The Book of Enoch in Jewish Tradition: From the Midrash to the Zohar

Some books are rejected, and disappear. And some books are rejected and go on hanging around the house like a relative nobody invites, who still turns up at every family celebration. The Book of Enoch belongs to the second kind.

The Jewish sages did not include it in the Bible. After the Second Temple period people stopped copying it in Hebrew and Aramaic, and the original text was lost. And yet whoever follows Jewish literature through the generations discovers that the book, or at least its ideas, never left it.

In the Second Temple period: a book like any other

It is worth starting at the beginning. In the Second Temple period the Book of Enoch was no fringe book. The Book of Jubilees praises Enoch as the first man to learn writing and wisdom, and relies on his books. Ben Sira, a Jerusalem sage of the second century BCE, puts him at the head of his list of the fathers of the world, and writes that few were created on earth like him. And in the caves of Qumran, fragments of eleven copies of the book were found.

At this stage Enoch is an agreed hero. The dispute will come later.

The rabbis: silence, and reservation

In rabbinic literature the situation is completely different. In the Mishnah Enoch is not mentioned at all. In the Babylonian Talmud there is hardly a trace of him. And where he does appear, in the midrash Genesis Rabbah, the tone is pointedly cool.

The midrash cites several opinions on the verse “and he was not; for God took him,” and almost all of them are meant to cut him down to size. According to one, Enoch was sometimes righteous and sometimes wicked, and God said: I will remove him while he is still righteous. According to another, Enoch was never written in the book of the righteous at all. And the midrash also tells of a debate: heretics argued before one of the sages that the Torah does not say Enoch died, and the sage answered that “taking” means death, and brought proof from the Book of Ezekiel.

This debate teaches a great deal. There were people who saw in Enoch a man who did not die, and wanted to build on it. The sages knew the claim, and refused it. Onkelos, too, the accepted Aramaic translation of the Torah, renders the verse so that God caused Enoch to die. And Rashi, whose commentary accompanies every child who learns the Torah, follows the Midrash: he was righteous, but easily swayed to return to wickedness, and so the Holy One hastened to remove him.

So it happened that most Jews who grew up on the Torah and its commentaries knew Enoch as a somewhat dubious figure, without knowing that there was a whole book telling a different story about him.

The angels return under other names

The book’s central story, about the angels who came down to the daughters of men, was not welcomed either. In Genesis Rabbah, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai explains that the “sons of God” were the sons of judges, and curses anyone who calls them sons of God.

And yet the story found ways to come back. Another Aramaic translation of the Torah, attributed to Jonathan, names Shemhazai and Azael, who fell from heaven. The Talmud, in tractate Yoma, says that the scapegoat atones for the deeds of Uzza and Azael. And later midrashim tell a whole legend about two angels who accused humankind, asked to go down to earth to prove they would withstand temptation, and failed at once. In one version there is also a girl who refused them, and was set in heaven among the stars.

The Semyaza and Azazel of the Book of Enoch are easy to recognize here, even if the names have changed slightly and the moral has been turned upside down. In the Midrash the story is no longer about the origin of evil in the world. It is a story about angels who learned the hard way not to look down on human beings.

Enoch rises to greatness: Metatron

The great surprise awaits in the mystical literature. That same Aramaic translation attributed to Jonathan renders the verse about Enoch in the opposite way from Onkelos: Enoch ascended to the firmament by the word of the LORD, and his name was called Metatron, the great scribe.

In the Hekhalot literature, the early Jewish mystical literature, the idea develops into a whole story. In the work known as 3 Enoch, or Sefer Hekhalot, Rabbi Ishmael ascends to heaven and meets there the angel Metatron, the Prince of the Presence. Metatron tells him that he is Enoch son of Jared, who was taken from the earth in the generation of the Flood, and whose body was turned into fire.

The Talmud also knows Metatron. Tractate Hagigah tells that Elisha ben Abuyah saw him sitting on high writing down the merits of Israel, and almost made the mistake of thinking that there are two powers in heaven. The Talmud does not mention Enoch there. But the angel who sits and writes recalls very strongly the man whom the Book of Jubilees called the first scribe.

There is no small irony in this. The sages of the Midrash took pains to remind everyone that Enoch was only a man. The mystics made him the highest of the angels.

The Middle Ages and the Zohar

In the Middle Ages Enoch keeps appearing. In Sefer haYashar, a narrative work that retells the stories of the Torah, Enoch is a righteous king who teaches humans knowledge, and at the end he goes up to heaven in a whirlwind, with horses of fire. According to another tradition, he is one of the handful of people who entered paradise alive.

And in the Zohar, the central work of the Kabbalah, “the book of Enoch” is mentioned several times, and sayings are cited in its name. These are not quotations from the Book of Enoch as we have it. But the very knowledge that such a book existed, and that it held secrets, was preserved.

The tradition itself describes this passing on from generation to generation. This is what Enoch says to his son:

I have given wisdom to you, to your children and to the children who will be born to you, so that they may pass this wisdom on to their children, for all generations.

1 Enoch 82:2

The homecoming

In 1892 Lazarus Goldschmidt translated the book from Ge’ez into Hebrew, and for the first time in many generations a Hebrew reader could read the Book of Enoch itself, and not just rumors about it. In the twentieth century the book was included in the Hebrew editions of the Apocrypha, and its Aramaic fragments were discovered at Qumran, a short distance from where it was written.

And there is one Jewish community that did not need to wait for any of this. The Jews of Ethiopia kept the Book of Enoch in Ge’ez among their sacred books, through all the generations.

What a book that would not leave teaches

We tend to describe a tradition as a single river, flowing in a single channel. The story of the Book of Enoch presents a more interesting picture. What was rejected from the main channel does not necessarily dry up. It goes on flowing beneath the surface, and from time to time it breaks out in an unexpected place: in an Aramaic translation, in a legend about two angels, in the name of an angel who sits and writes.

The sages who left the book outside probably knew what they were doing. It is doubtful they imagined that its ideas would find their way back, and that two thousand years later people would read it in Hebrew.