Enoch’s Aftermath (Ben Sira)
The Genealogy of Adam
New to the column? We’re doing a close reading of Genesis, which started in September 2022. Visit the Archive and plunge in, or look here to get oriented.
Last time, we read and discussed the following amazing verse:
24 Enoch walked around with God and was gone, because God took him.
וַיִּתְהַלֵּ֥ךְ חֲנ֖וֹךְ אֶת־הָֽאֱלֹהִ֑ים וְאֵינֶ֕נּוּ כִּֽי־לָקַ֥ח אֹת֖וֹ אֱלֹהִֽים׃ פ
Follow the link for some discussion of the Hebrew terms that I’ve translated “walked around” and “was gone” if those translations differ from the one(s) that you are used to. Today we’ll talk some more about the aftermath:
What (may have) happened to Enoch after “God took him.”
What happened to Enoch in post-biblical literature.
We have already looked very briefly at Enoch in Jubilees and even more briefly at the three books of Enoch that have been preserved in various languages; we’ll come back to this material. First, though, let’s have a look at Enoch as he appears in the Catholic/Orthodox Bible, and then in all Christian Bibles. (A reminder, here, for those who missed it, that Bibles are not all the same.)
We’re going to start with the book of Ben Sira, a/k/a Sirach, a book that is also known as Ecclesiasticus. Don’t confuse this with Ecclesiastes/Qohelet, the book in everyone’s Bible that is famous for its “vanity of vanities” phrase. This book, Ecclesiasticus, was written around the year 200 BCE, in Hebrew, and translated into Greek later in the century by the author’s grandson.
It’s a book that combines proverbial wisdom with Jewish history. In the section that gave James Agee and Walker Evans the title for their 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Ben Sira says this about Enoch, the first on his list (quotations are from NRSV):
Sir 44:16 Enoch pleased the Lord and was taken up,
an example of repentance to all generations.
As you remember, “Enoch pleased the Lord” comes from the Greek version of Gen 5:24. The Greek text of Ben Sira uses exactly the same word. Though Ben Sira is not preserved in the original Hebrew, we do have 44:16 — which in this case combines “walking around” of the MT with “pleasing” of the Greek:
חנוך נ֯מ֯צ֯א תמים והתהלך עם ייי
חנוך Ḥanokh ‘Enoch’
נ֯מ֯צ֯א תמים nimtza tammim ‘was perfect’
[the dots indicate that the manuscript is hard to read here]
והתהלך עם ייי v’hithallekh im YYY ‘and walked around with YHWH’
[this manuscript replaces the Tetragrammaton with three yuds]
This kind of double reading is frequent in the Aramaic translations, as I wrote after attending Aramaic camp at Duke University (your US tax dollars at work, thank you very much). As far as I’m aware, we don’t have an original Hebrew text of Gen 5:24 from the Dead Sea Scrolls, so I can’t say whether Ben Sira was combining “he walked around” of the MT with “was perfect” from another Hebrew text or from his own knowledge of the LXX.
But I can think of another possibility. Ben Sira — of course — is not translating Gen 5:22 or 24. He is using Genesis as a source of information and inspiration. It’s quite possible that nimtza tammim is Ben Sira’s own comment explaining why Enoch might have “walked around” with God. One commentator on the LXX writes that “he ‘pleased’ God … while expressed differently, means the same thing as the MT’s he ‘walked with’ God.” That may be correct as an interpretation but it is certainly not correct as a translation. Did the LXX translator take Ben Sira’s interpretation as a clearer translation of the unusual Hebrew word?
We might indeed guess that Ben Sira is explaining Enoch’s “walking” with God to mean that his actions were pleasing to God. What makes him “an example of repentance to all generations,” though?
Here I turn to a remarkable book by James Kugel: Traditions of the Bible. Warning: Should you want a copy of your own, this baby costs around $100 and weighs 3.82 pounds (that’s 1¾ kg.). A condensed version of it called The Bible As It Was is cheaper and (a little bit) lighter. Kugel explains where the notion of Enoch’s repentance comes from: a close analysis of the text, just as we’re doing in this column, but (in this case) a midrashic one:
The passage says that Enoch “walked with God” after the birth of Methuselah; the clear implication is that before Methuselah's birth he did not walk with God. If so, it would seem that Enoch's great virtue, and the reason for God's taking him, was that he repented. Although he may not have been an exemplary youth, Enoch began to walk with God at age sixty-five and thus became, in the Ben Sira text cited above, “an example of repentance to all generations.”
In the Hebrew text of Ben Sira, however, Enoch is not “an example of repentance” (as NRSV translates the Greek text) but an אות דעת ōt dá’at ‘a sign of knowledge’. Kugel explains how he thinks this change may have happened:
It is interesting that, save for Pseudo-Philo (whose precise provenance is unknown), all the attestations of the motif “Enoch the Penitent” are apparently from Alexandrian sources (the Greek version of Ben Sira, the Wisdom of Solomon, and Philo). Indeed, the Hebrew version of Ben Sira here describes Enoch as a “sign of knowledge.” All this might suggest that the idea of Enoch's penitence was particularly well known—and felt to be one of the most important aspects of his “story” —in Alexandria at the time when Ben Sira's grandson translated his grandfather's text. For, if so, it is easy to understand why the grandson should have rendered his grandfather's “sign of knowledge” (apparently, an allusion to Enoch's acquisition of heavenly knowledge) as “example of repentance.”
The (Greek) New Testament follows the Greek “pleasing God” interpretation:
Hebrews 11:5 By faith Enoch was taken so that he did not experience death; and “he was not found, because God had taken him.” For it was attested before he was taken away that “he had pleased God.”
The tradition that we see reflected in Ben Sira’s original Hebrew will lead us in quite a different direction, one that viewed Enoch as the possessor of heavenly knowledge. We’ll look at that — or at least get started on it — next time.