(Genesis 5:24) is one of the most mysterious verses in the Torah. "Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him." That is all the Hebrew says. No explanation of where he went or what happened. The Targum Jonathan reveals the answer. Enoch "was withdrawn, and he ascended to the firmament by the Word before the Lord, and his name was called Metatron the Great Saphra."

This is extraordinary. The Targum identifies Enoch, a human being listed in a genealogy, as Metatron, the most powerful angel in Jewish mystical tradition, the one who sits on a throne beside God's own in some Kabbalistic texts, the "Prince of the Countenance" who governs all the other angels. The title "Great Saphra" (Great Scribe) connects to the tradition that Metatron serves as the heavenly scribe, recording the deeds of all humanity. One verse in a dry genealogy becomes the origin story of the highest angel in the heavenly court.

The rest of Genesis 5 is a list of lifespans, and most translations render it as-is. But the Targum makes one critical editorial intervention about Cain. When describing the birth of Seth, it says Seth "had the likeness of his image and of his similitude," meaning he looked like Adam. Then the Targum explains why this matters. "Before had Hava born Kain, who was not like to him," meaning Cain did not resemble Adam at all. "And Kain was cast out; neither is his seed genealogized in the book of the genealogy of Adam." Cain's entire bloodline is deliberately erased from the record of humanity. Seth replaces him not just as a son but as the only legitimate continuation of Adam's image.

The chapter also notes that in the generation of Enosh, Adam's grandson, humanity "began to err, and to make themselves idols, and surnamed their idols by the name of the Word of the Lord." Idolatry did not begin with foreign nations. It began in Adam's own family, three generations in, with people attaching God's sacred Name to false images. The Targum turns a genealogy into a story of lineage, erasure, angelic transformation, and the first corruption of worship.