ABSTRACT
In the Book of Jubilees there is a remarkable prayer in which Noah prays to God to preserve him and his descendants from the influence and the power of the evil spirits, known as the Watchers. Known from old traditions about Enoch (now found in the Books of Enoch), these Watchers were fathered through the offspring of the improper sexual unions between divine beings and human women, described in Genesis 6:1–4 (with parallels in 1 Enoch 15:8–16:1 and in Jubilees 10:1–2, 8–11). In this prayer Noah reminds God of the pattern of divine mercy already shown to the patriarch's offspring and then he implies that God should live up to that image in the present generation. Specifically, he wants God to neutralize the power of evil spirits and even to imprison them; he also prays that God bless his sons that they might continue to populate the earth and may not be corrupted, as the Watchers were before them.
