Judgment Is Assigned

Then the Most High, the Holy and Great One, spoke and sent Uriel to the son of Lamech, and said to him: Go to Noah and tell him in My name to hide himself. Reveal to him the end that is coming, for the whole earth will be destroyed. A flood is about to come upon the entire earth, and all that is upon it will perish. Teach him how he may escape, and how his seed may be preserved for all the generations of the world.

Before judgment falls, a warning is issued. Before the water rises, a door is opened. The response to a corrupted world does not begin with destruction; it begins with the quiet instruction of a single righteous family so that the story does not end at the flood.

The Lord said again to Raphael: Bind Azazel hand and foot and cast him into the darkness. Make an opening in the desert which is in Dudael, and cast him in. Place upon him rough and jagged rocks. Cover him with darkness, and let him remain there forever, and cover his face so that he cannot see the light. On the great day of judgment he shall be hurled into the fire. And heal the earth which the Watchers have corrupted, and announce the healing of the earth, so that they may heal the wound of the earth. All the children of men shall not perish through all the secret things that the Watchers have disclosed.

The one who taught the making of weapons is himself bound. The one who unveiled the eyes of others has his own face covered. The judgment matches the offense, and in the same breath the command is given to heal — not merely to punish. The wound in the earth is treated as a wound, not as a verdict.

And to Gabriel the Lord said: Proceed against the biters and the reprobates, and against the children of fornication. Destroy the children of fornication and the children of the Watchers from among human beings. Send them one against another that they may destroy each other in battle, for length of days shall not be theirs. No request that their fathers make on their behalf shall be granted, though they hope to live an eternal life, or that each of them will live five hundred years.

The giants, whose appetite could not be filled from outside, are given over to it from within. What they did to the world, they are permitted to do to one another. Length of days — the very thing their fathers had tried to steal for them — is precisely what is refused.

And to Michael the Lord said: Go and bind Shemihazah and his associates, who have united themselves with women and have defiled themselves in all their uncleanness. When their sons have slain one another and they have seen the destruction of their beloved ones, bind them fast for seventy generations beneath the hills of the earth, until the day of their judgment and consummation — until the judgment that is forever and ever is consummated. In those days they shall be led off to the abyss of fire, and to the torment and the prison in which they shall be confined forever.

The Watchers who swore an oath together are bound together. What they arranged in secret on the summit of a mountain is answered by a sentence carried out beneath the mountains. The oath that made retreat impossible becomes the chain that makes escape impossible.

Then shall the whole earth be tilled in righteousness, and shall all be planted with trees and be full of blessing. All desirable trees shall be planted on it, and vines shall be planted on it, and the vine that is planted on it shall yield wine in abundance, and every seed sown on it shall yield a thousandfold. The earth shall be cleansed from all defilement, from all sin, from all punishment and from all suffering, and I will never again send a flood upon it, from generation to generation and forever.

In those days I will open the storehouses of blessing which are in the heavens, and cause them to descend upon the earth, over the works and labor of humanity. Truth and peace shall be associated together throughout all the days of the world and throughout all the generations of humanity.

This is the note the first ten chapters end on. Not the giants. Not the binding. Not even the flood. The last image the reader is given is a tilled field, a heavy vine, a thousandfold harvest and open storehouses — a world in which truth and peace, for the first time since Chapter 6, are permitted to stand together in the same sentence.