Enoch

• 1. Introduction

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  Enoch is a biblical patriarch from the generations before Noah's flood, and the Book of Genesis ends his story in the strangest way it can. The text says Enoch "walked with God: and he was no more; for God took him." He had lived 365 years. No funeral follows, and no cause of death. For thousands of years readers have asked what that sentence means. Some hear an ascent into heaven while still alive. Others hear something far less comfortable. Whole books were later written in his name, and churches still disagree about whether they belong in scripture. How did one short verse grow so large? Why does his name appear in the New Testament, in Muslim tradition, and in the writings of a nineteenth-century theosophist? And what did each of those traditions think happened to him?

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• 2. The Seventh Patriarch

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  Genesis 5 gives Enoch a precise place: seventh of the ten patriarchs listed before the Deluge, between Adam and Noah. He is the son of Jared and the father of Methuselah. For each name on the list, the chapter records the age at which he fathered the next patriarch, and the age at which he died. Every one of the others is recorded as dying at more than 700 years old. Enoch's life is the shortest on the list by a wide margin.

  The chapter also singles him out with a phrase. Genesis 5 says he "walked with God" in verse 22 and again in verse 24. Only one other pre-Flood patriarch earns the same description, and that is Noah, in Genesis 6:9.

  The timing is recorded too. Enoch's departure comes 57 years after the death of Adam and 69 years before the birth of Noah. Many readers take him to be the exception to the rule of death in this chapter, and the Epistle to the Hebrews says he did "not see death." Greek translators faced a choice of verb when they reached the verse, and their choice shaped everything that followed.

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• 3. Names and Translations

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  Philo of Alexandria heard the Hebrew word ḥēn in the name Enoch and proposed that it meant "your grace." Jerome took a different route. He derived the name from a verb meaning to train, initiate, dedicate or inaugurate, which gave him the sense "dedicated." Modern scholars have floated further meanings, including "follower," "inaugurated," and "wise" or "clever." No single answer has won out.

  The verb question was settled earlier, in the third century BC, by the translators who produced the Septuagint in Koine Greek. For the phrase "God took him" they chose metatithemi, a verb that describes moving something from one place to another. Sirach 44:16, from about the same period, makes the destination explicit: "Enoch pleased God and was translated into paradise that he may give repentance to the nations."

  The Greek word there, paradeisos, came from an ancient Persian term for an "enclosed garden." The Septuagint used it for the garden of Eden. In time it became a synonym for heaven, which is the sense it carries in Sirach. Soon whole books would try to describe what Enoch saw when he arrived.

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• 4. The Books of Enoch

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  Three long apocrypha are attributed to Enoch, and they survive in three very different languages. The Book of Enoch, also called 1 Enoch, was composed in Hebrew or Aramaic but is preserved in Ge'ez. The Orthodox Tewahedo churches recognize it. Scholars usually date it between the third century BC and the first century AD. James Bruce first brought it to Europe from Ethiopia, and August Dillmann and Schoode later translated it into English.

  2 Enoch, also called the Book of the Secrets of Enoch, is preserved in Old Church Slavonic. William Morfill made its first English translation. It is usually dated to the first century AD. 3 Enoch is a rabbinic text in Hebrew, usually dated to the fifth century AD.

  These works describe Enoch being taken up to Heaven. There he becomes guardian of all the celestial treasures, chief of the archangels, and the immediate attendant on the Throne of God. He is taught every secret and mystery, and he carries out whatever comes from the mouth of God.

  Some esoteric literature, 3 Enoch among it, identifies him with Metatron, the angel who communicates God's word. Rabbinic kabbalah and Jewish mysticism followed this line. They saw him as the figure who passed God's revelation to Moses, and as the one who dictated the Book of Jubilees.

  A related work, the Book of Giants, is a Jewish pseudepigraphal text from the third century BC that resembles the Book of Enoch. Fragments of at least six and as many as eleven copies turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Rabbinic writers, meanwhile, had their own ideas about the man himself.

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• 5. Rabbinic Portraits

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  In the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, Enoch is a pious man carried up to Heaven and given the title Safra rabba, meaning Great scribe. After Christianity had fully separated from Judaism, this became the prevailing rabbinical picture of his character and exaltation.

  Rashi, drawing on Genesis Rabbah, offered a harsher reading. In his account Enoch was righteous but easily swayed back toward evil. So God hurried to take him and let him die before his time. That, Rashi says, is why Scripture changed its wording and wrote "and he was no longer" in the world, rather than stating that he completed his years.

  The minor Midrashim go further into esoteric territory. In the Sefer Hekalot, Rabbi Ishmael visits the Seventh Heaven and meets Enoch. Enoch tells him that the earth in his day had been corrupted by the demons Shammazai and Azazel. He was taken to Heaven to prove that God was not cruel. Similar traditions are recorded in Sirach.

  Later elaborations make him a pious ascetic who was called to mix with others and preached repentance. Despite the small number of people on Earth, he gathered a vast following and was proclaimed king. Peace is said to have reigned under his wisdom, until he was summoned to Heaven to rule over the sons of God. The New Testament, written within a different tradition, names him three times.

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• 6. Enoch in the Early Church

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  Luke 3:37 lists Enoch among the ancestors of Jesus, and that is the first of three New Testament mentions. The second is in Hebrews 11:5, which says he had the testimony that he pleased God before he was translated. This fits Genesis 5:24 and implies he escaped the mortal death assigned to Adam's other descendants.

  The third mention, in the Epistle of Jude 1:14-15, is the most unusual. The author attributes a prophecy to "Enoch, the Seventh from Adam," and the passage appears in no Catholic or Protestant Old Testament canon. Most modern scholars believe it comes from 1 Enoch 1:9, which survives in Greek, in Ge'ez as part of the Ethiopian Orthodox canon, and in Aramaic among the Dead Sea Scrolls. They also recognise that 1 Enoch 1:9 is itself a midrash of Deuteronomy 33:2. In this passage Enoch prophesies to ungodly men that God will come with his holy ones to judge them.

  Neither the Hebrew Tanakh nor the Septuagint included the Book of Enoch, and neither Jewish nor early Christian readers treated it as canon. Even so, Justin Martyr, Athenagoras of Athens, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian and Lactantius all spoke highly of Enoch. They echoed the book, and some argued outright for using it as Scripture. Jude's citation encouraged this, and so did the popularity of millennialism in the early Church. The book's theme of the Watchers corrupting humanity was widely mentioned in early writing.

  When amillennialism became common, the Book of Enoch no longer fit and was widely rejected. After the Oriental Orthodox Church split off in the 5th century, its use narrowed to that church, and eventually to Ethiopian circles within it.

  John of Damascus was among the Church Fathers who considered Enoch one of the two witnesses in the Book of Revelation, a view that still has many supporters. The Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodoxy and Oriental Orthodoxy all venerate Enoch as a Saint. A different branch of Christianity gave him a wholly new city.

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• 7. Zion and the Saints

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  In the Latter Day Saint movement, and especially The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Enoch founds an exceptionally righteous city named Zion in the middle of a wicked world. The Pearl of Great Price and the Doctrine and Covenants, both standard works, present this view. They teach that Enoch and the entire people of Zion were taken from the earth without death because of their piety. Zion is defined as "the pure in heart," and the city is expected to return at the Second Coming of Jesus.

  The Doctrine and Covenants adds that Enoch prophesied one of his descendants, Noah, and Noah's family would survive a Great Flood and carry on both the human race and the Scripture.

  The Book of Moses, in the Pearl of Great Price, devotes chapters to Enoch's preaching, visions, and conversations with God. It describes the wars, violence and natural disasters of his day, and it records miracles he performed. The Book of Moses is an excerpt from Joseph Smith's translation of the Bible. Community of Christ publishes the translation in full, with the Enoch chapters set inside the Book of Genesis.

  D&C 104:24 gives a chronology. Adam ordained Enoch to the higher priesthood, now called the priesthood of Melchizedek, at age 25. Adam blessed him when he was 65. The years that followed, until he and his city were blessed, bring Enoch to 430 at the moment Genesis says "he was not, for God took him." The same theology implies that Enoch was the scribe who recorded Adam's blessings and prophecies at Adam-ondi-Ahman.

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• 8. Idris and Other Enochs

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  Most Muslims identify Enoch as Idris, a prophet named in the Qur'an. Some etymological research disputes the link and suggests the Greek version of the name Ezra, Esdras, is a more plausible source for the name Idris.

  Idris is also frequently identified as Hermes Trismegistus. That Hermetic identification does not necessarily compete with the biblical one. There is some dispute over whether Idris was Hermes Trismegistus at all, but those who say he was generally agree that he was also a biblical prophet.

  The theosophist Helena Blavatsky took a bolder step. She wrote that the Jewish Enoch, or else the Greek demigod Hermes, was "the first Grand Master and Founder of Freemasonry."

  The Samaritan text known as the Asatir goes in a different direction altogether. It says Enoch was buried on Mount Ebal. A grave on a named mountain stands apart from every tradition in which a man walked with God and was carried away alive.

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