Enoch

The teaching

Taught from Genesis, the books of 1 Enoch, 2 Enoch and 3 Enoch, and the letter of Jude.

He walked with God

Genesis gives him a few lines in the list of the generations from Adam to Noah, and they are unlike any other lines in it. Enoch is the seventh from Adam, the son of Jared and the father of Methuselah, and where every other man in the list lives and dies, of him it says, in the King James words: “And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.” His years number three hundred and sixty-five, the days of a year of the sun. The letter to the Hebrews reads the lines as faith rewarded, for he pleased God and was carried away without seeing death, and Ben Sira calls him an example of repentance to every generation.

The scribe of righteousness

The first part of 1 Enoch, the Book of the Watchers, tells why the world needed the flood. In the days of Jared two hundred angels, the Watchers, came down on Mount Hermon, took human wives and taught forbidden arts, and their sons the giants devoured the earth; the angels and what they taught are set out under Forbidden knowledge, in What they share. Enoch's own part begins after. He is the scribe of righteousness, already hidden among the holy ones, and he is sent to tell the Watchers their sentence. They beg him to write a petition for their forgiveness, and he reads it by the waters of Dan, near Hermon, until he falls asleep, and in a vision he is carried up to heaven to hear the answer.

The house of fire

Clouds and mist summon him, the courses of the stars and the lightnings hurry him, and the winds lift him up. He comes to a wall of crystal ringed with tongues of fire, and within it a great house of crystal, its ceiling like the paths of the stars and the lightning, with fiery cherubim, hot as fire and cold as ice. Beyond it stands a second house, greater, built of flames, and in it a lofty throne like crystal, with wheels like the shining sun and streams of flaming fire pouring from beneath it. On it sits the Great Glory, whose robe is brighter than the sun and whiter than any snow; none of the angels may come near or look on his face, and ten thousand times ten thousand stand before him. The Lord calls Enoch near and gives him the answer: go, tell the Watchers that they should have pleaded for men, and not men for them; they left the high and holy heaven for the earth, and they shall have no peace.

The journeys

Then the angels lead him to the ends of the earth. He sees the storehouses of the winds and the cornerstone of the earth, the seven mountains of precious stones, and beyond the end of the earth a waste with no sky above it and no ground beneath, where seven stars burn in bonds, punished for not rising at their appointed times. In the west he is shown a high mountain with hollow places where the spirits of the dead are kept until the day of judgement, the righteous apart, beside a bright spring of water, and the sinners apart. He sees the tree of life, whose fragrance passes every other and whose fruit shall be given to the righteous after the judgement, and in the garden of righteousness the tree of wisdom, from which the first man and his wife ate and learned, and were driven out.

The book of the lights

The Astronomical Book is the teaching of the angel Uriel, who shows Enoch the law of every light in heaven. The sun rises through six gates in the east and sets through six in the west, moving from gate to gate through the year, and the year has three hundred and sixty-four days exactly, fifty-two weeks, with a day added at the head of each of the four seasons. The moon waxes and wanes by fourteenths of its light, the winds come out of twelve gates, and the stars keep their stations under their leaders. Those who leave out the four added days reckon the year wrongly, Uriel warns, and in the days of the sinners the years shall be shortened, the moon shall change its order and the stars go astray. Enoch writes it all down for his son Methuselah, to hand on to the generations of the world.

The Son of Man and the dreams

In the Parables Enoch sees the Head of Days, whose head is white like wool, and with him one whose face is like a man's and full of grace, the Son of Man, the Chosen One, whose name was named before the sun and the stars were made, and who shall sit on the throne of glory and judge the kings and the mighty of the earth. At the end of the Parables Enoch himself is raised to heaven and told, as the Ethiopic text has it, that he is that Son of Man, born to righteousness.

The Dream Visions tell all history as a dream of beasts: Adam a white bull, the fallen Watchers stars that drop among the cattle, Israel a flock of sheep handed to seventy shepherds who destroy more than they were told, until a great horn grows on a ram, a white bull is born at the end, and all the beasts become white bulls. The Epistle closes the book with woes on the rich and the violent, the hope of the righteous, and the strange birth of Noah, whose body is white as snow and whose eyes light up the house like the sun, so that Methuselah goes to the ends of the earth to ask Enoch what it means.

The seven heavens

The Slavonic book called 2 Enoch takes him through seven heavens. Two men taller than any on earth, with faces shining like the sun and wings brighter than gold, come to his bed and carry him up. In the first heaven he sees the angels who rule the stars and the storehouses of snow and dew; in the second, fallen angels kept weeping in darkness; in the third, paradise with the tree of life, and to the north a place of terror for the wicked; in the fourth, the courses of the sun and moon, and the flying creatures that go with the sun's chariot, the phoenixes and chalkydri; in the fifth, the Watchers' brothers, silent with grief, whom he urges to take up their worship again; in the sixth, the archangels who keep the order of the world; and in the seventh, the Lord on his throne. There he is anointed and clothed in glory and becomes like one of the glorious ones. He writes three hundred and sixty-six books at an angel's dictation, hears from the Lord himself how the world was made out of nothing, and is sent back for thirty days to teach his sons before he is taken for ever.

Metatron

The Hebrew book called 3 Enoch tells the end of his story. Rabbi Ishmael, rising through the palaces of heaven, is met by the angel Metatron, Prince of the Presence, who tells him that he was once Enoch, son of Jared. When the generation of the flood sinned, God took him up to be a witness against them, and changed him: his flesh became flame, his sinews fire, his bones coals of juniper, his eyelashes lightning and his eyes torches. He was made as great as the world in length and breadth, given seventy-two wings and a throne like the throne of glory, crowned, and called the lesser YHWH, for, the Lord says, my name is in him. When the sage Elisha ben Abuyah saw him enthroned and cried that there must be two powers in heaven, Metatron was made to stand and was struck with sixty lashes of fire.

What the tellers read in him

His tellers read in him the righteous man taken alive into heaven, and so the first mortal to see what others see only after death. To the authors of 1 Enoch he is the witness who answers where evil came from, not from Adam alone but from the Watchers' descent and their broken knowledge, and who shows that heaven keeps its order, its calendar and its judgement while the earth is in disorder. The letter of Jude quotes him by name, in the King James words: “Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, to execute judgment upon all.” For the mystics of the heavenly palaces he is the pattern of a man made into an angel, and Muslim tradition knows him as Idris, the truthful prophet whom God raised to a high place, the first to write with the pen.