Enoch Came Back From God's Face and Tried to Explain It

Enoch had seen the face of God. He came back to his sons to tell them about it, and the first thing he said was that he could not.

This is the moment at the center of 2 Enoch -- the Slavonic Book of Enoch, preserving traditions scholars date to the first century CE -- when Enoch returns from the tenth heaven and tries to transmit to his children what he had experienced. He had been taken through ten layers of the cosmos. He had seen the imprisoned Watchers weeping in the second heaven and had been honest about his inability to help them. He had seen the Tree of Life in the third heaven and heard the specification of who paradise was prepared for. He had been anointed, clothed in glory, and stood before a face described as "like iron made to glow from fire." He had sat with the archangel Pravuil for thirty days and thirty nights and written 366 books covering all of creation. Then God sent him home.

Now he stood before his children and tried to speak. "Oh my children, my beloved ones, hear the admonition of your father, as much as is according to the Lord's will." The qualifier is immediate: he will tell them as much as God permits to be said. There is a category of what he saw that cannot be transmitted. He can describe his experience only by negation and comparison.

You see my eyes, he told them. I have seen the Lord's eyes -- "shining like the sun's rays and filling the eyes of man with awe." You see my right hand. I have seen the Lord's right hand -- "filling heaven as He helped me." You hear my words. I heard the Lord's voice -- "like great thunder incessantly with hurling of clouds." You know the scope of my work on earth. I have seen the Lord's compass -- "limitless and perfect, which has no end." Everything about himself that his children could observe was simultaneously true and a diminished echo of the divine reality he had encountered. The relationship between human experience and divine reality was not one of analogy but of radical disproportion.

Then he turned from the ineffable to the measurable, because he had also been given the measurable. He told them what he knew: the heights from earth to the seventh heaven and downward to the lowest depths. The dimensions of the mountains and hills and fields. The revolutions of the stars -- "not even the angels see their number, while I have written all their names." The road of the thunder and the lightning, the chain by which it is let out "gently, in measure, lest by a heavy chain and violence it hurl down the angry clouds and destroy all things on earth." The key-holders of the winds, who bear weighing-scales and measures and apportion the wind "cunningly over the whole earth, lest by heavy breathing they make the earth to rock."

The universe he described to his children was not controlled by blind force but by meticulous administration. Every natural phenomenon -- every storm, every season, every gust of wind -- was governed by angels with precise instruments following exact orders. He had seen the mechanisms from the inside. He had written them down. Now he was explaining to people who could only observe the outside of these processes that everything they experienced was more managed and more intentional than they imagined.

The Book of Jubilees, written in the second century BCE and part of the broader apocryphal tradition, says that Enoch "testified to the sons of men among the generations of the earth, and recounted the weeks of the jubilees, and made known to them the days of the years, and set in order the months." This is the administrative dimension of his teaching. But 2 Enoch captures something different: the moment before the administration, when a man who had seen the face of God came home and looked at his children's faces -- ordinary, human, limited -- and felt the full weight of trying to say what he had seen.

He told them he had seen Adam and Eve among the forefathers of all time and had wept. He had seen the prisoners in pain, waiting for limitless judgment. He had seen the treasury-houses of heaven and the judgment-place and the weeping hell. And he had written it all down in 366 books that he was now entrusting to them. "Take these books of your fathers' handwriting and read them," he said. "For the books are many, and in them you will learn all the Lord's works, all that has been from the beginning of creation, and will be till the end of time." He was handing them something he could not fully explain and asking them to guard it. The knowledge of everything that existed and would ever exist, compressed into books, entrusted to the son who would become Methuselah, who would pass it to Lamech, who would pass it to Noah, who would carry it through the Flood.