Enoch’s Alter Ego

The Genealogy of Adam

²⁴ Enoch walked around with God and was gone, because God took him.

וַיִּתְהַלֵּ֥ךְ חֲנ֖וֹךְ אֶת־הָֽאֱלֹהִ֑ים וְאֵינֶ֕נּוּ כִּֽי־לָקַ֥ח אֹת֖וֹ אֱלֹהִֽים׃ פ

Our close reading of Genesis has taken a detour down the rabbit hole of Enoch’s disappearance — and we’ll continue that detour in this post and the next. Today: Enoch, a mild-mannered scribe for a great Mesopotamian newspaper, reveals his secret identity. To discover it, we’ll take a short trip through two of the Aramaic translations of our verse. When I give these in English, I’m quoting the translations made by Eldon Clem, available through the Accordance Bible search program. (Again: I provide links of this kind for those who want to take advantage of the resources that I use. I do not get a cut of any purchase you might make.)

“The” Aramaic translation of Genesis is the Onkelos translation of the Pentateuch. In our case, as translations sometimes do, it clarifies something that is a bit unclear in the original. Where the Hebrew says “God took him,” Onkelos says God “put him to death.”¹ The Aramaic word is אֲמִיתֵיה amiteih, the equivalent of Hebrew הֵמִית heimit ‘caused [someone] to die.’ This may be Rashi’s source for understanding the phrase that way.

Now we turn to the second-most well-known Aramaic translation, that of Pseudo-Jonathan. (Read more about that in “Pseudo-Jonathan Explains It All to You.”) P-J offers a completely different outcome, one that goes far beyond what the original text says: