An Angel of Frost Sealed Enoch's Face Before He Went Home

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Three Hundred Angels Were Singing Over the Fruit

The angels set Enoch down on the floor of the third heaven, and the smell reached him before the light did. Two heavens behind him, chained angels were still weeping in a darkness that pressed against skin. In front of him, orchard.

Not orchard the way the land below grew it. These trees carried at the same hour the fruit of every species and every taste the world had ever produced. Nothing there was barren. Not one withered branch in the whole spread of it.

At the center stood the Tree of Life, its bark running gold and vermilion at once, its branches burning with a radiance that lay over everything beneath them, its root going down past the floor of that heaven and out to the far edge of the earth. This was where God rested when He came into paradise. Two springs fed the ground under it, one running honey and milk, the other oil and wine, and they split into four rivers that wound through the garden and went down into the world below.

Three hundred angels tended the place and sang while they worked, and the singing did not stop. Not for an hour. Not for a breath.

"How beautiful this place is," Enoch said.

His guides answered without slowing their pace. "This is prepared for the righteous, the tzaddikim (צדיקים). For those who take suffering and do not break, who feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and cover the orphan. For them this garden is an inheritance with no end on it."

Then They Turned Him North

The two angels carried him to the northern side of the same heaven, and the fragrance shut off the way a door shuts.

The darkness there had weight and appetite. Its only light came from a murky fire flaming upward off nothing, and from a river of fire running through the black like a cut that would not close. The whole country was fire, and the same country was frost, ice, thirst, a shivering that never warmed into anything. The angels standing guard carried weapons of fury and used them without stopping to look at a face.

"Woe, woe," Enoch said. "How terrible is this place."

"Prepared for the ones who dishonor God," his guides told him. "Those who rob the poor and watch the hungry starve, who hold cloth in their hands and strip the naked instead of covering them. Those who bow down to gods carved out of wood, deaf things that cannot hear a prayer."

Paradise and the pit sat under one sky, divided by a direction on the compass, both furnished, both waiting.

The Order to Send Him Home

He went higher after that, past the sun's road and the fiery hosts, up to the tenth heaven, where he stood in front of the face of God, was anointed with the ointment, dressed in garments of glory, and changed until he looked like one of the hosts around him. Then came the order to go back down and speak to his children for thirty days.

One problem stood in the way of it.

"Enoch," God said, "if your face is not frozen here, no man will be able to behold it."

The radiance of that place was still on him. No one in the land below could take it into their eyes and keep them, any more than a man can put his face into an open stove or stare straight up at the sun at noon.

The Angel Whose Hands Were Frost

God called one of the older angels forward, a terrible and menacing being, white as snow, with the look of great frost on him and hands to match.

The angel laid those hands flat on Enoch's face and held them there.

The light went down under the skin. What had been burning on the surface got sealed behind an ordinary human mask, cheekbones, mouth, eyes a son could meet without dying of it. Nothing was taken off him. It was only shut in.

Then God spoke to the two angels who had first carried him up. "Let Enoch go down to earth with you. Wait for him until the appointed day."

They put him back on his own bed at night, the same bed they had lifted him off. Methuselah had been keeping watch beside it in daylight and in dark, and when he heard Enoch arrive the awe came over him so hard that he could not speak first.

"Let all my household come together," Enoch said. "I will tell them everything."

Thirty Days and Two Words to Swear By

He made his sons swear, and in the same breath he took every oath away from them. Not by heaven. Not by earth. Not by anything that had ever been made.

"The Lord Himself said there is no oath in Me, and no injustice, only truth," he told them. "If there is no truth in men, let them swear by the words 'yes, yes' or 'no, no.'"

Then he gave them something heavier to hold. Before a child is conceived in the womb, a place is already prepared for that soul, and a measure is fixed along with it, how much suffering it will carry here and what its life will cost to live.

"Do not deceive yourselves," he said. "A place has been prepared for every soul."

Every deed goes into the record. No one born on earth stays hidden and no work stays covered over. "I see all things," Enoch said, and his sons sat looking at the face of a man whose eyes had been iced shut so that they could sit there at all.

What he gave them after that was small enough to do by hand. Take the wound, the insult, the evil word, and let it pass for the sake of the Lord. When a man wrongs you, do not go back at him, neighbor or enemy, because the Lord settles His own accounts on the day of the great judgment. Whoever spends gold or silver on a brother collects treasure for it in the world to come. Stretch out your hands to the poor as far as your strength reaches, and do not hide your silver in the ground. Help the faithful while affliction is on them, and affliction will not find you when your own turn arrives.

The frost held his face steady while he talked. Outside, the month was already spending itself, and Methuselah was keeping the count.