17 myths
The highest of the angels in Jewish mysticism, called the Prince of the Presence and the heavenly scribe; rabbinic and Hekhalot tradition identifies him with the patriarch Enoch, transformed after his ascent to heaven.
17 myths on JewishMythology.com retell how Jewish tradition imagines metatron, drawn from the Hebrew Bible, Midrash, Talmud, Kabbalah, and later Jewish literature. Each story below synthesizes primary sources into a single narrative; follow any myth to read it, and from there into the source passages behind it.
Enoch vanishes from a genealogy without a grave. Two blazing angels lift him from his bed, and he returns as Metatron, heaven's Great Scribe.
Elisha ben Abuya entered heaven and saw an angel seated on a throne. In heaven, no one sits. His mind drew one conclusion, and it cost him everything.
Adam saw David would live only three hours. He signed away seventy years of his own life so the greatest king of Israel could exist at all.
Metatron carried seventy names through heaven, but the name Youth kept the mighty angel tied to service, speed, and human memory.
Thirty thousand angels escorted Moses through the heavens to receive the Torah. The escort was not an honor guard. It was crowd control.
Enoch told them every morning to turn around and go home. Some did. On the eighth day the kings sent men out to count the ones who had stayed.
A heretic found one extra word in the verse at Sinai and used it to prove there were two powers in heaven. Rav Idit answered him by naming the angel.
When the Tabernacle was raised and fire came down, God's joy matched the joy of the first day. The world had been waiting for this moment.
A stranger found Joseph lost in a field and pointed him toward Dothan, where his brothers sold him. The Torah never says who the stranger was.
An old man hung merchants' scales in front of the throne, put every noble in Egypt in one pan and a baby goat in the other, and the goat went down.
The moment the desert Tabernacle rose, a mirrored sanctuary locked into place above it. Metatron runs the upper one. Bilam ran his mouth with iron in it.
Most picture Jacob wrestling a man by a river. One early medieval tradition lifts the fight out of the mud entirely and moves it into the palaces of heaven.
The throne's measures drown the mind in myriads of parasangs. Then a quieter voice says Israel's raw sigh is sweet and already heard.
Exiles sit and weep by Babylon's waters, and God takes up the same lament above. Metatron falls on his face and is told not to stop the tears.
One glimpse above wiped his ledger of merits blank. When he died, fire burned over his grave until Rabbi Meir spread a cloak across it.
Behind a curtain of divine names, Metatron showed Rabbi Ishmael every generation to come. The light hurt. The knowledge did not make the path easy.
Roman soldiers were hunting Shimon bar Yochai. He stood in the cave mouth forty days and prayed, and on the fortieth night the rock seemed to thin.
