Mount Hermon: Where the Watchers Swore Their Oath

In 1 Enoch, two hundred Watchers descend on the summit of Mount Hermon and bind themselves by an oath there. The book explains the mountain's name as a memorial of that oath, a wordplay on the Hebrew herem, a ban or curse.

Mount Hermon is the highest mountain in the region, about 2,814 meters (roughly 9,230 feet), straddling the modern borders of Syria, Lebanon and Israel. Snow covers it much of the year and it feeds the springs of the Jordan River. The Bible praises "the dew of Hermon" (Psalm 133:3) and notes that other peoples called it by other names: "which Hermon the Sidonians call Sirion; and the Amorites call it Shenir" (Deuteronomy 3:9).

In 1 Enoch the mountain becomes the landing site of the fallen Watchers. The two hundred "descended in the days of Jared on the summit of Mount Hermon, and they called it Mount Hermon, because they had sworn and bound themselves by mutual imprecations upon it." The wordplay works in Hebrew: Hermon sounds like herem, a ban or curse. Enoch later sits by the waters of Dan, at the foot of Hermon, when he receives his visions.

Hermon was a sacred mountain long before the Enoch writers. Canaanite and later Greco-Roman worshippers built shrines around it, and dozens of ancient temples are known on its slopes. At the summit are the remains of a temple enclosure called Qasr Antar. At its southern foot lies Banias, a cave sanctuary to the god Pan. A Greek inscription reported from the summit in the 1800s speaks of those who "take an oath" there, which some scholars have compared with Enoch's story. Its height, its snows and its layered sacred history make Hermon the natural place for a story about beings who come down from above.