What Enoch Found in the First Two Heavens

Two radiant angels appeared at Enoch's bedside on the first day of the month when he was 365 years old. Their faces shone like the sun. Fire came from their lips. Their wings were brighter than gold. They called his name, and he got up from his bed and was afraid, and the appearance of his face changed from terror. This opening scene from 2 Enoch (the Slavonic Book of Enoch, preserved in manuscripts from the ninth to fourteenth centuries CE but drawing on traditions scholars date to the first century CE or earlier) sets the pattern for everything that follows: Enoch's journey through the heavens is not triumphant. It is terrifying at every threshold, and the terror is the point.

The angels brought him to the first heaven and placed him on clouds, and he looked up and saw the ether, and beyond it an enormous sea. Not a sea like any sea on earth -- a celestial ocean greater than all the earthly waters combined. Two hundred angels stood nearby, the rulers of the stellar orders, and they "fly with their wings and come round all those who sail." The stars have administrators. Every ship on every earthly sea has angelic overseers attending to the stellar navigation above them. The universe, as 2 Enoch presents it, is not impersonal machinery but a living system of hierarchical attendance, each level staffed and supervised.

The angels showed him the treasure-houses of the snow. The treasure-houses of the dew, described as being "like oil of the olive, and the appearance of its form, as of all the flowers of the earth." Every drop of dew that falls on every morning in every field on earth has been stored and managed and released by angels who keep "their terrible store-houses." This is a cosmos without accidents -- every meteorological event is an act of distributed divine administration. The rain that will fall next Tuesday has been sitting in a locked treasury since the world began, waiting for the appointed angel to turn the key.

Then the second heaven. And here everything changed.

The second heaven was dark -- "greater than earthly darkness," the text says, a darkness that exceeded anything Enoch had experienced below. In that darkness were prisoners. Angels, hanging in chains, waiting. Their faces were darker than the darkness around them. They wept without stopping, incessantly, through all hours, a sound that had been going on since before Enoch was born and would continue after he was gone. He asked the angels guiding him who these prisoners were. The answer was precise: "These are God's apostates, who obeyed not God's commands, but took counsel with their own will, and turned away with their prince, who also is fastened on the fifth heaven."

They were the Watchers -- the angels who had abandoned their station, who had followed their own will rather than God's, and who were now awaiting the great judgment at the end of time. They had been weeping in that darkness for centuries already. When Enoch walked into the second heaven, they recognized him. They saluted him. And then they asked him to pray for them.

Enoch's response is one of the most honest moments in the entire literature of heavenly ascent. He did not say yes. He did not offer comfort. He said: "Who am I, a mortal man, that I should pray for angels? Who knows whither I go, or what will befall me? Or who will pray for me?" He was being escorted through seven heavens by angels whose nature and power exceeded anything human. He had not yet stood before God's face. He did not yet know if he would survive the encounter. The imprisoned angels were asking him for intercession, and he was pointing out that he was the least qualified person in the building to grant it.

This is precisely why 2 Enoch places the scene here, before the ascent is completed. Enoch would go on to stand before God, to be anointed and clothed in the garments of glory, to be dictated 366 books of knowledge encompassing the whole of creation. He would become the scribe of heaven, the one who wrote down the weeks of the jubilees and who would stand before the face of God in the tenth heaven and the revolutions of the stars and the secrets of time. But none of that had happened yet. In the second heaven, he was just a man who had been woken from his bed by frightening strangers and was making his way through a universe he did not yet understand, past imprisoned angels weeping in the dark, being honest about the limits of his own standing before the One he was being brought to meet.

The Book of Jubilees, composed in the second century BCE, describes Enoch as "the first among men that are born on earth who learnt writing and knowledge and wisdom," taught by the angels in the generation before the Flood. But 2 Enoch's account insists that even this first scribe, this first man of knowledge, arrived at the threshold of divine understanding as a frightened mortal. The treasury of heaven was real, and the imprisoned angels were real, and the darkness of the second heaven was real -- and so was the trembling of the man who walked through it not knowing what would happen to him next.