Reversing Hermon: The Watchers and the Mission of Jesus

Most Bibles print Genesis 6:1-4 and hurry past it. Four verses about the sons of God, the daughters of men, and the Nephilim, and then the flood arrives and the strangeness gets left behind. I was taught to read it the way most people are taught: whatever those verses mean, they do not mean what they appear to say, and the safest move is not to linger.

Michael Heiser’s argument in Reversing Hermon is that the hurrying past is the mistake, and that the people who wrote the New Testament did not hurry past it at all. They knew a version of this story told at length, in a book called 1 Enoch, and they wrote assuming their readers knew it too.^[1] Once you have read what they read, passages that seemed to float loose in the Gospels and the letters click into a single frame. The work of Jesus, over and over, is being described as the undoing of a rebellion that began on a mountain.

This is a guide to the book and to the ancient text underneath it. I am not going to pretend 1 Enoch is Scripture; Heiser does not claim that either, and the distinction matters enough that I will come back to it. What I want to do is put the story in your hands so that Heiser’s chapters land the way he intends, and flag honestly where his case is strong and where he is reaching.

Contents

• What Is the Sin of the Watchers? (1 Enoch 6–16)
• Who Are the Sons of God in Genesis 6?
• Why Did Jesus Go to Mount Hermon and Caesarea Philippi?
• Who Are the Spirits in Prison in 1 Peter 3?
• Where Reversing Hermon Overreaches
• Why Isn’t the Book of Enoch in the Bible?
• How to Read Reversing Hermon and 1 Enoch Together

What Is the Sin of the Watchers? (1 Enoch 6–16)

Here is the spine of it, from 1 Enoch chapters 6 through 16.^[2]

Two hundred divine beings, called Watchers, look at human women and want them. Their leader, Semihazah, hesitates, afraid he will carry the blame alone, so they bind themselves by a mutual oath before they descend. They come down on the summit of Mount Hermon, and the text says they named the mountain for the curse they swore on it. They take wives. Their offspring are the giants, who consume everything and then turn on the people who made them. A second Watcher, Azazel, teaches humanity metalworking and weapons, cosmetics and sorcery and astrology, knowledge that was not his to hand over. The earth fills with blood, and the cry of it reaches heaven.

Four archangels bring that cry before God, and the sentence comes down in three parts. Noah is warned. Azazel is bound hand and foot and thrown into a pit in the desert, covered in jagged rock and darkness, to stay there until the day of judgment when he is thrown into fire. The rest of the Watchers are bound for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth, until the final judgment is consummated and they too are led to the abyss of fire.

Then the piece that turns the whole thing into a doctrine of demons. God explains to Enoch that when the giants die, the spirits that come out of their bodies do not die with them. Born from spirit and flesh, they become evil spirits on the earth, and they will afflict and oppress and attack humanity until the day of consummation. The demons of the Gospels, in this telling, are the disembodied spirits of the dead giants. That single idea is the engine under most of Heiser’s book.

If you want to read it for yourself before going further, I recorded the whole Book of the Watchers, 1 Enoch 1 through 36 in the old R.H. Charles translation, formatted to listen to straight through. That is the best preparation for everything below.^[3]

Who Are the Sons of God in Genesis 6?

Heiser’s first chapter takes apart the two readings that were built to make Genesis 6 less strange. The Sethite reading says the sons of God were the godly male line of Seth and the daughters of men were Cainite women. The divinized-rulers reading says the sons of God were kings claiming divine status. Both exist to keep the passage human, and both run aground on the same fact: the phrase “sons of God” everywhere else in the Hebrew Bible, in Job especially, means divine beings in God’s council, not pious men and not monarchs.

The move that anchors the book is that Peter and Jude already read it the supernatural way. Jude writes about angels who left their proper dwelling, in the vocabulary of the Watchers, and a few lines later quotes 1 Enoch by name. Second Peter describes angels who sinned and were cast into chains of gloomy darkness, which is the sentence of 1 Enoch 10 almost word for word.^[4] Heiser is not importing an exotic reading. He is recovering the one the apostles held, and asking why the later church talked itself out of it.

I find this chapter hard to argue with, and I have tried. The lexical case on “sons of God” is solid, and the fact that two New Testament writers assume the supernatural reading is not the kind of thing a tidy Sethite theory absorbs easily.

Why Did Jesus Go to Mount Hermon and Caesarea Philippi?

The chapter the title points at is the one about Jesus’s ministry, and it is the most persuasive thing in the book. The base of Mount Hermon forms the northern edge of Bashan, and Bashan in the Old Testament is dread country: the land of the Rephaim and the other giant clans, of Og and his iron bed, a region tied to the dead and the underworld.^[5] Psalm 68 has a mountain of Bashan looking with envy at the mountain God chose for his dwelling, and Heiser, following scholars like J.J.M. Roberts^[6] and John Goldingay,^[7] reads that as Hermon glaring at Zion.

So when Jesus takes his disciples to Caesarea Philippi, at the foot of Hermon, beside a cave the ancients called the gates of Hades and a shrine to Pan, and says he will build his church and the gates of hell will not prevail, Heiser reads it as a declaration of war spoken on the enemy’s doorstep. Gates are defensive. A church that assaults gates is on offense. Jesus walks to the headquarters of the rebellion that started with the oath on this mountain and announces he is coming for it. The Transfiguration follows almost immediately, on a high mountain, and Heiser thinks the most natural candidate is Hermon itself, glory displayed on the peak of the curse.

The geography is strong and the “gates of hell” reading is the best I have seen. The claim that the Transfiguration happened on Hermon is an inference and not a certainty, since the text only says a high mountain and tradition has long favored Tabor. I mark that one as a reasonable guess rather than a settled fact, which is how Heiser presents it too.

Who Are the Spirits in Prison in 1 Peter 3?

The chapter on 1 Peter 3:18-22 is the other one I would call strong. Peter writes that Christ, made alive in the spirit, went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison who were disobedient in the days of Noah. The old debate is over who those spirits are, and Heiser makes the case that they are the imprisoned Watchers: the word Peter uses points to nonhuman spirits, the imprisonment language matches 1 Enoch and the Tartarus of 2 Peter, and the days of Noah seal the connection to Genesis 6.

The key that unlocks it is a piece of 1 Enoch most readers skip. Enoch himself is sent to the Watchers to announce their sentence. He does not go to rescue them. He goes to tell condemned prisoners that the verdict stands. Peter is reading the risen Christ against that template. The proclamation to the spirits in prison is not a second chance offered to fallen angels; it is Christ doing what Enoch did, announcing a victory over the powers bound since Genesis 6. That is why the early church treated baptism as an act of warfare, with the convert renouncing Satan and his angels out loud. The link between 1 Peter, Genesis 6, and 1 Enoch is not Heiser’s private theory; it is widely recognized, and it is one of the most defensible chapters in the book.^[8]

Where Reversing Hermon Overreaches

Not every chapter carries equal weight, and the honest thing is to say which are which.

The reading of Revelation 12 as a dated sky-sign announcing Messiah’s birth, tied to a specific configuration in September of 3 BC, is the most speculative stretch in the book. The underlying theme, that Messiah’s arrival begins the reversal of the Watchers, is well grounded. The astronomical dating is not, and I would hold it loosely.^[9]

Heiser is on much firmer ground a few pages later, where Revelation 9 is read as the eschatological release of the very Watchers imprisoned in 1 Enoch 10. That reading has independent support in the commentary literature and does not depend on any dating scheme.^[10]

The genealogy chapter, following Amy Richter’s work on what she calls the Enochic Watchers template, argues that Matthew’s four women are each tied to the repair of the corruption the Watchers introduced. It is elegant, the scholarship is recent, and it is one proposal among several for why those four women appear. I take it as a compelling theory rather than a proven one.^[11]

The Antichrist chapter is the one to watch, because it is where popular teaching runs past Heiser’s own limits. He states plainly that there is no claim anywhere that the Antichrist is a literal descendant of the Nephilim or an incarnated Watcher. What he argues is narrower: that Second Temple Judaism already had a profile of the great end-times enemy, and that the profile shares roots with the Watchers tradition. Anything louder than that is somebody else talking, not Heiser.

Why Isn’t the Book of Enoch in the Bible?

The obvious objection is that 1 Enoch is not Scripture, so why lean on it. Heiser’s answer, and mine, is that using a book to understand the world the New Testament writers lived in is not the same as treating it as inspired. Jude quoted it. The earliest Christian writers, Justin and Irenaeus and Tertullian among them, used the Watchers tradition freely, and Tertullian went as far as defending Enoch outright. The book was read widely for a couple of centuries before the Western church set it aside, partly on principle and partly by accident, as the full text simply disappeared from Greek circulation and survived only in Ethiopia.^[12]

The strange result is that “go back to the sources and recover what the first Christians assumed” points, on this question, toward the older posture and not a newer one. Tertullian would have found Heiser’s reading of Genesis 6 ordinary. Augustine, who pushed the Sethite reading that buried it, is the innovation here. If you want the fuller history of the Enoch books and why none of them made the canon, I traced that separately.

How to Read Reversing Hermon and 1 Enoch Together

The efficient path is to read the Watchers narrative cold first, 1 Enoch 6 through 16 in one sitting, before you open Heiser at all. Absorb the story as a story. Then read Reversing Hermon from the front, and the early chapters will feel like review rather than new information, which is exactly how the book is built to work. Keep five passages within reach, because nearly every argument leans on one of them: the oath on Hermon in chapter 6, the giants and forbidden knowledge in 7 and 8, the sentence in 9 and 10, the origin of demons in 15, and Enoch’s commission to the prisoners in 12 and 13. Hold those five and you can follow, and check, everything Heiser does with them.

The book is not trying to make 1 Enoch your Scripture. It is trying to hand back the furniture that was in the room when the New Testament was written, so the words mean what their authors meant. Read that way, the story that starts with an oath on a mountain ends where Revelation ends, with the same rebels in the same fire the sentence promised, and the whole arc of the Gospels reads as the long answer to Hermon.

Sources

1. Michael S. Heiser, Reversing Hermon: Enoch, the Watchers, and the Forgotten Mission of Jesus Christ (Crane, MO: Defender, 2017). The book this guide accompanies. Footnotes posted separately at drmsh.com/rhfootnotes.
2. John J. Collins, “Enoch, Books of,” in Dictionary of New Testament Background, ed. Craig A. Evans and Stanley E. Porter (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000), on the two woven strands (the Shemihazah and Asael stories) in the Watchers narrative of 1 Enoch 6–16.
3. R. H. Charles, The Book of Enoch (London: SPCK, 1917), public domain and free in full at Project Gutenberg. All quotations and chapter references from 1 Enoch follow Charles.
4. Jude 14–15 quotes 1 Enoch 1:9 and names “Enoch, the seventh from Adam.” The angelic-transgression reading also stands behind Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4, the latter using tartaroo (“cast into Tartarus”), matching the imprisonment of 1 Enoch 10.
5. Michael S. Heiser, Reversing Hermon, ch. 6, and The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015), 183–214, on Bashan, the Rephaim, and Og as underworld-and-giant associations. The Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls fragments confirm the Mount Hermon reference where the Ethiopic text is corrupted.
6. J. J. M. Roberts, “The End of War in the Zion Tradition,” Horizons in Biblical Theology 26:1 (2004): 2–22, on Mount Hermon rebuked for envy of the mountain of Yahweh in Psalm 68. Paywalled; free through most university and seminary library subscriptions.
7. John Goldingay, Psalms 42–89, Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms, ed. Tremper Longman III (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 323, on the Bashan/Hermon association in Psalm 68.
8. Michael S. Heiser, Reversing Hermon, ch. 9, on “the spirits in prison” (1 Peter 3:18–22) as the imprisoned Watchers, read against Enoch’s commission in 1 Enoch 12–16. The reading is widely represented in the scholarship rather than unique to Heiser.
9. Michael S. Heiser, Reversing Hermon, on Revelation 12 and the birth of the Messiah. The astronomical dating to September of 3 BC is Heiser’s own reconstruction and is not established in the commentary literature; treat it as the weakest link in an otherwise well-supported chapter.
10. G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998; ISBN 9780802821744), 491–493, and Steven Thompson, “The End of Satan,” Andrews University Seminary Studies 37:2 (1999): 257–268, on Revelation 9 as the eschatological release of the Watchers imprisoned in 1 Enoch 10:11–13. Thompson is free in full.
11. Amy E. Richter, “The Enochic Watchers’ Template and the Gospel of Matthew” (PhD diss., Marquette University, 2010), free in full, on the four women of Matthew’s genealogy read against the Watchers template. Heiser presents this as a compelling proposal, not a proven one.
12. Augustine, City of God 15.23, free at New Advent, for the Sethite reading that displaced the older one. On early Christian use of the Watchers tradition (Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian) and Tertullian’s defense of Enoch, see Heiser, Reversing Hermon, Appendix I.