The Appearance of Feathers
Another important reference to the appearance of Watchers comes from the so-called Secrets of the Book of Enoch, also known as 2 Enoch, a kind of sequel to the original work written in Greek and dating to the first century AD.
The passage refers to the unexpected arrival of two Watchers as Enoch rests on his bed:
And there appeared to me two men very tall, such as I have never seen on earth. And their faces shone like the sun, and their eyes were like burning lamps; and fire came forth from their lips. Their dress had the appearance of feathers:... [purple], their wings were brighter than gold; their hands whiter than snow. They stood at the head of my bed and called me by my name.
White skin (often ruddied ’as red as a rose’), tall stature and facial radiances ’like the sun’ all recur frequently in connection with the appearance of angels and Watchers in Enochian and Dead Sea literature.
Yet what was this reference to their dress having ’the appearance of feathers’? Might it relate in some way to the ’cloak’ worn by the Watcher named Belial who appears in the Amram story, which was said to have been ’many-coloured yet very dark’, precisely the effect one might expect from a coat of black feathers, like those belonging to crows or vultures perhaps?
In spite of the fact that Christian art has invariably portrayed angels with wings, this tradition goes back no further than the third or fourth century AD. Before this time true angels (Cherubim and Seraphim did have multiple sets of wings) appeared in the likeness of ’men’, a situation that often prompted textual translators to add wings on to existing descriptions of angels. This has almost certainly been the case in the above account taken from 2 Enoch, which was re-copied many times during the early years of Christianity.
With this observation in mind, I felt that the statement concerning the Watchers dress having ’the appearance of feathers’ was very revealing indeed. It also seemed like an over-sight on the part of the scribe who conveyed this story into written form, for having added wings to the description of the two ’men’, why bother saying they wore garments of feathers?
Surely this confusion between wings and feather coats could have been edited to give the Watchers a more appropriate angelic appearance.
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Yahweh, the sky god.

