What Happens After Death According to the Book of Enoch

What happens after death? Whoever looks for an answer in the Hebrew Bible gets a short and disappointing one. The dead go down to Sheol, a dark and silent place, where, in the words of Ecclesiastes, “there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom.” The righteous and the wicked end up in the same place. “The dead praise not the LORD,” says the Book of Psalms, and goes back to dealing with the living.

And then, in the third century BCE, someone writes a short chapter that changes the picture. In it Enoch reaches a great mountain in the west, and sees with his own eyes where the dead are waiting.

The Book of Enoch’s answer, in brief

According to 1 Enoch, death is neither the end of the story nor a great equalizer. The souls of the dead are gathered in a special place, and wait there for the day of the great judgment. Even while they wait they are separated: the souls of the righteous in one place, and the souls of the sinners in another. After the judgment the righteous will receive life from the tree of life, and the wicked will be punished for ever.

This is one of the earliest Jewish descriptions of life after death that makes a moral distinction. Almost everything we imagine today when we say “heaven” and “hell” begins to take shape here.

The waiting room of the souls

In chapter 22 Enoch comes to a high mountain, with deep, wide hollows in it, very smooth. The angel Raphael explains to him that this is what they were made for: in them all the souls of humankind will be gathered, until the day appointed for them.

Enoch hears a voice of lament rising from there and reaching up to heaven. He asks whose voice it is, and Raphael answers that it is the soul of Abel, which still goes on accusing his brother Cain. It is a small, chilling detail. The first murder victim in history is still waiting for justice.

Then Enoch asks why the hollows are separated from one another, and receives the answer that made the chapter famous:

He answered me: These three divisions were made to separate the souls of the dead. This is how the souls of the righteous are set apart: there is a spring of water there, with light above it. The same has been made for sinners who died and were buried in the earth, and on whom judgment did not come during their lifetime.

1 Enoch 22:9–10

Notice the wording: sinners “on whom judgment did not come during their lifetime.” The book knows very well the phenomenon that troubles every decent person, the wicked who die at a ripe old age, rich and honored. For them, it says, there is a special chamber.

Why the idea was needed

It is easy to understand why the idea appeared just then. The Torah promises reward and punishment in this world: rain in its season for whoever keeps the commandments, and drought for whoever breaks them. But reality does not cooperate. The righteous suffer, the wicked prosper, and anyone who looks around with open eyes has a hard time making the accounts balance.

The Book of Enoch gives this difficulty an explicit voice. In the Epistle of Enoch, the sinners speak: the righteous died just as we do, and what good did their deeds do them? They went down to Sheol in grief, exactly like us. This is not an argument of unbelievers. It is the question the Book of Job asks, and Ecclesiastes after it.

Enoch’s answer is that the account is not closed in this life. There is a continuation, and in that continuation everything balances out. We tend to think of belief in the world to come as a consolation for mourners. At its origin it was, no less, a solution to a problem of justice.

The tree of life and the accursed valley

Enoch’s journey does not end in the waiting room. In the chapters that follow he also sees where the roads lead.

Among seven magnificent mountains he finds a tree whose fragrance is better than all spices, and whose leaves and fruit never wither. The angel Michael explains to him:

No flesh may touch this fragrant tree until the day of the great judgment, when all is atoned for and complete for ever. Then it will be given to the righteous and the humble. From its fruit life will be given to the chosen. It will be planted in the north, in the holy place, facing the house of the Lord, the King of the world.

1 Enoch 25:4–5

It is interesting to see what is promised here. The righteous will live long on the earth, as the ancient fathers lived, without sorrow and without trouble. This is not yet a heavenly paradise of souls. It is a mended earth, where people live long and live well.

And opposite it, close to the holy mountain, Enoch sees a deep, dry valley. This, he is told, is the accursed valley, where the cursed who spoke against God will be gathered, and there will be the place of their judgment. Readers who knew Jerusalem easily recognized the Valley of Hinnom at the foot of the city. From its name, Gei Hinnom, came the word Gehenna.

From Sheol to the sky

In the later parts of the book the picture goes on developing. The Book of Parables says that the earth will give back what was entrusted to it, and Sheol too will give back what it received. This is the resurrection of the dead, stated explicitly.

In the Epistle of Enoch the promise already soars upward. The righteous who have died are told that they will shine like the lights of heaven, that the gates of heaven will be opened to them, and that they will be companions of the hosts on high. The resemblance to the Book of Daniel, written in the same years, is striking. There too it is said that many of “them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake,” and that the wise “shall shine as the brightness of the firmament.”

What 2 Enoch adds

2 Enoch, written later, already presents an orderly picture. Paradise is in the third heaven, and in that same heaven, on the north side, is the place of punishment as well. For every person, it says, a place was prepared before the world was created.

Two details in the second book deserve attention. One is the statement that there is no repentance after death: what was not mended in life will not be mended afterwards. The other is more surprising. The souls of animals, too, it says, do not perish, and on the day of judgment they will accuse the man who mistreated them. It is hard to find in ancient literature a sharper statement of the idea that animals too are owed justice.

What remained of all this

The chambers of the Book of Enoch did not stay between its pages. The idea that souls wait, separated according to their deeds, for a day of judgment to come, entered Judaism, Christianity and Islam. When an early Christian parable tells of a rich man and a poor man who died, with a great gulf fixed between them, it is easy to recognize the hollows of chapter 22.

It is easy to assume that the picture of the afterlife was always there, part of the permanent furniture of religion. The Book of Enoch reminds us that there was a moment when it was sketched for the first time. Someone looked at the world, saw that the accounts did not add up, and decided there had to be another chapter. We have been arguing ever since about whether he was right. About the question that troubled him, on the other hand, there is no argument.