The most common tradition identifies Metatron as the angel who was once Enoch, the mortal man who "walked with God" (Genesis 5:24) and was transformed into the mightiest angel in heaven. But the Zohar, the foundational text of Kabbalah (first published c. 1290 CE in Castile, Spain), preserves an older and stranger idea—a Primordial Metatron who existed before Enoch, before Adam, before the world itself.
This Primordial Metatron, according to the Zohar and related kabbalistic traditions, was the very first being created—a divine blueprint for everything that followed. Howard Schwartz's Tree of Souls calls him the son of the Shekhinah (שכינה), the divine feminine presence, God's immanent dwelling in the world. The Zohar describes the Shekhinah as God's Bride, the feminine aspect of the divine. If Metatron is the son of the Shekhinah, then the kabbalists are describing a divine family—God and the Shekhinah as parents, and Metatron as their offspring.
The Zohar (1:94b) takes this even further, suggesting that the very first words of the Torah—Bereishit bara Elohim, "In the beginning God created"—actually refer to Metatron. The word Bereishit is read as "He created first," and that first creation was Metatron. According to this tradition, the Primordial Metatron assisted God in the creation of the world and has assisted God ever since in ruling the worlds above and below.
The Babylonian Talmud contains hints of this idea as well. Sanhedrin 38b (redacted c. 500 CE) records a debate about (Exodus 24:1), where God says to Moses, "Come up to the Lord." The rabbis noticed the oddity—if God is speaking, why does He say "come up to the Lord" rather than "come up to Me"? One interpretation preserved in the Talmud suggests that the "Lord" referred to here is Metatron, the angel whose name is "like the name of his Master." God was telling Moses to ascend to Metatron's presence.
The idea of a Primordial Metatron challenges the more common understanding of Metatron as the transformed Enoch, a tradition rooted in 3 Enoch (also called Sefer Heikhalot (the heavenly palaces)), which dates to approximately the 5th-6th century CE. The Zohar, where the Primordial Metatron concept reaches full expression, was not compiled until the 13th century. Whether this represents a genuinely older tradition that the Zohar preserved or a later kabbalistic innovation remains an open question in the study of Jewish mysticism.
This concept connects to other ideas in Jewish mystical thought, particularly Adam Kadmon (אדם קדמון), the Primordial Man—an archetypal, cosmic form of humanity that preceded the physical Adam. Both Adam Kadmon and the Primordial Metatron serve as intermediaries between the infinite God and the finite world, channels through which divine energy flows into creation. The relationship between these two figures is explored across multiple texts in Tree of Souls and in the broader kabbalistic tradition.
The two Metatron traditions—the transformed Enoch and the Primordial being—are not necessarily contradictory. The Zohar itself seems to hold both simultaneously, suggesting that Metatron is a multifaceted figure who operates on multiple levels of reality. He is both the human who ascended and the cosmic being who was always there. Both the youngest angel in heaven and the oldest. The ongoing tension between these two identities reflects a deeper theological question about the relationship between the human and the divine—whether the gap between them can be crossed, and what happens to the one who crosses it.