Creation According to 2 Enoch: The Secret the Angels Never Heard

In shortAccording to chapters 24 to 30 of 2 Enoch, before creation God moved alone among the invisible things. He commanded a being named Adoil to burst open, and out of him came a great light that became the foundation of the higher things. Then came Arkhas, solid and heavy, and from him came the darkness, the foundation of the lower things. From there creation continued for six days.

The Book of Genesis opens with the words “In the beginning,” and does not say what came before them. The rabbis of the Mishnah even warned against the question. Whoever looks into four things, they said, it would have been better for him had he not come into the world: what is above, what is below, what was before and what will be after.

The author of 2 Enoch could not resist. At the heart of his book he places a private lesson, in which God himself explains to one human being what there was before there was anything.

A private lesson in the tenth heaven

When the lesson begins, Enoch has already passed through all the heavens. He has been anointed with oil, dressed in garments of glory, and taught by the angel Pravuil all the works of heaven and earth. He has even written them down in three hundred and sixty-six books. Then God calls him to sit at his left, beside Gabriel, and begins to speak:

Listen, Enoch, and take these words of mine to heart. For not even to my angels have I revealed my secret. I have not told them of their beginning or of my kingdom that has no end, and they have not understood the work of my creation, which I am telling you about today. For before anything visible (material) existed, I used to move alone among the invisible (spiritual) things, like the sun from east to west and from west to east. But even the sun has rest within itself, and I found no rest, because I created everything. Then it came into my thought to lay foundations and to create a visible (material) creation.

2 Enoch 24:3–5

Two things stand out here. The first is the addressee. God reveals to a human being something the angels do not know, and has not even told them of their own beginning. The second is the motive. Genesis does not explain why the world was created. Here there is an explanation, and it is almost human: God moved about alone, back and forth, and found no rest.

Adoil and Arkhas

Then comes the strangest scene in the book:

I commanded in the lowest depths that the visible (material) should come down out of the invisible (spiritual). Then Adoil came down, very great. I looked at him, and in his belly was a great light. I said to him: Burst open, Adoil, and let the visible (material) come out of you. He burst open, and a great light came out. I was in the midst of the great light, and as light is born from light, so a great age came out and revealed all the creation I had planned to create.

2 Enoch 25:1–3

Out of the invisible world descends a very great being named Adoil, with light in his belly. God commands him to burst open, and the light comes out. God sets up a throne for himself, raises the light on high, and fixes it as the foundation of all the higher things. Then he calls a second time into the depths, and out comes Arkhas, solid, heavy and very red. He too bursts open, and out of him comes darkness, which goes down below and becomes the foundation of the lower things. Above the light there is nothing, and beneath the darkness there is nothing.

The names Adoil and Arkhas are known from no other source, and every attempt to explain them has remained a guess. The picture itself recalls ancient stories from Egypt and Greece about a primeval egg from which the world hatches. And a present-day reader will find it hard not to think for a moment of the Big Bang: everything begins with one dense thing that bursts open, and light comes out of it. The resemblance is a coincidence, but it shows that the question “what was there at the beginning” draws the imagination toward the same images, in the first millennium as in the third.

Six days, with additions

From here the story follows the familiar order, day after day, but each day gains a detail that Genesis does not have. Out of the light and the darkness the waters are made. Out of the waters comes rock, and out of the rock the dry land. From the rock God also cuts a great fire, and from the fire he creates the hosts of angels, whose clothing is flame.

The story of the first rebellion is woven in here too. One of the angels conceived an impossible thought: to set his throne above the clouds and be equal to his maker. He was thrown down from the height with his angels, and ever since he has been flying in the air, above the abyss. Later the book gives his name as well, Satanail.

Adam, from seven substances

On the sixth day comes the turn of the human being, and the author hands over the recipe:

On the sixth day I commanded my wisdom to create man from seven substances: first, his flesh from the earth; second, his blood from the dew; third, his eyes from the sun; fourth, his bones from stone; fifth, his understanding from the swiftness of the angels and from the cloud; sixth, his veins and hair from the grass of the earth; seventh, his soul from my breath and from the wind.

2 Enoch 30:10

The list is not arbitrary. Each part of the human being is taken from a different part of the world, so that the whole person is the world in miniature: earth, dew, sun, stone, cloud, grass and wind. Seven senses correspond to the seven substances. And the result, in the words of the book, is “a second angel,” a creature who is “small in his greatness, and great again in his smallness.”

The name has an explanation too. God gives Adam a name from the four directions of the world: east, west, south and north. In Hebrew, and in English, the sentence is opaque. In Greek it is a solved riddle: the first letters of the names of the four directions spell the word Adam. This is one of the reasons most scholars believe that 2 Enoch, which survived in Slavonic, was originally written in Greek, perhaps by a Jew of Alexandria.

What a human being cannot see

The newly created human is shown two ways, the light and the darkness, and told: this is good and this is evil. The purpose is stated: to know whether he has love for his maker or hatred. Free choice is part of the plan.

Then comes a sentence that is easy to pass over without noticing, and it may be the deepest in the chapter. God says: I have seen his nature, but he has not seen his own nature, and therefore, because he does not see, he will sin.

According to this sentence, sin does not come from wickedness, nor from temptation. It comes from a very particular kind of blindness. The human being is made of seven substances, he is the world in miniature, and the one thing in the world he is unable to see is himself. Anyone who knows the inscription that was carved at Delphi, “Know thyself,” will recognize a kindred idea here, in different dress.

Why Enoch

The question we began with remains. Why does God tell all this to a human being, and not to the angels?

The answer may be simple. The angels of 2 Enoch stand in their ranks, sing their song, and ask nothing. They do not know what their beginning was, and it does not seem to bother them. The human being is the only creature who wants to know what there was before he was born.

Curiosity is not listed among the seven substances from which Adam was made. And yet it is what brought Enoch all the way to the tenth heaven, and what made an anonymous author two thousand years ago write down the very thing the Mishnah asked us not to ask.