1The burden of Babylon, which Isaiah the son of Amoz saw.
2Set up a banner on the bare mountain! Lift up your voice to them! Wave your hand, that they may go into the gates of the nobles. 3I have commanded my consecrated ones; yes, I have called my mighty men for my anger, even my proudly exulting ones. 4The noise of a multitude is in the mountains, as of a great people; the noise of an uproar of the kingdoms of the nations gathered together! Yahweh of Armies is mustering the army for the battle. 5They come from a far country, from the uttermost part of heaven, even Yahweh, and the weapons of his indignation, to destroy the whole land.
6Wail, for Yahweh’s day is at hand! It will come as destruction from the Almighty. 7Therefore all hands will be feeble, and everyone’s heart will melt. 8They will be dismayed. Pangs and sorrows will seize them. They will be in pain like a woman in labor. They will look in amazement one at another. Their faces will be faces of flame. 9Behold, the day of Yahweh comes, cruel, with wrath and fierce anger; to make the land a desolation, and to destroy its sinners out of it. 10For the stars of the sky and its constellations will not give their light. The sun will be darkened in its going out, and the moon will not cause its light to shine. 11I will punish the world for their evil, and the wicked for their iniquity. I will cause the arrogance of the proud to cease, and will humble the arrogance of the terrible. 12I will make people more rare than fine gold, even a person than the pure gold of Ophir. 13Therefore I will make the heavens tremble, and the earth will be shaken out of its place in Yahweh of Armies’ wrath, and in the day of his fierce anger. 14It will happen that like a hunted gazelle and like sheep that no one gathers, they will each turn to their own people, and will each flee to their own land. 15Everyone who is found will be thrust through. Everyone who is captured will fall by the sword. 16Their infants also will be dashed in pieces before their eyes. Their houses will be ransacked, and their wives raped.
17Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them, who will not value silver, and as for gold, they will not delight in it. 18Their bows will dash the young men in pieces; and they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb. Their eyes will not spare children. 19Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldeans’ pride, will be like when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. 20It will never be inhabited, neither will it be lived in from generation to generation. The Arabian will not pitch a tent there, neither will shepherds make their flocks lie down there. 21But wild animals of the desert will lie there, and their houses will be full of jackals. Ostriches will dwell there, and wild goats will frolic there. 22Hyenas will cry in their fortresses, and jackals in the pleasant palaces. Her time is near to come, and her days will not be prolonged.
Jude’s quotation comes from the non-canonical book known as “The Book of Enoch,” a book that was compiled over a two-hundred-year period, completed immediately before the birth of Jesus. Although Jude quotes from it, the Book of Enoch is not considered canonical by a large majority of Christianity. Some traditions use it, though, and the most complete copy of the book was preserved in the Ge’ez language of the Ethiopian Church. Although it is supposedly the visions of Noah’s great-grandfather, Enoch was likely composed between 350 B.C. and the time of Christ. It purports to be Enoch’s prophetic visions concerning the apocalypse. Because of Enoch’s use of the phrase “Son of Man,” as well as its similarity to the book of Daniel, the work has been of great interest to scholars studying the Bible’s use of the term.
The oldest known copies of Enoch were found at Qumran’s cave four and date to between 30 B.C. and A.D. 20. Epigraphic studies on the Qumran Enoch have found that they were written by the same scribe as several other Dead Sea Scrolls. These fragments of Enoch, written in Aramaic, cover about a fifth of the book.
The exact citation found in Jude is from Enoch 1:9. Enoch was a highly respected book by many early Christians and Jews of the era, including the community at Qumran, even though Jude does not call the book Scripture. Jude’s use of non-canonical writing in verses 14-15 does not mean that his writing is false or that he is mistaken, similar to the use of the Assumption of Moses in Jude 9. Rather, Jude was writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and was recounting this event as true; consequently, we can be certain that it did happen. In fact, the theme of God destroying the ungodly is a common theme in the Bible (Ps 78:49; Isa 13:11; Joel 1-2). The judgment of which Enoch prophesied is yet to be fulfilled and relates to the second coming of Christ after the tribulation era (2 Thess 1:7-10). Although the prophecy in Jude does not reveal any new information, it is a good summary of the certainty of the coming universal judgment by God.
The passage shows the man Jude’s great awareness of the culture in which he lived and the audience to whom he wrote. It also shows that when the Bible quotes other sources or speaks of events, it does so with accuracy and truth. A non-biblical source may contain truth, even if it is not inspired. Jude is not the only biblical author to quote or refer to non-biblical texts. For example, Paul quoted the Greek philosophers Cleanthes and Aratus in Acts 17:28, Menander in 1 Corinthians 15:33, and Epimenides in Titus 1:12.
Bibliography. Baez-Camargo, Gonzalo, Archaeological Commentary on the Bible (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1984), 260-61; Boccaccini, Gabriele, ed., Enoch and the Messiah Son of Man: Revisiting the Book of Parables (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 2007); Martinez, Florentini Garcia, Qumran and the Apocalyptic: Studies on the Aramaic Texts from Qumran (Leiden: Brill, 1992 ), 2; Nickelsburg, W.E., “The Dead Sea Scrolls: Dead Sea Scrolls Spotlight: The Book of Enoch,” Biblical Archaeology Review 33 (2007): 64-65, accessed April 12, 2010, http://members.bib-arch.org/publication.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=33&Issue=5&ArticleID=14.