This study has suggested that the Book of the Watchers originated in a setting of priestly scribalism. In the centuries following its composition and redaction, the apocalypse had a major impact on early Jewish and early Christian approaches to antediluvian history. Although early exegetes generally avoided its distinctive view of the fallen angels as corrupting teachers of humankind, the Enochic myth of angelic descent shaped the interpretation of Gen 6:1–4 among a range of pre-Rabbinic Jews, including members of the Jesus Movement. In the first centuries of the Common Era, Enochic texts continued to be popular among proto-orthodox Christians, and Enochic traditions were developed in new directions by Christian apologists and heresiologists. By contrast, their Rabbinic contemporaries abandoned the Enochic pseudepigrapha, replacing the traditional angelic interpretation of Gen 6:1–4 with new euhemeristic approaches and asserting that Enoch was a normal man who died a normal death. These efforts formed part of a broader attempt at self-definition over against non-Rabbinic Jews (including but not limited to Christ-believing Jews), and they proved largely successful in excluding the Book of the Watchers and the Enochic myth of angelic descent from Rabbinic Judaism during the Talmudic period (ca. 200–600 ce).

Beginning in the third and fourth centuries, Christians in the Roman Empire began to adopt a similar stance. Concurrent with the formation of the biblical canon of Western Christian orthodoxy, church leaders followed their Rabbinic counterparts in rejecting both the Enochic books and the angelic reading of Gen 6:1–4, often with explicit reference to the precedent set by “the Jews.”