Enoch Walked with God

Genesis 5:24 (NIV)

7/5/26

 “Enoch walked faithfully with God; then he was no more, because God took him away.”

Moses

Since it is Independence Day weekend, I didn’t think Christian and Grace would want to do breakfast Bible study, but I was wrong. I think breakfast Bible study gives them something else to worry about besides us living in a post-literate, declining, late-stage capitalist Republic of plutocrats run by evil moron puppets…or something like that.

Since Grace and Christian pick apart complicated prophecies to show me how they are out of context, this week I picked a short passage buried in a long list of people who lived way before Jesus. This one is about Enoch, who walked with God and then was taken to Heaven. Enoch was the first person that God took to Heaven, which means Enoch foreshadowed Jesus.

“Enoch,” Christian said when he came to breakfast. “What do you know about Enoch?”

“He walked with God, and then God took him to Heaven,” I said, “just like with Jesus.”

“Really?” Christian said. “Where does it say God took him to Heaven?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“That’s what we learned in church,” Christian said, “but does the text say that?”

“I’m using the NIV,” I said. “I know it’s not your favorite, but it says that.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Grace said, appearing over my shoulder. “It says that Enoch was no more.”

“Because God took him to Heaven,” I said.

“That might be a fair assumption, but that’s not what the text says,” Christian said.

“Where else would God take him?” I asked.

“Some translations say that Enoch couldn’t be found,” Christian said. “All of them imply that Enoch vanished after 365 years.”

“Because God took him to Heaven,” I said.

“Again,” Christian said. “You’re reading into the text, which is fine, but it’s a short passage that has caused so much speculation that there was even a book that almost made it into the Bible about Enoch’s life.”

“They wrote a book about Enoch?” I asked. “What’s it called?”

“The Book of Enoch,” Christian said.

“Why isn’t it in the Bible?” I asked. “Why just this one verse?”

“Most Christian and Jewish sects nowadays consider the book heretical,” Christian said.   

“I think it’s an interesting read,” Grace said. “It introduces angels and demons and explains the flood and talks about the thousand-year reign of a messianic figure.”

“Who wrote it?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” Christian said. “It appeared several hundred years before Jesus.”

“It actually informs much of the beliefs of Jesus’ day,” Grace said. “Demons and such. Powers and principalities. Angels. A whole cosmology that does not appear in the Old Testament.”

“It does?”

“Most Christian and Jewish churches don’t consider the Book of Enoch part of the biblical canon,” Christian said, “even though it is quoted in the Book of Jude.”

“The book of Hebrews and 1^st and 2^nd Peter also seem to lift material from Enoch,” Grace said.

“About angels and stuff like that?” I asked. “But if the Book of Enoch is actually quoted in the Bible—”

“It’s a weird book,” Grace said. “Most modern churches would struggle with the book’s theology.”

“I would argue that some churches incorporate materials from it,” Christian said. “End of Time churches, churches that focus on angels and demons, churches like that.”

“And Enoch didn’t write it?” I asked.

“Enoch probably didn’t exist,” Christian said.

“You’re sure?” I asked.

“The Book of Enoch was written in Aramaic during the Persian period in the centuries right before Jesus,” Christian said, “which dates long after Enoch would have lived. No ancient Hebrew version of the text is known to survive. I believe the portions found in the Dead Sea Scrolls were wholly Aramaic. No earlier texts allude to the Book of Enoch. It comes along late.”

“But…wait, you don’t think Enoch foreshadows Jesus?” I asked.

“What did Enoch do?” Grace said.

“He walked faithfully with God,” I said.

“That was before the time of the law,” Christian said. “How did he walk faithfully with God?”

“He was faithful?” I asked.

“That’s circular logic,” Christian said.

“I don’t know then,” I said.

“Nobody probably knew,” Grace said, “which is probably why somebody hundreds of years before Jesus but thousands of years after Enoch was said to have lived, created a whole mythology surrounding Enoch meant to explain the evolving religion of the people of Israel.”

“I knew this passage was probably too short,” I said. “It was so short that somebody came along and made up a whole book about Enoch.”  

“The thing is,” Christian said, “the Book of Enoch was probably important to the earliest Christians. The Book of Enoch might even have been important to Jesus.”

“But if it was important to Jesus, why is it heretical?” I asked.

“That’s a tricky question,” Grace said. “All we know is that Jesus’ worldview seemed to reflect some of the concepts in the Book of Enoch.”

“Which is interesting,” Christian said, “because a few hundred years after Jesus, the Christian church rejected the book as heretical.”

“I thought I picked an easy one,” I said. “Now, I have a whole new book to read.”  

In state legislatures across the country, Christian fundamentalists are passing laws meant to force the teaching of the Christian Bible in public schools. From the posting of textually inaccurate iterations of the Ten Commandments on the walls of classrooms to the incorporation of the “Trump Bible” across multiple pedagogical disciplines, these laws and mandates are sweeping the reddest parts of this nation.

The height of hypocrisy is banning books in the name of “protecting children” while mandating one particular book rife with numerous acts of sexual violence and scenes of graphic violence and genocide.

Book bans are dangerous. The Bible is worth reading and exists online and in public school libraries across the country, but proponents of mandating its formal teaching in public schools need to know what it actually says.

Some of the biblical themes in the books below might not be appropriate for children.