Enoch and Elijah: The Two Men Who Never Died

In shortThe Bible tells of two men who did not die like everyone else. Of Enoch, Genesis says that he walked with God and was no more, for God took him. Of the prophet Elijah, the Book of Kings says that he went up to heaven in a whirlwind, with a chariot of fire and horses of fire.

According to the Bible, everyone who is born dies. Adam lived nine hundred and thirty years, and died. Methuselah lived longer than anyone, and died. Moses, who spoke with God face to face, went up Mount Nebo and died. In the whole Bible this rule has only two exceptions, and for two thousand years those two have occupied the religious imagination more than anyone who was properly buried.

A few words and a chariot of fire

The two left the world in very different ways. Of Enoch, Genesis says: and he was not, for God took him. In Hebrew that is five words, with no witnesses and no explanation. He lived before the flood, he has no nation and no land, and we know almost nothing about him.

Elijah, by contrast, is one of the most vivid figures in the Bible. He confronts a king, calls down fire on Mount Carmel, flees to the desert and asks to die. And when his hour comes, the scene takes place before the eyes of his disciple Elisha: a chariot of fire and horses of fire separate the two of them, and Elijah goes up to heaven in a whirlwind. Elisha is left on the bank of the Jordan with the fallen cloak, and fifty men who go out to search the hills for Elijah come back empty-handed.

One might say that Enoch is a riddle and Elijah is a story. Perhaps that is why their traditions went different ways. The riddle had to be solved, so whole books were written about Enoch to tell what he saw up there. The story had to be continued, so Elijah never stops coming back.

Enoch borrows a chariot

The people who wrote the Books of Enoch knew the story of Elijah well, and did not hesitate to borrow from it. This is how the taking of Enoch is described in the Book of Parables:

After this, during his lifetime, his name was lifted up above all who live on the earth, to that Son of Man before the Lord of Spirits. He was raised on the chariots of the wind, and his name disappeared from among them. From that time I no longer came among them. He set me between two winds, between the north and the west, where the angels took the cords to measure for me the place of the chosen and the righteous.

1 Enoch 70:1–2

Chariots of the wind. Genesis knows nothing of a chariot, but whoever had read the Book of Kings knew what an ascent to heaven looks like, and gave Enoch a vehicle too. 2 Enoch chooses another way: darkness falls on the earth and covers those standing around Enoch, and when the light returns, he is gone. Here too a puzzled crowd is left behind, not understanding what it has seen, much like the sons of the prophets who stood at a distance by the Jordan.

One sheep escapes

The link between the two is not only literary. In 1 Enoch they actually meet. In the Animal Apocalypse, which tells the history of Israel as a fable about animals, Enoch himself watches history from the top of a high tower to which he has been lifted. And at the stage where the people persecute their prophets, this is what he sees:

I saw that the sheep strayed again, went many different ways and abandoned their house. The Lord of the sheep called some of them and sent them to the sheep, and the sheep began to kill them. One of them escaped and was not killed. It fled and cried out against the sheep, and they wanted to kill it. But the Lord of the sheep rescued it from their hands, brought it up and set it beside him.

1 Enoch 89:52–53

The sheep that escaped is Elijah, who fled from Jezebel and whom God brought up to himself. The Apocalypse of Weeks, another work in the same book, mentions him in a single sentence: in the sixth week, it says, a man will ascend to heaven.

And at the end of the Animal Apocalypse, a moment before the great judgment, the angels seat Enoch among the sheep, and beside him, holding his hand, is a single lamb. According to a common scholarly reading, this lamb too is Elijah. If so, then as early as the second century BCE someone imagined the two men who never died standing together, hand in hand, to face the day of judgment.

Two witnesses

That idea had a long road ahead of it. The prophet Malachi had already promised that Elijah would return before the coming of the great and terrible day. The Book of Revelation, which closes the New Testament, describes two witnesses who will prophesy at the end of days, be killed by the beast that rises from the abyss, lie in the street of the city for three and a half days, and rise.

The vision does not say who they are. The early Church Fathers, among them Tertullian and Hippolytus, had no trouble identifying them: Enoch and Elijah. Their logic was almost legal. Every human being is sentenced to die once, and these two have not yet died. Their death, Tertullian wrote, was not cancelled. It was only postponed. They are being kept in heaven in order to die at the end of history, in the final struggle.

It is a rather sober reading. In Tertullian's eyes, Enoch's ascent is not a prize for his righteousness. It is a debt that will still be collected.

A chair for Elijah

In Judaism the two men's paths parted. Elijah became a member of the household. A chair is set out for him at every circumcision, a cup is poured for him on Passover night, and he appears in the Talmud again and again, arguing with the sages and telling them what is being said in heaven.

With Enoch the sages had a harder time. In the midrash Genesis Rabbah one sage says that he was not entirely righteous, and another answers those who ask that the word took simply means that he died. And yet he was not erased. The tractate Derekh Eretz Zuta lists those who entered paradise alive, and Enoch son of Jared and Elijah stand at the head of the list. And the Hekhalot literature, many years later, raises Enoch higher than any other human being and turns him into the angel Metatron.

Why was Elijah preferred? Perhaps because he is a prophet of Israel, and shares a language with the people of the study house. Enoch came before Abraham and before the Torah, and he belongs to all of humanity. And perhaps because the Books of Enoch were already too well loved by other groups, the first Christians among them.

What to do with a man who has no grave

A grave is a full stop. Whoever is buried, his story is sealed, and one can make a pilgrimage to him and miss him. A man with no grave is a story that has not ended, and a story that has not ended can always be continued.

We tend to think that religions deal mainly with what has been. Enoch and Elijah are a reminder that they deal just as much with what is still to come, and that for this they need someone who is able to return. The Bible left only two doors open, and ever since, anyone who wanted to tell about the future has walked in through one of them.