So a quick little note about a few things that I recently learned. If you ever had the yellow book of Bible stories, there was the story of Enoch, also repeated in other Watchtower publications, about the angels fathering giants and being a menace on earth. Now if you look at the Nicean Bible, which is the WTBTS selection of the Bible, it mentions Enoch twice and only has a very brief passage about Nephilim and Ben Elohim. But it doesn’t speak of giants and the like or Enoch and what he did, it seems to be conjured up by the WTBTS. However, the book of Enoch does go into details on Enoch’s life, the giants etc, how he preached about the apocalypse.
Likewise the story told to JW children about Cain and Abel, read the Genesis chapter, then read or remember the story in the WT literature, especially the pictures, now there are a lot of details that aren’t in the Nicean Bible, that match the Book of Jasher, the Bible says he simply killed him without details, the Book of Jasher details an iron ploughing instrument, the fact he didn’t bury him but left him bleeding in the field etc, the WTBTS depicts Cain having killed Abel with an instrument matching that description, Abel bleeding and Cain walking away from an unburied body.
There are a lot of other things, minor details perhaps that if you read for example Book of Jubilees, Book of Enoch etc and put them in context with what’s in the JW interpretation of the Bible and additional background to the stories which suddenly start making sense. Where does the WTBTS get its explanation of year-weeks and numerology surrounding the numbers 6 and 7 - read the books surrounding Kabbalah, Jubilees and others and it starts making more and more sense, patterns you see there are reused by WTBTS although some of these practices the WTBTS itself has condemned as demonic influences.
It’s an interesting avenue of investigation I haven’t heard much about in contemporary JW investigation. I think the mid-60s-through-90s Governing Body were very much aware of the apocryphal books and must have done significant investigation into it for it to come through in what we consider the JW canon. Question is why they rejected them, especially since the Dead Sea Scrolls indicates those books were very much in circulation amongst Christians ca 100BC and have to date existed amongst Ethiopian Churches (one of the earliest churches still in existence)