1Yahweh’s word that came to Joel, the son of Pethuel.
2Hear this, you elders,
and listen, all you inhabitants of the land!
Has this ever happened in your days,
or in the days of your fathers?
3Tell your children about it,
and have your children tell their children,
and their children, another generation.
4What the swarming locust has left, the great locust has eaten.
What the great locust has left, the grasshopper has eaten.
What the grasshopper has left, the caterpillar has eaten.
5Wake up, you drunkards, and weep!
Wail, all you drinkers of wine, because of the sweet wine,
for it is cut off from your mouth.
6For a nation has come up on my land, strong, and without number.
His teeth are the teeth of a lion,
and he has the fangs of a lioness.
7He has laid my vine waste,
and stripped my fig tree.
He has stripped its bark, and thrown it away.
Its branches are made white.
8Mourn like a virgin dressed in sackcloth
for the husband of her youth!
9The meal offering and the drink offering are cut off from Yahweh’s house.
The priests, Yahweh’s ministers, mourn.
10The field is laid waste.
The land mourns, for the grain is destroyed,
The new wine has dried up,
and the oil languishes.
11Be confounded, you farmers!
Wail, you vineyard keepers,
for the wheat and for the barley;
for the harvest of the field has perished.
12The vine has dried up, and the fig tree withered—
the pomegranate tree, the palm tree also, and the apple tree,
even all of the trees of the field are withered;
for joy has withered away from the sons of men.
13Put on sackcloth and mourn, you priests!
Wail, you ministers of the altar.
Come, lie all night in sackcloth, you ministers of my God,
for the meal offering and the drink offering are withheld from your God’s house.
14Sanctify a fast.
Call a solemn assembly.
Gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land to the house of Yahweh, your God,
and cry to Yahweh.
15Alas for the day!
For the day of Yahweh is at hand,
and it will come as destruction from the Almighty.
16Isn’t the food cut off before our eyes,
joy and gladness from the house of our God?
17The seeds rot under their clods.
The granaries are laid desolate.
The barns are broken down, for the grain has withered.
18How the animals groan!
The herds of livestock are perplexed, because they have no pasture.
Yes, the flocks of sheep are made desolate.
19Yahweh, I cry to you,
for the fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness,
and the flame has burned all the trees of the field.
20Yes, the animals of the field pant to you,
for the water brooks have dried up,
and the fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness.
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.