Egyptian-Hebrew stream·The Book of Enoch (1 Enoch)·Book V — Epistle of Enoch (with Appendix)·Chapter CI — Behold and Tremble
The sailors who fear the sea — how much more before God
Behold heaven and earth and tremble; sailors fear the sea — how much more should you fear the Lord who has dominion over all? The kings of the earth shall behold the holy ones in the day of visitation.
Source context
- Theme
- admonitory address to natural forces as witnesses of human moral accountability
- Soul-faculty
- Consciousness Soul
Steiner
not engaged in the GA corpus
Cross-tradition
- Hebrew covenant-witness formula (Deuteronomy 30–32)The calling of heaven and earth — and by extension the natural order — as witnesses to ethical obligation is a structural feature of Deuteronomic covenant rhetoric, paralleling Enoch 101's invocation of cosmic phenomena as silent judges of human conduct.
- Stoic cosmologyThe Stoic principle that the rational order (logos) pervading natural phenomena implies a moral law binding on rational beings shows cross-tradition congruence with the chapter's premise that the obedience of stars, seas, and seasons indicts human disobedience.
Chapter CI
CI. Exhortation to the Fear of God: all Nature fears Him, but not the Sinners.
CHAPTER CI.
1Observe the heaven, ye children of heaven, and every work of the Most High, and fear ye Him and work no evil in His presence. 2. If He closes the windows of heaven, and withholds the rain and the dew from descending on the earth on your account, what will ye do then? 3. And if He sends His anger upon you because of your deeds, ye cannot petition Him; for ye spake proud and insolent words against His righteousness: therefore ye shall have no peace. 4. And see ye not the **sailors** of the ships, how their ships are tossed to and fro by the waves, and are shaken by the winds, and are in sore trouble? 5. And therefore do they fear because all their goodly possessions go upon the sea with them, and they have evil forebodings of heart that the sea will swallow them and they will perish therein.
6Are not the entire sea and all its waters, and all its movements, the work of the Most High, and has He not set limits to its doings, and confined it throughout by the sand? 7. And at His reproof it is afraid and dries up, and all its fish die and all that is in it; But ye sinners that are on the earth fear Him not. 8. Has He not made the heaven and the earth, and all that is therein? Who has given understanding and wisdom to everything that moves on the earth and in the sea. 9. Do not the **sailors** of the ships fear the sea? Yet sinners fear not the Most High.
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