The Watchers Descend

It came to pass, when the children of men had multiplied, that in those days beautiful and lovely daughters were born to them. The Watchers — the angels, the sons of heaven — saw them and desired them, and said to one another: come, let us choose for ourselves wives from among the daughters of men, and let us beget children for ourselves.

They had been assigned to watch. That was the whole of their charge. But the longer they looked, the less watching there was in it, and the more wanting. What began as observation slowly rearranged itself into appetite, and appetite began to look for a plan.

But Shemihazah, their leader, said to them: I fear that you will not truly agree to this deed, and that I alone shall have to pay the penalty for so great a sin. Then they all answered him and said: let us all swear an oath, and let us bind ourselves by mutual curses, that we will not abandon this plan but will carry it through and do this thing.

So they all swore together, and they bound themselves by mutual curses upon it. They were two hundred in number, who descended in the days of Jared upon the summit of Mount Hermon. And they called the mountain Hermon because they had sworn and bound themselves by mutual curses upon it.

The mountain became a monument to a decision that could no longer be walked back. Each of the two hundred had now tied his fate to the fate of every other. What one might have reconsidered alone, none could reconsider bound together.

These are the names of their leaders: Shemihazah — their chief — Ar'taqoph, Ramt'el, Kokab'el, Ra'ma'el, Dani'el, Zeq'el, Baraq'el, Asa'el, Hermoni, Matra'el, Ananel, Setawel, Samsi'el, Sahri'el, Tummi'el, Turi'el, Yamin'el and Yehaddi'el. These were the chiefs of tens over the two hundred, and the rest were with them.

Each of these leaders took to himself a wife, and they all began to go in to them, and to defile themselves with them, and to teach them charms and enchantments, and the cutting of roots, and to show them the properties of plants. What had begun as desire ended as instruction. Knowledge that had been kept above was now poured, indiscriminately, onto ground that had never been prepared to receive it.

The descent was not framed in the ancient text as a fall through the sky. It was a choice made in daylight, in view of one another, sealed by a spoken word. The Watchers did not stumble into the world of humanity. They organized their entry, elected their captains and named the ground beneath their feet after the moment they surrendered their post.

From that summit their teaching spread downward the way water spreads downhill — quickly, unevenly and impossible to call back. The first village that heard an enchantment was not the last. What one wife learned by evening, a sister learned by the next new moon. The two hundred had multiplied their reach far beyond two hundred before anyone in heaven had answered the oath they had sworn.