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Friday, May 06, 2011

Hot Action Enoch

"HOT ACTION ENOCH": The Forward discovers Enochic pseudepigrapha and the new game El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron. Excerpt:
All of which appears to make “El Shaddai” a fairly unique case. Sawaki and his team are consciously developing the characters and themes in conversation with traditional interpretations and treatments. While the ancient text, with its firmly unorthodox insistence on the fall of rebellious angels, wasn’t even considered for canonization by Jewish authorities and Enoch himself (either the human or taken as the angel Metatron) appears only a handful of times in the Talmud, the Book of Enoch is central to many Jewish mystical traditions and is also counted among the Apocrypha of Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. Notably, the book is included in the canon itself of the Beta Israel Ethiopian Jewish community. Meanwhile, the game seeks to play up on this angle of esoteric transmission, advertising itself as a “tale of times past: a tale that was not permitted to be handed down through the ages.”
Actually 1 Enoch is not part of the Old Testament Apocrypha (which form part of the Catholic and Orothodox biblical canons, but not the Jewish or Protestant canons).

Background here.