Enoch Commanded the Torah to Methuselah Before Moses Was Born

Every student of the Torah knows that the commandments came from Sinai. What fewer know is that the Book of Jubilees claims the essential laws were already in circulation centuries before Moses was born, passed down through a chain that begins with Enoch and runs through Methuselah and Lamech to Noah, who commanded his sons, who commanded their sons, all the way down to the moment when an angel dictated the whole record to Moses on the mountain.

The chain is explicit. Noah, in his final instructions to his children and grandchildren, says: thus did Enoch, the father of your father, command Methuselah his son, and Methuselah his son Lamech, and Lamech commanded me all the things which his fathers commanded him. The commandments were not new at Sinai. They had been traveling from mouth to ear across the generations since the first man to receive written knowledge from the angels wrote them down on tablets and passed them to his son.

What were these commandments? The Book of Jubilees gives an example in context: the laws of the fruit of a new tree. In the first three years after planting, do not eat the fruit. In the fourth year, sanctify all the fruit before the Lord and offer it as a first-fruits offering. In the fifth year, make the release so that you release it in righteousness and uprightness. And you shall be righteous, and all that you plant will prosper. This is not a new law invented at Sinai. It is an ancient commandment, attributed to Enoch himself, transmitted intact through four generations.

Enoch's authority for these commandments was direct. The Book of Jubilees records that in the days of Enoch's father Jared, the angels of the Lord descended to earth to instruct the children of men, to teach them judgment and uprightness. Enoch was the first human being to learn writing and knowledge and wisdom. What the angels taught, he received. What he received, he wrote. What he wrote, he commanded to Methuselah. The chain of transmission is as unbroken as the tradition itself.

This is why the Legends of the Jews describes Enoch as a king who ruled for two hundred and forty-three years, during which time there was peace over the whole earth. Not peace by military suppression but peace because the people had received the law and lived by it. Enoch taught them the ways of the Lord. He established law and order for the regulation of the affairs of men. He gave them instruction before he left, exhorting them to serve God and walk in His ways. The commandments he passed down to Methuselah were the same commandments that made the peace possible.

The failure came after Enoch ascended. Methuselah taught faithfully. But in the latter days of Methuselah's life, the sons of men turned from the Lord. They corrupted the earth. They robbed and plundered one another. They rebelled against God. The chain of transmission did not break, exactly, but the people stopped listening to it. The flood was not God destroying a civilization that had received no instruction. It was God responding to a civilization that had received every instruction and rejected it anyway.

Noah carried the transmission through the flood. He built the altar first. He made the offering. He kept the feast of weeks and the feast of first-fruits as his grandfather Enoch had established them. He commanded his sons: as Enoch commanded Methuselah, as Methuselah commanded Lamech, as Lamech commanded me, so I command you. The Torah that reached Sinai was not a new revelation in the sense of something previously unknown. It was the authoritative written form of a teaching that had been traveling from father to son since before the flood.

When Moses climbed the mountain and the angel of the presence began dictating to him, what the angel was reading aloud was the heavenly record that Enoch had first received, that Methuselah had first inherited, that Noah had carried through the water. The tablets given at Sinai and the tablets that Enoch wrote before the flood belong to the same chain. Between them, the flood. But the commandments on both sides of the water are the same commandments, because they came from the same source, from the angels who descended to earth in the days of Jared, and from the one student who was ready to receive everything they had to give.

The Book of Jubilees, which preserves the fullest record of this chain, was itself written as a dictation from an angel of the presence to Moses on Mount Sinai. The angel was giving Moses not a new law but a complete history, one that showed how the commandments had always existed, how they had traveled from Enoch to Methuselah to Lamech to Noah to Abraham to Isaac to Jacob, how they had been waiting for Israel the entire time. The receiving at Sinai was not the beginning. It was the formal ratification of what Enoch had started.