THE HIDDEN BOOKS

Before Adam, before death, before the first grave, there was a story. Parts of it entered the Bible. Other parts were kept in books most readers have never seen.

The Hidden Books retells that story as one continuous narrative, from the first morning of creation to the Tree of Life in the last chapter of Revelation. It weaves together the Bible, the Apocrypha, and the ancient writings that stood just outside its doors: 1 Enoch and Jubilees, still part of the Bible of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the Book of Giants, the Genesis Apocryphon, the Testament of Abraham, and the scrolls hidden for two thousand years in the caves above the Dead Sea.

Here you will meet the two hundred Watchers who swore an oath on Mount Hermon and came down to take human wives. The giants who dreamed of their own destruction. Enoch, the seventh from Adam, who carried the fallen angels' plea to the throne of God and returned with their sentence. Noah's mother, accused of carrying a child of the angels. Abraham driving away the bird of prey that was Azazel. Angels weeping over the altar on Mount Moriah. The goat sent into the wilderness "for Azazel." And the community by the Dead Sea who waited for the final war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness.

The story continues through Moses and the kings, the prophets and the exile, Tobit and the Maccabees, to the Gospels, the letter of Jude that quotes Enoch word for word, and the war in heaven in Revelation.

Every chapter ends with a short note, What the Sources Say, explaining which ancient texts the chapter draws on, where they agree and disagree, and how Jewish, Christian and modern scholars have read them.

This expanded edition includes:

•89 chapters in fourteen parts
•Maps of the ancient Near East and of the land from Hermon to the Dead Sea
•Family trees from Adam to Noah according to Genesis and Jubilees
•A guide to the sources and which Bibles contain them
•Timelines, a who's who of angels, Watchers, giants and people, and a glossary

Not a translation, and not a claim to secret revelation, but a clear and careful telling of the great story that ancient readers saw in all these books together: creation, rebellion, judgment and restoration.