Enoch Wrote 366 Books and Came Back With a Frozen Face

The Angels at the Bed

Enoch was three hundred and sixty-five years old and asleep in his house when the distress seized his heart. Not a dream exactly. A dread without shape, a weeping he could not name, a sense that something enormous was about to enter the room where he had slept safely for centuries.

Two figures stood at the head of his bed.

They were taller than any person who had ever walked the earth. Their faces blazed like the sun. Their eyes burned like living fire. Flames came from their lips. Their garments were purple, shifting with colors that had no earthly names. Their wings were brighter than gold. Their hands were white as snow.

They said his name.

Enoch woke. He looked at them and was terrified, and then they explained. He would ascend to heaven that day. Before he left, he should bless his children and tell his household what was about to happen, so that no one would come looking for him.

Alone at the Edge of the Seventh Heaven

The angels carried Enoch upward through the heavens. Each one was different. Each one was larger than the one below it. He passed through chambers of clouds and fire and ice, through halls where angels stood in rows and sang without stopping, through a darkness that contained its own kind of light. His guides named what he saw. They explained what they could explain.

At the edge of the seventh heaven they stopped.

They said: this far we were commanded to travel with you.

They vanished. Enoch stood alone before the throne of the highest heaven, surrounded by cherubim and seraphim whose wings covered the air, whose many eyes saw everything, whose voices rose in the ceaseless praise that never stopped and never would. He fell on his face. He cried out: what has happened to me?

Then Gabriel lifted him. God spoke. Enoch was brought before the face of heaven's center, and whatever fear he had carried from the bed in his house, it was replaced by something that had no human word.

Sixty Days Without Stopping

For sixty days and sixty nights Enoch wrote without stopping.

The archangel Pravuil, heaven's own scribe and the wisest of all the archangels, dictated to him everything. The workings of heaven. The workings of earth. The workings of the sea. Every element, every motion, every pattern. The thunderings of thunder, the courses of the sun and moon, the changes of the stars, the changes of the seasons. The rising of every wind. The number of every angel and the shape of every song they sang. The tongue of every human language. The pattern of every human life. The commandments of heaven. Everything a mortal mind could learn and several things that were not meant for mortal minds.

When the dictation ended, Pravuil gave Enoch three hundred and sixty-six books. He said: everything you have written here, keep it safe. These books contain the wisdom of all creation.

The Angel Who Froze His Face

Before Enoch could return to earth, God called one of the older angels forward. This being was white as snow, with hands like ice and the appearance of great frost. He was terrible to see even in heaven, where extraordinary things were ordinary.

The angel froze Enoch's face. Not as punishment. As protection.

Enoch had been anointed with divine ointment. He had been dressed in garments of glory. His body had been transformed until he resembled one of the angelic hosts. No human being on earth could look at a person who had stood before God's face and survive the looking. The radiance of the highest heaven was in Enoch's skin. Mortal eyes cannot bear the fire of a stove or the heat of the sun. They could not have borne Enoch without the frost that sealed what heaven had opened in him.

God told him: if your face were not frozen, no man could endure looking at you.

Enoch came down carrying three hundred and sixty-six books and a face his children could not look at directly. He had thirty days to speak with them before he was taken permanently. He spent those days trying to explain what he had learned, and his children wrote down what they could follow, and the rest could only be guessed at by those who came after.