The Books of Enoch: The Angels, The Watchers and The Nephilim: With Extensive Commentary (Unabridged‪)‬

These are fascinating books for those familiar with the Christian Biblical texts and probably with Jewish or Islamic texts, but since I don’t know the latter two, I’ll only comment on the connection with the Christian Bible. The text and its Notes clearly point out similarities and many connections with canonical texts. I recommend these to someone who studies Biblical texts and are very familiar with them. Since either these texts or their sources obviously influenced the writers of the Bible, they are informative. It also was obvious to me why these would not have been acceptable to the church fathers who decided upon the Canon. If as a Christian I had to incorporate an understanding of these texts into my faith, that would be complicated and very difficult. Still it is interesting to see how Evil is described as being established on the earth, to hear an explanation of why there were giants, to be told of God’s displeasure with the “fallen angels” who became evil spirits, yet he allowed them to exist on the earth and draw humans into evil.

That being said, these are not books that would interest someone who is not familiar with, nor interested in, Biblical texts because they are mystic in nature and repetitive and full of almost impossible to pronounce names of human characters and of angels. For his smooth rendition of these hundreds of names (though sometimes different than what I grew up calling these characters), I commend the narrator Dennis Logan.

However, I was often distracted by Logan’s mispronunciation of common words, for example: prophesy or prophesied, Yea (as in “yea or nay”) pronounced as though it were yeah, quiescence, back and froth (instead of forth). These were mostly found in c 48A, but there were too many throughout the entire text.
Also, I disliked the too common repetition of phrases to improve the inflection or emphasis, but the first reading was not edited out. Proofing should have found and removed those repetitions.
The punching of words, and gaps between too-short phrases, made a staccato or percussive effect through the entire 17+ hours. It was easier to listen to the delivery at 1.5x speed or faster, in fact, 1.0 speed obviously was slowed down from the actual speed when recording. I don’t understand why that would be done.
The echo effect put me off at first, but as I realized it was used for titles and notes and parentheses, it was helpful to understand the text while listening, not able to see those textual elements. I wished it had less extension of the echo, which seemed inappropriate – didn’t fit with the nature of this scholarly translation of historical texts.

I LOVE THIS VERSION OF ENOCH!

I want my money back!