on earth. Then he brought in the Book of Jubilees, chapter 10. After the flood, Noah complains that the spirits are leading his grandchildren astray. According to Jubilees, nine-tenths of them are bound and one-tenth are left under the control of the chief of the spirits (called Mastema there, which Sean reads as another name for Satan).

That, Sean says, is “the reality we live in today”: Satan plus a remnant of unclean spirits working to deceive people. It also explains, in his view, why after the flood you mostly hear about unclean spirits, the idols of the nations, and Satan, and no longer about individual Watchers. One of the hosts suggested that people who claim contact with named “angels” in occult practice are more likely dealing with those disembodied spirits. Sean agreed that fits if “we take Enoch seriously,” and added that the spirits would know the Watchers’ names, since the Watchers were their fathers.

Is the Book of Enoch scripture?

The hosts asked the obvious question. Sean’s answer covered a lot of history. Enoch fragments turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Ethiopian church never dropped the book, and its full text has survived in Ge’ez. Early Christian writers like Tertullian argued for it. And Sean said an 8th-century Byzantine chronicler, George Syncellus, quoted Enoch and Jubilees while writing his world history. His point: Enoch didn’t just “pop up in 1947.” It has come back into view again and again. He believes 1 Enoch opens by saying it was written for a far-off generation going through tribulation, so it can recognize the deception when it comes.

The New Testament quotes Enoch directly. On Straight Bible (NDS’s sister show), Matt Hepner spent a whole episode on Jude 14–15: “Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, to execute judgment upon all.” Matt is more cautious about Enoch as a whole. He pointed out that the Bible itself says very little about Enoch (Genesis 5:21–24 and Hebrews 11:5) and focused on the man who “walked with God, and he was not; for God took him.” Watch the Prophecy of Enoch episode for his breakdown.

Why the Watchers still matter to NDS

The Watchers are where the show’s name, and a lot of its designs, come from: two hundred beings who walked out on heaven, came down on a mountain, and left behind giants and unclean spirits. Sean’s last point was about deception. If you know where the rebel angels and the unclean spirits came from, he argued, you’re much harder to fool when something shows up claiming to be your ancient benefactor. That’s the thread NDS keeps pulling on in the UFO and “disclosure” conversation. For the flip side, where a guest pushes back hard on the idea of a spirit realm, read Biblically Accurate Angels and the “Aliens Are Demons” Debate.

Wear the lore

The Watchers’ mountain gets a travel-poster tribute in Visit Mt. Hermon (Visit Mt. Hermon T-Shirt), and the rebellion itself is the subject of The Fall, woodcut angels dropping out of the light, based on Gustave Doré. See every Nephilim design in NDS Bible & End Times.

Episodes cited

Leave a comment