The Hebrew Bible says Enoch "walked with God, and he was no more, for God took him" (Genesis 5:24). Generations of readers have understood this as Enoch being taken alive into heaven—a rare and extraordinary fate. Targum Onkelos tells a completely different story.
Onkelos renders "walked with God" as "walked with the fear of God." Enoch did not walk alongside God as a companion. He walked in reverence and awe. The relationship is not peer-to-peer. It is creature-to-Creator, and Onkelos will not let the language suggest otherwise.
Then comes the bombshell. "God took him" becomes, in Onkelos's Aramaic, "God put him to death." Enoch was not raptured into heaven. He died. Onkelos strips away the mystical interpretation entirely, replacing celestial ascent with ordinary mortality. Why? Because the idea of a human being taken bodily into heaven blurs the boundary between the human and the divine—exactly the kind of blurring Onkelos works to prevent throughout his translation.
The rest of Genesis 5 is a genealogical list—Adam to Noah, with lifespans stretching into the hundreds of years. Onkelos translates it faithfully, making no adjustments to the extraordinary ages. Nine hundred and thirty years for Adam. Nine hundred and sixty-nine for Methuselah. These numbers stand without comment.
The chapter ends with Noah's birth and his father Lemech's prophecy: "This one will bring us rest from our work and the anguish of our hands, from the soil which God has cursed" (Genesis 5:29). Onkelos renders "anguish" as "toil"—a small change, but one that keeps the focus on physical labor rather than existential suffering.