Enoch

The fifth chapter of Genesis is a list of lifespans and of deaths: Adam nine hundred and thirty years, Seth nine hundred and twelve, Enosh nine hundred and five, and so on to Methuselah, who reaches nine hundred and sixty-nine. Enoch stands seventh in that count, son of Jared, who lived nine hundred and sixty-two years, and father of Methuselah, grandfather of Lamech and great-grandfather of Noah.

His own figure is the one that jars: three hundred and sixty-five years, by far the shortest life in the chapter, less than half that of any of his neighbours. And it matches exactly the days of the solar year. The coincidence did not go unnoticed: the literature later placed under his name is precisely the literature that defends the solar calendar against the lunar one, and in it Enoch appears as the man who learned from the angels the course of the sun, the moon and the stars.

The Book of Jubilees adds the detail of his trade: he was the first of those born on earth to learn writing, knowledge and wisdom, and he set down in writing the signs of heaven. Everything else follows from that.

Genesis does not say of Enoch that he was righteous, or pious, or upright. It says something else, and of him and Noah alone: that he walked with God. The Hebrew formula is rare and the text does not explain it, and for that very reason later tradition filled it in. For the author of Jubilees, those three hundred years are an apprenticeship among the angels; for 1 Enoch, a post as intercessor whom the fallen Watchers themselves end up begging to carry their plea upward, because he is the only one who can take it there.

A clarification is in order that almost no summary makes. The books that bear his name are not his. The First Book of Enoch is a compilation of texts written between the third and the first century before our era; the Second survives in Old Slavonic; the Third is medieval. Placing them under the signature of a patriarch older than the Flood was the ancient way of declaring that their contents came from above, not an attempt to deceive anyone. Enoch is the recipient of the attribution, not the author.

His name survived even where the book did not reach. Sirach remembers him among the illustrious men, the Letter to the Hebrews holds him up as an example of faith, and the Epistle of Jude quotes a passage of the First Book of Enoch word for word: the only time the New Testament cites that work.

The fifth chapter of Genesis runs on a refrain. Each patriarch receives the same formula: he lived so many years, he begat sons and daughters, and he died. Eight times in a row. At the ninth the refrain breaks: Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him. It does not say that he died. It is the only exception in the chapter, and the silence is deliberate.

Out of that two-word gap comes the whole Enochic literature. The Second Book of Enoch tells the journey: two angels take him up, he passes through the seven heavens one by one, he sees the storehouses of snow and dew, the angels of punishment, paradise and the place of the condemned; and on reaching the throne, Michael anoints him with an oil whose scent is like myrrh and clothes him in the garments of glory, and from that moment his appearance is that of one of the glorious ones.

Only one other figure in the Hebrew Bible leaves like that, without dying: Elijah, taken up in a whirlwind. Tradition paired the two, and ended by giving each of them an angel. Enoch became Metatron; Elijah, Sandalphon. That the patriarch with the shortest life should be the only one who does not finish it is the irony on which everything else is built.

The Third Book of Enoch, or Sefer Hekhalot, is a Jewish mystical text of the fifth or sixth century presented as the account of Rabbi Ishmael when he goes up to heaven and finds there an angel who introduces himself with a disconcerting sentence: I am Enoch, the son of Jared.

What the text goes on to describe is a smelting. His flesh turns to flame; his sinews, to burning fire; his bones, to embers; the light of his eyes, to radiance; and his eyeballs, to lit torches. Seventy-two wings are fixed on him, thirty-six on each side, and three hundred and sixty-five thousand eyes. A throne is made for him at the door of the seventh palace and a crown is set upon it. The patriarch who learned writing from the angels ends up as the scribe of them all.

And here is what is almost always told backwards. The Talmudic passage that mentions this angel does not promote him: it corrects him. In tractate Hagigah it is related that Aher, seeing Metatron seated and writing, concluded that there might be two powers in heaven; and to undo the misunderstanding, the story adds that Metatron was given sixty lashes of fire, because a servant does not sit. The scene exists to set a limit, not to grant a rank. Everything later said about his height drags that clause along with it.