Friday morning.
Nothing special.
Coffee. Phone. Just checking what the world had got up to overnight.
And then I came across a story about the Bible.
That happens more often. You read something about Jesus, Paul, a prophet with a difficult name, and before you know it, you are twenty minutes further on.
But this was different.
It began with Genesis 6.
There it says, almost in passing, that there were giants on the earth in those days. The sons of God came to the daughters of men, and children came from it.
And then it says:
“And also afterward.”
Afterward?
I read it again.
Afterward.
As if Moses, halfway through a complicated story, briefly thought: I’ll explain that later.
But he did not.
He simply carried on.
Noah.
Flood.
End of story.
Well.
Not quite.
Because somewhere behind Genesis, there turned out to be a book I had never read.
The Book of Enoch.
According to Genesis, Enoch was someone who walked with God. The sort of person who makes you think: I would actually like to know more about him.
But there is not much more there.
Enoch walked with God.
And then he was gone.
That was it.
Except that people thousands of years ago apparently had exactly the same reaction I did:
“Yes, but how?”
And so an entire book appeared.
Enoch tells of Watchers.
Heavenly beings.
About two hundred of them.
They apparently found human women attractive enough to leave their home in heaven for them.
They came down to earth.
They took women.
And children came from it.
Giants.
Nephilim.
And those giants got rather hungry.
Not the sort of giant who sits kindly in a fairy-tale book writing with a goose quill.
No.
They ate the people and their food supplies, and eventually the whole earth became one large mess.
God looked at it.
And apparently said:
This is not going to work anymore.
Then came the flood.
By then, I was sitting upright.
Because hang on.
All of this was in an ancient text I had never read.
And then it got even better.
The Book of Enoch did not simply turn up somewhere in the Middle Ages.
Fragments of Enoch were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Qumran.
Two thousand years old.
And Jude, in my own Bible, simply mentions Enoch by name.
More than that: Jude quotes him.
That was where it became interesting.
Because then you get:
Genesis.
Enoch.
Qumran.
Jude.
And somewhere on the other side of the world, Ethiopian Christians had simply kept Enoch in their Bible all that time.
I thought:
Well.
This is interesting.
And then came the advert.
Because the internet remains the internet.
According to the story, the modern church had not merely lost Enoch.
No.
The entire Western Christian world had apparently taken a large eraser to the Bible.
Books removed.
Spiritual knowledge gone.
Angels hidden.
Nephilim still active.
Demons everywhere.
Elites.
Politicians.
Priests.
Pyramids.
Mysterious rituals.
Giant trees.
Hidden history.
And somewhere in the middle of it all was the solution.
A special Ethiopian Bible.
With an audiobook.
For less than fifty pounds.
Temporarily.
Because of course it was temporary.
It made me laugh.
Because it was actually a splendid piece of salesmanship.
First you get a mystery.
Then a forgotten book.
Then a secret.
Then an enemy.
Then fear.
And eventually you get a button:
BUY NOW.
The only thing missing was:
WHILE STOCKS LAST.
But meanwhile, I had become curious.
Not about the offer.
About Enoch.
Because underneath that entire sales trap was something that really was interesting.
An ancient Jewish text.
A strange story about heavenly beings and people.
An explanation for Genesis 6.
A tradition about giants and evil spirits.
A text that existed before Jesus.
Fragments recovered at Qumran.
And a letter in my own Bible in which Jude refers to Enoch.
That is enough.
You do not have to pay £350 for it.
You just have to read.
And that may be the best thing about 2026.
Two and a half thousand years ago, for a text like that, you depended on a handful of scribes, monasteries and libraries.
Now you can sit on the sofa on a Friday morning with coffee and say to ChatGPT:
“Look up Enoch for me.”
And within a few minutes you are in the middle of a story about two hundred fallen heavenly beings, giants, a worldwide flood and the origin of demons.
I looked at my coffee again.
It was not even nine o’clock yet.
I thought:
Phew.
That is quite a lot for a Friday morning.