Enoch #24

Enoch is a figure from the earliest generations in Genesis, the seventh from Adam in the line of Seth. He is remembered for a single striking statement: he walked with God, and then he was no more, because God took him. Enoch should not be confused with Cain’s son of the same name, for whom Cain named a city (Genesis 4:17).

Biblical Significance

The genealogy of Genesis 5 follows a steady pattern, in which each person lives a stated number of years and then “he died.” Enoch breaks it. He fathered Methuselah when he was 65, and after that “Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years, and begat sons and daughters.” His whole life lasted 365 years, and then “Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him” (Genesis 5:21-24). He is also included in the genealogy of Jesus in Luke (Luke 3:37).

Hebrews explains the event as an act of faith. “By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him,” it says, and adds that before he was taken he was commended as having pleased God (Hebrews 11:5-6). The phrase “walked with God” is used in Genesis of only one other person before the flood, Noah (Genesis 6:9), and it suggests close, ongoing fellowship rather than a single religious act.

The Book of Enoch

The letter of Jude quotes a prophecy attributed to “Enoch, the seventh from Adam,” about the Lord coming with thousands of his holy ones to execute judgment (Jude 1:14-15). The same words appear in an ancient Jewish text known as 1 Enoch. That work was written in the centuries before Christ, not by the Genesis Enoch himself according to most scholars, and it is not part of the Jewish or Protestant canons or of the Catholic and Orthodox canons. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church does accept it as Scripture. Christians disagree about what Jude’s citation implies, and many take it to show that he was drawing on a familiar tradition without endorsing the whole book.

Legacy

Enoch is one of two people in the Old Testament said to have been taken from earth without dying, the other being Elijah (2 Kings 2:11). His brief entry has fed centuries of reflection on what it means to walk with God, and on the hope that death is not the last word for those who trust him. The Bible itself is restrained about the details, and it leaves the emphasis on his faith and closeness to God.