The Ten Heavens: Enoch’s Journey into the Sky

Imagine an elevator with ten buttons, where on every floor the doors open onto a different world. On one floor there are storerooms of snow. On another, a garden whose fragrance cannot be described. On another, hundreds of angels standing silent and refusing to sing. The passenger in the elevator is a single man, and he is afraid for almost the entire ride.

That, more or less, is how 2 Enoch is built. Two shining men wake Enoch from his sleep, carry him on their wings, and lift him from heaven to heaven. It is one of the most detailed maps of the sky that the ancient world has left us.

What the ten heavens are

The ten heavens are the floors of the sky according to 2 Enoch, also called the Book of the Secrets of Enoch. Enoch passes through them one after another, and in each of them he sees a different part of the upper world. The journey ends in the tenth heaven, before the throne of God.

The lower heavens: weather and prisoners

In the first heaven Enoch sees a great sea, greater than the sea on the earth. He is shown the angels in charge of the order of the stars, and the storehouses of snow and dew. Anyone who has ever wondered where snow comes from gets a simple answer here: it is kept in storage.

The second heaven is dark. In it Enoch sees prisoners hanging, awaiting judgment and weeping without end. These are angels who rebelled. They turn to him with a surprising request, that he pray for them, and he answers humbly: who am I, a mortal man, to pray for angels?

The third heaven: paradise, and what lies north of it

Paradise is in the third heaven. At its center stands the tree of life, which looks like gold and fire. Springs of honey and milk, of oil and wine, flow in it and divide into four streams, and three hundred angels guard it with unceasing song. The angels explain to Enoch for whom the place is intended: for those who give bread to the hungry, clothe the naked and help the orphan.

But in that very same heaven, on the north side, there is another place: darkness, murky fire, frost and ice. It is meant for those who oppressed the poor, and for those who could have fed the hungry and did not. The author placed paradise and the place of punishment on the same floor, within walking distance of each other. It is hard to think of a clearer way of saying that the difference between them depends on deeds, not on fate.

The fourth heaven: the engine room of the world

In the fourth heaven Enoch sees how the luminaries work. The sun goes out and comes in through gates in the east and the west, accompanied by thousands of angels. Beside its chariot fly wondrous creatures, phoenixes and chalkydri, with the feet and tails of a lion and the head of a crocodile. The moon has gates of its own too, twelve of them, and Enoch counts the days it spends in each.

This is the scientific part of the journey. The author tries to explain, with the tools of his time, the length of the year, the difference between the solar year and the lunar year, and the change of seasons.

The fifth heaven: the angels who fell silent

In the fifth heaven Enoch meets a vast army of beings who look like men and are as tall as giants. They are called the Grigori, and they are the brothers of the angels who came down on Mount Hermon. Their faces are downcast, their mouths are silent, and there is no worship in this heaven at all.

Here Enoch does something no one expects of a guest. He rebukes them: what are you waiting for, my brothers? Why do you not serve before God? They listen to him. Four trumpets sound together, and the angels break into song. It is the only time on the journey that the presence of a human being changes something in heaven.

The sixth and seventh heavens: the management

In the sixth heaven sit seven camps of shining angels, indistinguishable from one another. They run the world: they set the courses of the stars, they are in charge of the seasons, the rivers and the fruit of the earth, and they record the deeds of every human being.

In the seventh heaven the light is already more than one can bear. Enoch sees camps of fire, cherubim and seraphim, and in the distance God sitting on his throne. Here something unsettling happens: the two men who have been with him announce that they were commanded to go with him only this far, and they vanish.

I was left alone at the edge of the seventh heaven. I was afraid, fell on my face and said in my heart: Woe is me, what has happened to me?

2 Enoch 21:3

The angel Gabriel comes and carries him onward, like a leaf carried by the wind.

The three highest heavens

The last three heavens have Hebrew names, and the book takes care to say so. The eighth is called Muzaloth, and it changes the seasons. The ninth is called Kuchavim, and it holds the dwellings of the twelve signs of the zodiac. And the tenth:

In the tenth heaven, which is called Aravoth, I saw the appearance of God's face: like iron heated white in the fire and drawn out, throwing off sparks and burning.

2 Enoch 22:1

In this heaven Enoch is transformed. The angel Michael strips him of his earthly clothes, anoints him with an oil that shines like a ray of the sun, and dresses him in garments of glory. Enoch looks at himself and sees that he has become like one of the angels. Then he is given a pen, and he writes three hundred and sixty-six books.

Where the idea of many heavens comes from

The author of 2 Enoch did not invent the idea that the sky is built in floors. In the ancient world it was widely assumed that there were seven heavens, matching the number of moving bodies in the sky visible to the eye. The Talmud, too, in tractate Hagigah, lists seven heavens by name, and the highest of them is called Aravot, exactly like Enoch’s highest heaven. The apostle Paul tells in one of his letters of a man who was “caught up to the third heaven,” into paradise, just as on the map of 2 Enoch.

And what about ten? Here one must remember that the book is known in two versions. The short version has only seven heavens, and many scholars believe the three highest were added later. Someone, it seems, felt that seven were not enough.

Why map the sky?

One may ask why anyone bothered to draw so detailed a map of a place nobody had ever visited. The answer has to do with what the map achieves. A world that has floors, gates and angels in charge is an orderly world. The snow does not fall by chance, the sun does not set by chance, and the righteous and the wicked do not share the same fate.

We no longer believe that snow is kept in storerooms. But the need behind the map is very familiar to us. We too prefer a world that has order in it, even if we have to climb ten floors to find it.