Enoch the Scribe: The Hero Whose Weapon Is a Pen

In shortIn 1 Enoch the angels and God himself address Enoch as the scribe of righteousness because his task is to write: he records the sentence passed on the angels who sinned, copies what is written on the tablets of heaven, and hands books to his sons. Later traditions add that he records the deeds of every person for the day of judgment.

Every ancient hero has a tool he is known by. Gilgamesh has an axe, David a sling, Hercules a club. Enoch has a pen. He kills no monsters and conquers no cities, and yet angels tremble at what he writes. The Books of Enoch chose a kind of hero that hardly exists in ancient literature: a clerk.

The first to learn

Genesis does not say a word about writing. It tells us that Enoch walked with God, and leaves it at that. But the Book of Jubilees, written in the second century BCE, already knows more: Enoch was the first human being to learn writing, knowledge and wisdom, and the first to record the signs of heaven in a book.

In 1 Enoch this has become an official title. God addresses him with the words Enoch, scribe of righteousness. One part of the book opens with the statement that it was written by Enoch the scribe. And elsewhere, when Enoch tells his son about a vision he saw in his youth, this is how he dates it: I saw it when I was learning to write. It is hard to find another hero in ancient literature who remembers his first lessons.

Angels in need of a lawyer

The first task given to the scribe is also the strangest. The angels who came down to earth and sinned hear that sentence has been passed on them, and they panic. They can no longer approach God themselves. They turn to Enoch:

They asked me to write a petition for them, so that they might be shown mercy, and to bring the petition before God in heaven. For from then on they could not speak with him, nor even raise their eyes to heaven, out of shame for the sins for which they had been condemned.

1 Enoch 13:4–5

It is a picture worth stopping in front of. Heavenly beings, who once stood before the throne of glory, are asking a human being to draft a document for them. Enoch writes, sits down by the waters of Dan and reads the petition until he falls asleep, and receives the answer in a dream: the petition is denied. And then it falls to him to write down the refusal as well, and deliver it to the angels.

In the world of the Book of Enoch, even heaven runs on paperwork. Whoever knows how to write stands between the parties and carries the documents back and forth.

The great archive

The further one reads, the clearer it becomes how full of documents this heaven is. The angel Uriel shows Enoch the tablets of heaven, on which all the deeds of humankind are recorded in advance to the end of the generations, and Enoch reads and copies. Even the order of the universe is handed over in writing: Enoch takes down the paths of the heavenly lights at Uriel's dictation and gives the books to his son Methuselah, with instructions to keep them for the generations to come. In the Animal Apocalypse an angel sits and records the deeds of the shepherds placed in charge of Israel, and at the hour of judgment the sealed books are opened before God. And to sinners who feel sure of themselves Enoch issues a warning that sounds like a notice from a government office:

Do not imagine in your soul or say in your heart: "We do not know and we do not see," for all sins are written down day by day before God in heaven. Know from now on: every wicked thing you have done is written down day by day, until the day of your judgment.

1 Enoch 98:7–8

In 2 Enoch the idea reaches its peak. God orders an angel named Pravuil to bring books out of the storehouses and give Enoch a pen for quick writing. Enoch sits for sixty days and sixty nights and writes three hundred and sixty-six books. When he returns to his sons he tells them that he has recorded the deeds of every person, and that no one born on earth can hide. And the people who come to take leave of him tell him that God has appointed him the writer of all his creation.

Who invented such a scribe

Where did this figure come from? One clue leads to Mesopotamia. In the Mesopotamian king list, among those who reigned before the flood, the seventh king is Enmeduranki of Sippar, the city of the sun god. According to what is told of him, the gods brought him up into their assembly and taught him the secrets of divination. Enoch is the seventh from Adam, and the years of his life are three hundred and sixty-five, the number of days in the solar year. Many scholars think the Jewish scribes knew the Babylonian figure and shaped Enoch as an answer to him.

But there is also a simpler explanation. Who wrote the Books of Enoch? Scribes. People whose livelihood and standing came from the rare ability to read and write, and who spent their days copying scrolls and calculating calendars. When people like that imagine the human being God loves most, they imagine him in their own image. The warriors sang about warriors, and the scribes wrote about a scribe.

The pen as a sin

And yet it is in this very book that we find one of the sharpest attacks on writing to have come down to us from the ancient world. The list of angels who corrupted humanity names one called Penimiah, and of him it is said:

He taught people to write with ink and paper, and because of this many have sinned, from eternity to eternity, to this very day. For people were not created for this, to confirm their faith with pen and ink.

1 Enoch 69:9–10

How can a book whose hero is a scribe regard writing as a sin? It may be that we have here two different traditions that were bound together. And it may be that the contradiction is real, and that the authors knew exactly what they were talking about. Anyone who lives by writing knows what can be done with it: a promissory note, a contract that strips a man of his land, a signed false testimony. Writing gives a word a power that speech does not have, and that power does not ask who is holding the pen. In Enoch's hands writing is testimony. In other hands it is a weapon.

The scribe stays on the job

Later traditions did not let the scribe go. In the Testament of Abraham, a Jewish work from the first centuries of the Common Era, Abraham sees the court of heaven, and beside the judge sits Enoch, writing down the deeds of the souls. The Aramaic translation attributed to Jonathan adds to the verse in Genesis that Enoch went up to heaven and was called Metatron, the great scribe. And in the Babylonian Talmud Metatron is the angel who was given permission to sit and write down the merits of Israel.

We tend to think that the idea that all our actions are recorded somewhere is an invention of our own time, of cameras and databases. The scribes of the Book of Enoch imagined it more than two thousand years ago, and found comfort in it. In a world where the strong do as they please and nobody sees, they wanted to believe that someone is writing it down all the same. Only the question the book itself asks remains: who is holding the pen.