Book of Enoch · The Full Story of the Judgment of the Watchers · 3 Hour Sleep Story
The Sleeping Almanac: Sleep Stories for Adults from Myth and Fairy TaleShow Notes
Two hundred watchmen came down a mountain and would not go back. Tonight, the Book of Enoch tells what was decided about them, and how, and it is not a war in heaven. It is a sentence, carried down by four messengers with four instructions: a word in Noah's ear before anything else, the one who taught the making of knives put under rough stones in a hole in the desert, the giants turned on each other, and their leader bound under the hills for seventy generations. And then, because this is the Book of Enoch, a journey. The man who carried the answer is taken by the hand and walked to the ends of the earth and shown where the winds are kept, the fire in the west that receives every setting of the sun, the mouths of all the rivers, seven mountains of pearl and jacinth and alabaster with a summit of sapphire, the empty place where the stars that came up late are kept, the mountain in the west where the dead wait beside a spring, a tree like no other on the hill where the throne will be, with fruit like the dates of a palm, and, at the far edge of the east, the garden, still there, with the tree in it that his father and mother ate from. A three hour sleep story, the first night of Season Six, The Lost Books.
More from The Sleeping Almanac: Sleep Stories for Adults from Myth and Fairy Tale
Who put the jars in the cliff? Tonight, the Dead Sea Scrolls as the people who wrote them: a rule book that measured punishment in days, thirty of them for falling asleep in the meeting, a community that kept awake a third of every night to read aloud, two spirits in every heart, a scroll made of copper listing sixty four buried treasures that nobody has ever found, the longest scroll of all, hidden under a floor for years, in which God speaks in the first person about a temple that was never built, a war written down as a set of instructions for the trumpets, a book that was found twice, half a century apart, in a Cairo storeroom and a desert cave, a priest from three verses of Genesis raised into a heavenly judge, the one outsider who saw them and wrote it down in his own words, the oath they swore to keep the books and the names of the angels, and the machine, built only a year or so before this night and named Enoch, that was taught to read their handwriting. A three hour sleep story, the second night of Season Six, The Lost Books.
Bonus: five Anunnaki and Book of Enoch sleep stories in one 11 hour episode.
Bonus: six Egyptian Mythology sleep stories in one 11 hour episode.
For twelve nights this season told the oldest stories on earth the way the clay tells them. Tonight, the other story. The one most people mean when they say Anunnaki: a twelfth planet on a long slow orbit, visitors who came for gold, a worker made in a laboratory out of clay and blood, a memory the tablets are said to keep. It is told whole, at full length, the way the people who believe it tell it, with its wonder intact. And after each part, once and plainly, what the object is: what the word means in the dictionary, what the seal in Berlin actually shows, what the flood poem actually says, what the chromosome and the green tablets actually are. Nobody is scolded. Nobody is lectured. If you have the twelve nights in you, you decide; if not, you are welcome anyway, and you may simply sleep.
Erra and Ishum is the only poem in this season whose author put his own name at the end and told us how he wrote it. He says it came to him in a dream, and that he wrote it down in the morning without adding a line. Tonight is a god of war who cannot