BOOK OF ENOCH MEDIA WATCH: The Book of 1 Enoch has been mentioned in the media a couple of times in the last few days. First of a letter in defense of Rastafarianism was published on Thursday in City Vision South Africa. The author comments at one point on Rasta scriptures:

Rasta uses the bible, apocrypha, book of Enoch, the hiden books of Eden, the other gospels and most, importantly, the Holy Piby (the black man's bible) - the Royal scroll of black supremacy; the promised Key; the utterances and testimony of the Binghi ancients; the epistles of Ras Marcus; The Kebra Negast; the Fetha Negast; The Egyptian and the Ethiopian book of the Living; and the Testament of the Living I, by Ras Tesfa.

You will recall that 1 Enoch (which is really a library of 5+ second temple Jewish texts) survives complete only in an Ethiopic translation, although Aramaic fragments were recovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls and translations of some of the book survive in Greek. I don't know some of the other texts, but I have mentioned the Kebra Negast here recently.

Second, a Q & A column in today's Allentown Morning Call addresses the question "Do Jews believe in hell? Where is it found in the bible?" and comments:

Hell, like paradise, was created by God. In the Apocryphal Book of Enoch and in the post-biblical work called the Talmud, more speculations were added to this rather minimal reference in the Hebrew Bible.

Some of these ideas are also found in the writings of the Persians and Greeks. In those legends, the entrance to hell in the valley near Jerusalem is considered one of three on earth; another is under the sea, a third is in the desert. The valley entrance is between two palm trees, down a hole that's always filled with smoke. The mouth of the entrance to hell is narrow and keeps the smoke from rising and revealing the exact location of the place.

Hell is huge and divided into seven different areas. In hell, a fiery river flows over the heads of sinners, and this fire is 60 times hotter than any earthly fire. There is a smell of sulfur in Gehenna. An angel-prince in charge of Gehenna � the devil, Satan. The basic belief is that sinners go directly to hell after death, while the righteous go directly to paradise olam habah, ''the world to come'').

At birth, a place is reserved for each person in both heaven and hell, and at death, after a final judgment is made by God of our life's deeds, either the space in heaven or the one in hell is given up.

Most souls after death are not sent to heaven or hell immediately, but rather remain in a place of judgment and purification (purgatory for Christians) for up to one year as they learn why they were afraid and why they were cruel. Christians have much more elaborate beliefs about the nature of purgatory.

No specific references for either 1 Enoch or the Talmud are given for these details, but the author seems to have in mind Enoch's tour of the universe in the the Book of the Watchers (the first component book of 1 Enoch) 17-36, esp. chaps. 18 and 27, and also various parts of the Epistle Enoch (= 1 Enoch 91-105). Most of the details seem to come from somewhere other than 1 Enoch. Some come from the Talmud, but I think other sources may be involved as well. There's a fair amount of speculation about hell in Jewish literature, but it never turned into a coherent doctrine, as it did in Christianity.