3 Enoch: How Was Enoch Turned Into the Angel Metatron?

A Hebrew mystical text in which Enoch, now the angel Metatron, tells a rabbi how he was turned to fire.

3 Enoch, or Sefer Hekhalot, is a Hebrew mystical text framed as Rabbi Ishmael's ascent through the heavenly palaces. There Metatron reveals he was Enoch son of Jared, transformed into fire and called "the lesser YHWH."

3 Enoch is a Hebrew work of the Hekhalot, or "palaces," literature, framed as the account of Rabbi Ishmael, a second-century sage. Ishmael ascends through the heavenly palaces and is protected by Metatron, the Prince of the Presence. Metatron then tells his story: he was Enoch son of Jared, taken up from the corrupt generation of the Flood to serve as a witness.

His transformation is described in physical detail. He is enlarged to the length and breadth of the world, given seventy-two wings, and his flesh is changed into flame, his sinews into fire, his bones into burning coals and the light of his eyelids into lightning. God gives him a crown and a throne and calls him "the lesser YHWH."

The book also contains a detailed angelology: princes over the elements, the stars and the days, the heavenly court of justice, the storehouses of souls, and the curtain before God on which all history is printed. A notorious episode has the heretic Aher see Metatron seated on his throne and think there are two powers in heaven, after which Metatron is punished with sixty lashes of fire. Hugo Odeberg published the first critical edition and English translation in 1928. Scholars such as Philip Alexander see it as a compilation from Babylonia, with the Enoch material added to earlier Metatron traditions.