Soul Signal

There is a man in the Bible who never died, and the church handed you exactly one sentence about him.

That’s it. One sentence. Genesis 5:24: “Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.” Then the story moves on like nothing happened, like a man walking off the face of the earth without dying is just a Tuesday.

I read that verse for the first time when I was about twelve, sitting on an overturned paint bucket in my grandmother’s basement with her old King James open on my knees. I asked her where he went. She said, “Somewhere better, baby. Don’t worry about it.” I have been worrying about it ever since.

Turns out there was a whole book. Somebody just didn’t want us reading it.

The Book That Got Left Out

The Book of Enoch, the one scholars call 1 Enoch, is an ancient Jewish text written in pieces over a few centuries before Jesus was born. It is not some internet hoax. Fragments of it in Aramaic were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, which tells you the same community that preserved Isaiah and the Psalms was copying Enoch too, and taking it seriously.

It even shows up inside the Bible you already own. The little letter of Jude, right before Revelation, quotes it directly: “Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, to execute judgment upon all.” Go look. Jude 14 and 15. A book of the New Testament quoting a book that most churches tell you isn’t scripture.

And here’s the part that stopped me cold. The whole text survived in only one place, in Ethiopia, written in an old church language called Ge’ez. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church never threw it out. It’s still in their Bible today. Most of the Western world didn’t get a full copy until a Scottish traveler named James Bruce brought manuscripts back to Europe in the 1770s, and the first English translation didn’t come out until 1821.

So for well over a thousand years, most of Christendom just forgot it existed. Or decided to.

What’s Actually Inside

I want to be honest with you here. 1 Enoch is strange. It’s long, and it’s really five books stitched together. There’s the Book of the Watchers, the Book of Parables, an Astronomical Book about the sun and moon and calendar, the Book of Dreams, and the Epistle of Enoch. Different hands, different centuries. Read it in a translation you trust and don’t let anybody, including me, tell you it’s simpler than it is.

But the opening section, the Book of the Watchers, is the one that rearranged the furniture in my head.

It takes that odd little passage in Genesis 6, the one about the “sons of God” coming down to the “daughters of men,” and it tells the whole story. Two hundred angels, the Watchers, swear an oath together on Mount Hermon and come down. They take human wives. Their children are giants. And they teach people things heaven never meant to hand over like that: weapons and metalwork, charms and enchantments, reading the stars to read the future.

The earth gets loud with suffering. And it’s Enoch, a human being, who gets sent to carry the message back up.

The Part Nobody Preached On

This is where it gets me every time.

The fallen Watchers can’t even pray for themselves anymore. They’ve lost the right to lift their own eyes to heaven. So they ask Enoch, a man, to take their petition up for them. And he goes. He rises through what the book describes as a house of fire and crystal and stands before the Great Glory.

And the answer he’s given is basically this: you were supposed to intercede for men, not men for you.

Sit with that one a minute. The beings who were supposed to watch over us ended up needing a human to stand in the gap. The human was the one who could still get through.

I grew up being told I was a worm. A sinner in the hands of an angry God, crawling on my belly hoping for scraps. Nobody ever read me the story where a human being walks into the throne room because he’s the only one left with a clean line.

Why This Feels Like Gnosis to Me

Now, 1 Enoch is not a Gnostic book. It’s older than the Gnostics and it comes out of a Jewish world. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

But the Nag Hammadi library, that jar of buried books a farmer dug up in Egypt in 1945, carries the same echo. The Apocryphon of John tells its own version of powers coming down to the daughters of men and binding people with a kind of counterfeit spirit, keeping them from remembering where they came from. Same old wound, told from a different angle.

And the shape of Enoch’s life is the shape every one of those buried texts keeps circling. A person who walks with God. Who sees behind the curtain. Who gets taken up without passing through the door everybody else is so terrified of.

“He was not, for God took him.” I used to read that as disappearing. Now I read it as the most complete kind of remembering there is. He stopped being only the man people thought he was. He went home while he was still breathing.

What I Do With It

When I buried my daddy, the preacher at the graveside said Daddy was “with the Lord now,” like it was a place you only get to after the casket closes. I remember standing there in my good black shoes sinking into the red mud thinking, why does it always have to be after?

Enoch didn’t wait for after. He walked with God in the middle of an ordinary, violent, confusing world. While he had a wife and a son. While the earth was getting louder.

That’s what I want. Not some rapture to yank me out. I want to walk with it now. I want to be the kind of person who can still get through when the powers that were supposed to be guiding things have lost their way.

You don’t have to believe giants walked the earth to get that. You don’t even have to believe the whole book. You just have to notice that somebody decided you shouldn’t read it, and ask yourself why a story about a human being who rose high enough to speak for the angels might make the people in charge a little nervous.

Your Turn

So here’s what I’m asking you to sit with this week.

Where in your own life are you waiting for “after”? After the kids are grown, after the job, after you die, before you let yourself walk with God the way Enoch did? And what would it look like to start walking today, right in the middle of the mess?

Tell me in the comments. And if you’ve read 1 Enoch yourself, tell me which part shook you. I read every one.

Walk with it.

Kelli Scott
Soul Signal