The Last Words Enoch Said Before He Disappeared

Enoch knew he was leaving. The angels had already taken him once, brought him through the ten heavens, and returned him. Now he had been permitted one final visit with his sons, a last window of time to say what he needed to say before God took him permanently from the earth. What he chose to say, according to 2 Enoch -- the Slavonic Book of Enoch, preserving traditions scholars date to the first century CE -- was not prophecy or warning. It was instruction about time.

"Now, my children, lay thought on your hearts, mark well the words of your father, which are all come to you from the Lord's lips." Everything he was about to say had a single source. He was not transmitting his own wisdom but the knowledge that had been dictated to him by the archangel Pravuil over thirty days of continuous writing in the presence of God. The 366 books he had written were the documentation. His blessing was the interpretive key.

He began with foundations. The Lord had placed the foundations of the world "in the unknown" -- not the unknown to Enoch, who had seen them, but the unknown to ordinary human experience. The heavens, both visible and invisible, physical and spiritual. The earth fixed on the waters. The countless creatures. Then the rhetorical questions that 2 Enoch favors as a way of invoking the limits of human comprehension: "Who has counted the water and the foundation of the unfixed, or the dust of the earth, or the sand of the sea, or the drops of the rain, or the morning dew, or the winds' breathings? Who has filled earth and sea, and the indissoluble winter?" The answer, implied, is: no one, except the One who made them, and the scribe who was taken to observe them and write them down.

Then the sun. Enoch gave his sons a cosmological specification: the sun moves along seven heavenly circles, each circle containing the appointment of 182 thrones, so that it descends over 182 of them on short days and ascends over 182 on long days, with two throne-positions where it rests. The sun has a relationship with the earth, and the relationship is emotional as well as physical: "When it goes close to the earth, then the earth is glad and makes grow its fruits, and when it goes away, then the earth is sad, and trees and all fruits have no florescence." The earth responds to the sun's proximity with gladness. The seasons are not mechanical; they are relational.

All of this had been measured "with good measurement of hours, and fixed a measure by his wisdom, of the visible and the invisible." The physical world and the spiritual world were both subject to the same ordering principle. And then the line that 2 Enoch offers as the key to the whole cosmology: "From the invisible He made all things visible, himself being invisible." The spiritual precedes and generates the physical. The creation is a rendering-visible of what was already real in an invisible form.

This is the knowledge Enoch was distributing. The Book of Jubilees, composed in the second century BCE and preserved in the apocryphal tradition, records that Enoch "recounted the weeks of the jubilees, and made known to them the days of the years, and set in order the months and recounted the Sabbaths of the years." The calendrical knowledge was real and practical. But 2 Enoch's account of the blessing Enoch gave his sons goes deeper: he was not just handing them a calendar. He was explaining what time was for.

The books, he told them, were to be distributed not only to his children but to "all nations who shall have the sense to fear God." They were not tribal property. They were intended for anyone with the wisdom to value them -- "may they come to love them more than any food or earthly sweets, and read them and apply themselves to them." For those who rejected them, "a terrible judgment awaits." For those who received and transmitted them: "Blessed is the man who shall bear their yoke and shall drag them along, for he shall be released on the day of the great judgment."

Enoch had seen the great judgment from the inside, walking through the cosmology he describes in his records of the heavenly order. He had walked past the weeping prisoners in the second heaven, the souls in torment at the lowest depths, the key-holders and guards at hell's gates "like great serpents" with eyes of fire and sharp teeth. He knew what the judgment-place looked like. The blessing he was giving his sons was not wishful thinking but practical information: the books existed, the knowledge in them was real, the judgment they described was real, and the people who treated those books as more valuable than food would be the ones who stood on the right side of it. When he finished speaking, the Book of Jasher records that all the kings of the earth rose and took his son Methuselah and anointed him and caused him to reign. Enoch was gone. Methuselah taught what his father had taught him -- wisdom, knowledge, and the fear of God -- for generation after generation. The books passed from hand to hand down toward the Flood, carrying the record of what one mortal man had seen when God opened the gates of heaven and let him walk through.