Book of Enoch Describes What Easter Island Actually Is, And Who the Statues Were Carved To Look Like

0:00Those giant stone faces on Easter Island

0:02had eyes once. White coral with a red

0:05stone set in the middle. And the experts

0:08didn't believe it until 1978.

0:12Somebody wrote down more than 2,000

0:15years before that what that island is

0:18and who those faces were carved to look

0:21like. It's in the book of Enoch and it

0:25reaches into your own family further

0:28than you'd expect.

0:30whose faces those really are and why it

0:32matters to your house that every last

0:34one of them got knocked flat onto the

0:37ground. I'll give you with about 3

0:39minutes left on this video. The

0:42Ethiopian church never dropped this

0:45book. They still read it out loud in

0:48church's scripture. So, here's what

0:51their text says. Enoch names that

0:54island. [music] It's the last of the

0:57great islands he saw in the sea, farther

1:00from any land than the rest. And the

1:02stone men on it aren't idols. They're

1:06lookouts. First, you'll hear the lines

1:08themselves. Then, you'll watch a stone

1:11walk, and then you'll find out who those

1:13lookouts are waiting for. If that got

1:17you leaning in, give this a like right

1:19now so it reaches more people who read

1:22the way you do and subscribe because the

1:26strangest chapters in this book haven't

1:29been read to you yet.

1:32I'm John Blackwell and I want you to do

1:34one thing before I read you a single

1:37line.

1:39Think about the faces in your own family

1:41for a minute. Most of us can name three

1:44people back, maybe four. And after that,

1:47it's a blank wall. The Bible most of us

1:50grew up with has blanks in it, too.

1:53Whole books that got left out. That's

1:56why we put the Ethiopian Bible on our

1:59website. It's fully uncensored with

2:02every one of the 88 books that church

2:05kept. And the personal readings, the

2:09ones built on your own birth date, are

2:11also on the website. You'll find each

2:14one linked in the description, or you

2:17can just scan this QR code.

2:20What comes next is worse than anything a

2:23tour guide on that island will tell you.

2:27Chapter 77 is short, and most people

2:30skip it. It sits in the part of Enoch

2:33about the sky and the calendar.

2:36My copy is marked there with a paint

2:38stirer left over from when we redid the

2:41back porch. It opens with the four

2:44corners of the world. The east comes

2:47first, Enoch says, and the south is

2:50where the most high will come down.

2:53That caught me. God coming down to a

2:57spot on the map. And Enoch drops it into

3:00a list of directions like it's an

3:02address. The west is called the

3:04diminished because every light in the

3:07sky goes down there. The north holds the

3:10homes of men, the deep places, and the

3:13garden of righteousness. Then he counts

3:16seven mountains higher than any on

3:19earth. Seven rivers bigger than any on

3:23earth. And verse 8, seven great islands

3:27he saw, two on the mainland and five in

3:30the great sea. The English stops right

3:33there. The Ethiopian manuscripts [music]

3:36don't.

3:37After verse 8, before chapter 78 begins,

3:41they carry seven more lines under a

3:43heading of their own. Of the island at

3:46the naval of the waters. Those seven

3:49lines never made it into English type.

3:52The first one reads like this. And of

3:55the five in the great sea, the last lies

3:58alone at the navl of the waters, and no

4:02land is near it on any side. A navl is

4:06the middle of a thing. But it's also the

4:09place where you were once tied to your

4:10mother before somebody cut the cord.

4:14Enoch picks a word for this island that

4:16sounds like something was born there and

4:18then set loose. Line two. There the sons

4:23of men set up faces of stone in the

4:26likeness of the Horat. Horat is a gaes

4:29word. Gaes is the old church language of

4:33Ethiopia. The one the full book of Enoch

4:36survives in. And hat put into English

4:39means the ones who walk. So men on the

4:42loneliest island in the ocean carved

4:45stone faces to look like walkers.

4:49I'll admit that line made no sense to

4:51me. You carve a king sitting down. You

4:54carve a soldier standing at attention.

4:58Nobody carves a stone to look like a man

5:00who walks because stone doesn't go

5:03anywhere. Unless you ask the people who

5:06lived there.

5:08On April 5th, 1722,

5:12three Dutch ships under a man named

5:14Jacob Rogavine were out in the Pacific

5:17hunting for a southern continent that

5:19wasn't there. They'd left the Juan

5:22Fernandez Islands off Chile nearly 3

5:24weeks earlier and sailed more than 1,500

5:28miles.

5:30Nothing but water day after day. Then

5:34the lookout spotted a low island off to

5:36one side. It was Easter Sunday. Rogavine

5:41wrote in his log that they named it

5:43Parsh Island because they found it on

5:46Easter day.

5:48That's where your name for it comes

5:50from. A Dutch ship, a holiday, and a

5:55date written in a log book. That ship

5:58named the island after the day it showed

6:01up. And if you want it, a reading built

6:03on the day you showed up is on the

6:05website, links in the description. When

6:08his men went ashore, they saw the

6:10statues. The islanders call them Moai.

6:14Rogavine's people wrote down stone

6:17figures a good 30 ft tall and the

6:20statues faced inland. Their backs were

6:23to the ocean.

6:25Think about how odd that is. You live on

6:28a speck of rock in the middle of the

6:30biggest sea on Earth. Anything that ever

6:33comes to you comes out of that water and

6:36you build your biggest faces with their

6:39backs to it. Later, when outsiders asked

6:42how those statues got from the quarry to

6:45the coast miles away, the islanders gave

6:48the same answer for generations.

6:52They walked. So, the book has already

6:54told you what the statues were made to

6:57look like. Walkers. The next line tells

7:00you why they were turned around. Line

7:03three, they set their backs to the sea

7:07and their faces to the houses. And in

7:09the faces they set eyes of white stone

7:13faces to the houses. On that island the

7:17Moai stand on stone platforms the

7:19islanders call au. And from those

7:22platforms they look inland across the

7:25land where each family lived. Not out to

7:28see where trouble would come from in at

7:31the houses at the people. That's not a

7:34guard.

7:36A guard turns his back on what he's

7:38guarding and looks for the enemy. This

7:41is something that watches the family

7:42itself. Line four is short. The eyes do

7:46not close while the sons sleep. I didn't

7:50like that one, and I'll tell you why.

7:52Every preacher I ever heard at a

7:54graveside said, "The dead are at rest."

7:57Asleep. This line turns that around. The

8:01living are the ones asleep. Something

8:04else is awake. Looking at your windows

8:07while you're in bed. And the islander's

8:10own name for these statues fits it

8:12better than I wanted it to. In their

8:15language, their aringa aura, living

8:19faces. The living faces of ancestors who

8:23were raised into something more than

8:25dead men. Living faces with eyes of

8:29white stone that don't close. But

8:32there's a problem. and you've seen it

8:34yourself. Almost every photo of those

8:37statues you've ever looked at shows

8:40empty sockets, no eyes at all. For most

8:44of the 1900s, that's how the experts

8:47said they'd always been. In 1978, the

8:51islanders were putting a row of fallen

8:54statues back up at a beach called

8:56Anakina on the north side of the island.

9:00The platform there is called Aua Nao and

9:04the work was being run by an island

9:06archaeologist named Sergio Rau. One of

9:10the diggers was a Rapanui woman named

9:13Sonia Howa. She was working the sand

9:16beside a statue that had been knocked

9:19down and lay half buried and she started

9:22turning up pieces of white coral. then a

9:26round disc of red stone. On their own

9:30they looked like nothing much. Broken

9:33shell and a pebble. But when the pieces

9:36were laid together, they made an oval

9:39about 14 in long, about the size of a

9:42dinner plate. No, longer and narrower

9:46than a plate closer to a loaf of bread.

9:49And the red disc sat in the middle of it

9:51like the dark of an eye. Sergio Rau saw

9:55that it fit the empty socket of one of

9:58the statues and he called it what it

10:00was, an eye.

10:0320 years earlier, another archaeologist,

10:07William Mallaloy, had dug up pieces just

10:10like that on the south coast.

10:12Everybody took them for bits of a coral

10:15dish. They'd been holding an eye in

10:18their hands and calling it a plate.

10:21Meanwhile, two old men on the island,

10:23Jose Farti and Leonardo Pakarati, had

10:27said they'd seen things like that before

10:30and that they were eyes. It took the

10:33coral sitting in the socket to prove the

10:35old men right. That one dig turned up 57

10:39pieces of eyes. The one that's nearly

10:42whole sits in the island's museum today.

10:46So, the statues had eyes, white ones,

10:50just like line three says, eyes that

10:53could be put in and taken out. Is there

10:56a photo of somebody in your family on a

10:58wall in your house right now looking out

11:01into the room? Tell me in the comments

11:04whose face it is. That leaves the thing

11:07Enoch answers next. What those eyes were

11:11watching for. Line five. For the horror

11:15will walk again on the earth, and they

11:18will know the houses of their sons by

11:20the faces that look upon them. So,

11:24they're not watching for an enemy.

11:26They're watching for a homecoming.

11:29The walkers are coming back, and when

11:32they come, they'll find their own people

11:34by the stone faces carved in their

11:37likeness.

11:38A face set up in front of a house is a

11:41sign on the door. This family is ours.

11:45That's a hard thing for a soul to hear.

11:48We're taught the dead go on ahead of us

11:50and wait somewhere far off. This line

11:54says some of them never died at all. And

11:57they aren't waiting far off. They're

12:00coming back to the door and they're

12:02looking for a face they know. I never

12:05heard that preached from any pulpit.

12:08Line six. But where the faces are laid

12:11on the ground and the eyes are taken

12:13out, that house is not known. And line

12:17seven, the last, and the whor pass over

12:21it. That's the whole section. Seven

12:24lines.

12:26Now, here's what bothers me, and I'd

12:28rather tell you than pretend it doesn't.

12:30It says the walkers pass over the house

12:32they can't recognize. It never says what

12:36passing over means for the people

12:38inside. Spared, skipped, or left behind.

12:42It doesn't say. And right here, this

12:46stops being about an island and starts

12:48being about your street because what the

12:51book describes is a sign on a house. And

12:55a sign can be taken down. The lines also

12:59never say who would lay a face on the

13:02ground. The island answers that one. By

13:05the 1860s, every statue that had stood

13:08on a platform on that island was down.

13:12Knocked over and left lying.

13:15Some came down in fighting between the

13:17clans. The last ones that stood were

13:20pulled down in the years the island took

13:23up Christianity. Around the same time,

13:25slave ships were raiding the coast and

13:28carrying people off, and the eyes were

13:31gone. When Rogavin's men wrote about the

13:34statues in 1722,

13:36they said nothing about eyes at all. So

13:40the islanders laid their own faces down,

13:43most of them with their own hands. And

13:46through all of it, the one thing they

13:48kept saying was that the statues had

13:50walked there. For about a hundred years,

13:54scientists smiled at that. The usual

13:57idea was that the statues were laid flat

14:00on wooden sleds and dragged, which would

14:03have taken a crowd of people and a

14:05forest of logs. In 2012, two American

14:09archaeologists named Terry Hunt and Carl

14:12Leipo decided to take the islanders at

14:15their word. They'd been looking at the

14:17statues left lying along the old roads,

14:20the ones that never made it to a

14:22platform, and those statues were shaped

14:24differently. wide at the bottom like a

14:28letter D and tipped forward like a man

14:32leaning into his next step. So they

14:35built one, a copy of a little over four

14:37tons close to the real size. It went

14:41badly at first. The thing couldn't even

14:43stand up on its own and they had to prop

14:46it on supports. For several days,

14:49nothing worked. You can picture that

14:52crew standing around four tons of stone

14:55that won't do anything but lean. Then

14:57they tried it the way the road statues

14:59seem to want. Three ropes tied around

15:02the head. One team on the left, one on

15:05the right, one behind. The side teams

15:09took turns pulling. So the statue rocked

15:11up onto one corner of its base and swung

15:14forward a little, then rocked onto the

15:16other corner and swung again. The rope

15:19at the back had one job only. Keep the

15:23statue from falling on its face. 18

15:26people. They chanted heave ho to keep

15:29the timing. And the statue walked left,

15:33right, left. A stiff shuffle down the

15:36road. 100 m in about 40 minutes. The

15:40test was filmed. When I watched it, I

15:43didn't say anything for a while. Four

15:46tons of stone rocking side to side down

15:50a dirt road like an old man on bad

15:53knees. It looked alive. That's the only

15:56way I can put it. Lipo told a reporter

15:59from the journal Nature that it really

16:01hauls. A young man who lives on the

16:04island put it more simply to National

16:06Geographic that same year. The experts

16:10could say what they liked. He said his

16:13people already knew the statues walked.

16:16In 2025, Huntton Leipo came back with a

16:20bigger study. They went through 962

16:24statues and built 3D models of the 62

16:28left along the roads. The shape held

16:31every time. The wide base, the forward

16:34lean, built to walk. Leo said that once

16:38you get one moving, people are pulling

16:40with one arm. For most of my life, I

16:44heard that the statues walked and I

16:46rolled my eyes. Now I think the

16:49islanders were telling the truth twice

16:51over. The stone really walked. And I

16:56think it was shaped to walk because the

16:58men it was carved to look like were

17:00walkers, too. The horat in Enoch's

17:03lines. And every time those families

17:06rocked a statue down the road, they were

17:08acting out their own fathers.

17:11Go back to that rope at the back for a

17:14second. The one whose only job was to

17:17keep the face off the ground.

17:20Line six says, "That's the one thing

17:23that must never happen. Every crew on

17:26the island knew it without being told."

17:28Now the two stories meet and they meet

17:31in one year.

17:34In 1868, a British army reached a

17:37mountain fortress in Ethiopia called

17:39Macdala. When the fighting was over,

17:42they looted it. It took 15 elephants and

17:46almost 200 mules to carry the plunder

17:50down to a plane where it was auctioned

17:52off. You don't bring elephants for a few

17:56souvenirs.

17:58A man from the British Museum's

18:00manuscript department had come along for

18:02exactly this, and he went home with

18:05about 350 Ethiopian manuscripts.

18:09Among the Enoch copies that went to

18:11London that year were the ones that

18:14carried the island lines. When English

18:17readers set those copies side by side,

18:20they marked the seven lines as a later

18:22addition, somebody's note that crept

18:25into the text.

18:28Every English printing since was set

18:30without them. Later that same year in

18:34November, a British Navy ship called HMS

18:37Topaz anchored off Easter Island. Two of

18:40its crew went looking through a village

18:42of stone houses up on the cliffs at the

18:45island's southwest corner, a place

18:48called Orango. Inside one of those

18:51houses, they found a statue still

18:53standing. It was buried up to about half

18:56its height. It faced inland toward an

19:00old crater. Its back was to the sea. The

19:04commodor decided to take it. The house

19:06came apart. The statue came down. They

19:09dug it out of the ground, dragged it

19:11down the hill on a sled. The crew

19:14knocked together from ship's timber,

19:16floated it out to the ship on a raft,

19:19and somewhere between the cliff and the

19:21deck. The red and white paint that

19:24somebody on that island had once laid on

19:26it by hand, washed off into the sea. Its

19:30eye sockets had once held coral and red

19:33stone, too. A Rupaoui man remembered

19:36later that a chief followed the sailors

19:38all the way down to the water that day

19:41and afterward had the whole scene

19:42tattooed on his arm.

19:45You don't mark your own skin for a piece

19:48of rock. You do that for family. The

19:51islanders told the sailors its name and

19:54they wrote it down. Hakania

19:58people translated a few ways. One of

20:00them is stolen friend. Another is hidden

20:04friend. The next year, Queen Victoria

20:07gave it to the British Museum and it

20:10stood there since. The island asked for

20:13it back in 2018.

20:15So, in one year, the book with the lines

20:18about the watching faces was carried off

20:20to London. And one of the last watching

20:23faces still standing on that island was

20:26carried off to London, too. The same

20:29museum took in both. That one stayed on

20:32me like a weight for days. I don't trust

20:35coincidences that neat.

20:38Has anything that belonged to your

20:39family ever ended up in somebody else's

20:42hands? A Bible, a ring, a picture, and

20:45do you know where it is now? Let me hear

20:48about it below. Here's the part I owe

20:51you. Horat means the ones who walk.

20:55That's true. But the word has a second

20:58meaning and the second one is the older

21:00of the two. It means the ones who were

21:03taken while they were walking. Men who

21:06went and never died. Open your own Bible

21:10to Genesis 5. Enoch walked with God and

21:15he was not for God took him. Walked then

21:19taken. The whole word in one verse.

21:23Hebrews puts it another way. Enoch was

21:26taken up so that he would not see death.

21:29The islanders called their statues the

21:32living faces of their ancestors.

21:34Fathers raised into something more than

21:37dead men. Enoch's lines give those

21:40fathers a name. The faces on Easter

21:43Island were carved to look like the

21:45walkers who were taken. Men of Enoch's

21:48kind. Men like Enoch himself.

21:51Now the last line. The Horat pass over

21:55the house they can't recognize.

21:58Remember the Dutch ship and the word it

22:00used par. The Greek word for Easter is

22:04parasha and it comes from the Hebrew

22:06word for Passover. The Ethiopian church

22:10calls Easter fasica. The same word worn

22:13down by a lot of mouths. So Rogavine

22:16without knowing a thing about it named

22:19that island for the night of the passing

22:21over. In Egypt passing over was mercy.

22:26The blood on the door meant the

22:28destroyer went by. In these seven lines,

22:32it runs the other way. The walkers are

22:35coming back for their own. The way Enoch

22:38was taken. And the house with its faces

22:40laid in the dirt doesn't get gathered.

22:43It gets walked past, left where it

22:46stands.

22:48The island named for passing over had

22:51already laid every one of its faces

22:53down.

22:55I believe those statues were carved to

22:57look like Enoch and the men of his kind.

23:01And I believe the walkers are coming

23:03back down the same road they went up.

23:06So, when they come down your street

23:07looking for a face, turn toward the

23:09house.