2 Enoch: What Did Enoch See in the Heavens?
Enoch's guided tour through the heavens, surviving only in Old Church Slavonic, with giant escorts, silent Grigori and a new angelic body.
2 Enoch, or the Secrets of Enoch, survives only in Slavonic manuscripts from the 1300s on. Two huge shining men carry Enoch through the heavens, where he meets the silent Grigori and is dressed in glory before God.
2 Enoch survives only in Slavonic manuscripts, the oldest from the fourteenth century, in longer and shorter versions. It was unknown to Western scholars until the late 1800s, and W. R. Morfill and R. H. Charles published an English translation in 1896. Its date is hotly debated: many scholars place its core in the first century CE, possibly in Egypt, while others argue it is much later.
The story begins at Enoch's bedside. "There appeared to me two men, exceeding big, so that I never saw such on earth; their faces were shining like the sun, their eyes too were like a burning light." They carry him up through the heavens, where he sees storehouses of snow and dew, the angels who move the stars, a place of torment and Paradise.
In one heaven he meets the Grigori, "of human appearance, and their size was greater than that of great giants and their faces withered, and the silence of their mouths perpetual." They are the brothers of the fallen Watchers, grieving. Before God's face, Enoch is stripped of his earthly garments, anointed and dressed in glory, and "was like one of his glorious ones." He then writes down what he learns and returns to teach his sons. Some manuscripts end with a strange episode: Noah's brother's wife conceives without a husband and dies, and the baby Melchizedek is born from her body already speaking and is carried off by an angel.
The longer version of 2 Enoch ends with the miraculous birth of Melchizedek, a child who emerges from his dead mother with the priestly badge already on his chest.
Because it survives only in medieval Slavonic copies with no ancient fragments, scholars disagree on whether 2 Enoch is a first-century Jewish work or a later Christian composition.
