HEAVENLY ASCENTS OF ENOCH AND PAUL

by

JAMES H. MCGOWN

(Under the Direction of Wayne M. Coppins)

ABSTRACT

This thesis will examine the accounts of heavenly ascents in The Book of

Watchers and 2 Enoch as examples of Jewish Merkabah mysticism and explore the light

they shed on the nature of both Paul’s Damascus Road Experience and his “visions and

revelations of the Lord” of which he speaks in 2 Corinthians 12. Taken as a continuation

of Paul’s own Merkabah praxis, these events contributed significantly to Paul’s

understanding about God’s plan of salvation and his own role in it.

INDEX WORDS: Paul and Merkabah, Damascus Road Experience, Paul’s visions
and revelations, Pauline soteriology
 HEAVENLY ASCENTS OF ENOCH AND PAUL

by

JAMES H. MCGOWN

B.A. McGill University, 1969

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Georgia in Partial

Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

MASTER OF ARTS

ATHENS, GEORGIA

2010
 © 2010

James H. McGown

All Rights Reserved

 HEAVENLY ASCENTS OF ENOCH AND PAUL

by

JAMES H. MCGOWN

Major Professor: Wayne M. Coppins

Committee: Richard E. Friedman

Carolyn Medine

Electronic Version Approved:

Maureen Grasso
Dean of the Graduate School
The University of Georgia
May 2010
 iv

DEDICATION

This paper is dedicated to my wife, Jane Foster McGown, and my two sons, Todd

Foster McGown Elihu, and Evan Hewitt McGown.

 v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the roles that my father’s intellectual honesty and my

mother’s profound faith played in my lifelong interest in religion. I wish to thank

Mikelle Kinnard (now deceased) for encouraging me to pursue that interest in a serious

way through the Education for Ministry program of the School of Theology of The

University of the South. I would like to express deep appreciation to Wayne Coppins for

the quality of his teaching and the wisdom of his guidance during my graduate study.

Finally, work like this cannot be brought to completion without a good proofreader, a role

which my friend, Milton Leathers, kindly agreed to fill. My thanks to him.

 vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.............................................................................................v

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................1

2 ASCENTS OF ENOCH................................................................................. 15

3 ASCENTS OF PAUL.................................................................................... 54

4 CONCLUSIONS ........................................................................................... 70

BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................... 74
 1

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

A great deal of work has been done in the last 30 years or so by scholars on the

possible connections between Jewish texts produced in the period c. 300 BCE to c. 200

CE.1 and emergent Christianity. This represents an almost tectonic shift in focus upon

this material. Among this literature are accounts of Jewish Merkabah mysticism that have

been probed for foundational ideas of early Christology.2 Alan Segal has explored

connections with the life and writings of Paul and shown how Paul’s Christology,

soteriology, and eschatology were influenced.3 This paper attempts to confirm his

Damascus Road Experience as an instance of Merkabah mystical experience.

Additionally, when Paul’s “visions and revelations of the Lord,” of which he writes in 2

Corinthians 12:1-10,4 are seen as continuous with the heavenly ascents recorded in the

Pseudepigrapha, especially the Enochic literature, one is afforded an understanding of the

nature and significance of these experiences. This paper purports to demonstrate the

appropriateness and results of analyzing Paul’s mystical experiences in light of Jewish

Merkabah mysticism in Ezekiel, the Targumim, and in the Enochic accounts of heavenly

ascent found in the Pseudepigrapha.

Let us turn first to my employment of some terms.

1
Various names have been used for this period including “Second Temple Judaism,” “the
intertestamental period,” and “Middle Judaism.” See Boccaccini 1991, 7-25, for a
discussion.
2
See Eskola 2001, 7-25 for a survey of the work on Christology.
3
Segal 1998 and 2004.
4
All Biblical references and quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
 2

What is Jewish Merkabah mysticism? Merkabah, Hebrew for “throne-chariot,”5

mysticism originates in the book of the prophet Ezekiel in the Hebrew Bible (Ezek. 1-3).

Ezekiel reports that “the heavens opened, and I saw visions of God.” (Ezek. 1:1) This is

followed by a fantastic vision of a throne-chariot upon which is seated “something that

seemed like a human form,” “the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.”

(Ezek. 1:26 and 28) That Ezekiel sees God on a throne reflects one of the most central of

Hebrew metaphors—the glorious enthronement of God the King.6 His vision includes an

audition, his own commissioning by God himself to prophesy:

Mortal, I am sending you to the people of Israel…and you shall say to

them, “Thus says the Lord God.” Whether they hear or refuse to hear (for

they are a rebellious house), they shall know that there has been a prophet

among them. (Ezek. 2:3-5)

Related texts are found in Isaiah (6:1-13) and Daniel (7:9-14). The Isaiah passage

begins straightforwardly, “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting upon

a throne.” (Isa. 6:1) The fantastic chariot of Ezekiel is missing from Isaiah and, though

Isa. 6:2-12 elaborates the prophet’s vision some what, there are many fewer details about

the creatures in attendance upon God—and differences as well. Still, the Lord is sitting

upon a throne “high and lofty” with seraphim in attendance and praising him. The

prophet’s lips are purified, and Isaiah volunteers to be commissioned by the Lord:

5
Though the word for “chariot” does not appear in the text of Ezekiel, the descriptor
“throne-chariot” has been used to describe the vision.
6
Eskola 2001, 44ff.
 3

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send and who

will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!” And he said, “Go and

say to this people…” (Isa. 6:8-9)

Daniel also reports a vision of an “Ancient One” whose “throne was fiery flames

and its wheels were burning fire.” (Dan. 7:9-14) This echoes strikingly Ezekiel’s vision.

He introduces in his vision a court (of unspecified composition) that sits in judgment.

And he sees “one like a human being” who was presented before the Ancient One and to

whom “was given dominion and glory and kingship…that shall not pass away.” By so

doing, he links Merkabah mysticism with eschatology. This linkage between Jewish

mysticism and eschatology has resulted in some confusion for it became combined into

the term “apocalypse.” Collins offers the following definition of the genre of apocalypse

(from the Greek ἀποκάλυψις meaning “revelation”):

[A] genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a

revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient,

disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it

envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves

another supernatural world. 7

This definition, while helpful perhaps in cataloging which works should be

considered together in studying apocalyptic literature, did a disservice to the study of

mysticism, including Merkabah mysticism. DeConick puts her finger on the cause of the

confusion:

7
Collins 1998, 5.
 4

[W]hen the early Jews and Christians describe their mystical experiences

in a single word, they do so most often by employing the term

apokalypsis, an “apocalypse” or “revelation.” In the Jewish and Christian

period-literature, these religious experiences are described emically as

waking visions, dreams, trances, and auditions that can involve spirit

possession and ascent journeys. Usually these experiences are garnered

after certain preparations are made or rituals performed, although they can

also be the result of rapture. The culmination of the experience is

transformative in the sense that the Jewish and Christian mystics thought

they could be invested with heavenly knowledge, join the choir of angels

in worship before the throne, or be glorified in body.8

Apokalypsis, the emic word used for a wide variety of mystical experiences with

many different contents, came to be considered only for the eschatological element they

contained.9 To avoid slighting the purely mystical elements which some ἀποκαλύψεις,

i.e., revelations, contained, DeConick prefers to use the word “mysticism,” defined

broadly as follows:

In etic terms, it identifies a tradition within early Judaism and Christianity

centered on the belief that a person directly, immediately, and before

death can experience the divine, either as a rapture experience or as one

solicited by a particular praxis.10

8
De Conick 2006a, 2.
9
De Conick 2006a, 18.
10
De Conick 2006a, 2.
 5

I accept DeConick’s definition of mysticism. So though we will deal with reports

of mystical experiences that contained eschatological elements, we will bear in mind that

the chief concern of mysticism was the experience of the divine, whether or not it also

involved knowledge of the end times.

The Ezekiel, Isaiah and Daniel texts clearly qualify as mystical experiences by

this definition. They all constitute Merkabah mysticism because they all involve seeing

the throne of God that in Ezekiel is a throne-chariot. The eschatological element of

Daniel’s vision would become terribly important in Middle Judaism, spawning a

collection of works each of which modern scholarship would categorize as an

apocalypse.

Let us now see how I will employ the term Pseudepigrapha. Instead of a

definition of the term, a nearly impossible task due to the variety of works covered by the

term, Charlesworth simply offers a description of the works he included in his 1983

edition of The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha:

Those writings 1) that, with the exception of Ahiqar, are Jewish or

Christian; 2) that are often attributed to ideal figures in Israel’s past; 3)

that customarily claim to contain God’s word or message; 4) that

frequently build upon ideas and narratives present in the Old Testament;

5) and that almost always were composed either during the period 200

B.C. to A.D. 200 or, though later, apparently preserve, albeit in an edited

form, Jewish traditions that date from that period.11

11
Charlesworth 1983, xxv.
 6

This is as close, perhaps, as one can come to establishing criteria by which a work

should be included among the Pseudepigrapha. Many of the works are named for men of

reputation who did not, in fact, write them and hence their designation as Pseudepigrapha

from the Greek ψευδεπίγραφα meaning “falsely ascribed.” All are works that rabbinic

Judaism did not ultimately include in its canon of inspired Scriptures. Some Christian

authorities, however, did consider some books as inspired and thus part of the Christian

canon. They classified them under the title Apocrypha from the Greek ἀπόκρυφα

meaning “hidden.”12 Both 1 Enoch and 2 Enoch, texts that we will examine, are now

classified by all Christendom (except for the Ethiopian Church which considers 1 Enoch

canonical13) as Pseudepigrapha. There is some basis to believe, however, that 1 Enoch

may have been considered as inspired in early Christian circles. I will say more about

this when introducing the books below.

Let me now treat briefly my methodology. I will use the chosen Pseudepigraphic

texts that come under consideration as both reports of the mystical experiences of the

authors who lived in the period—though attributed to someone else—and expressions of

the beliefs, thought and practices leading up to and during the time in which Paul lived (c.

1 – 65 CE14). This will shed light on the scriptural texts concerning Paul that we will

examine. This is historical-critical analysis. The rationale is quite simply put by Macrae

in his forward to the Charlesworth collection of the Pseudepigrapha:

To study the Bible by this method (historical-critical) involves knowing as

much as one can about the biblical world in all its facets. And this of

12
For a listing see Anderson, Metzger and Murphy 1994, xxv-xxvi.
13
Charlesworth 1983, xxiv.
14
Paul’s birth year is conjecture; however, the year of his death likely took place during
the reign of Nero. See Horrell 2000, 40.
 7

course includes knowing the Jewish and Christian religious literature that

ultimately did not become part of the Bible.15

The “of course” in Macrae’s statement testifies to the increased acceptance of the

historical-critical method of study due, in part, by the light which examination of the texts

of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi corpus has shed upon developments

within middle Judaism and early Christianity.16 The very publication of Charlesworth’s

collection of the Pseudepigrapha in 1983, the only former one in English being by

Charles in 1913, is testimony to a freshly perceived need for examining the experiences,

belief systems, thought patterns and praxes—as reflected in the period literature—in

which rabbinic Judaism and Christianity both took form.

While we will apply the historical-critical method in comparing Lukan and

Pauline texts describing Paul’s Damascus Road Experience (DRE) and Paul’s description

of his “visions and revelations of the Lord” in 2 Corinthians 12 with the Ezekiel,

Enochic, and Targumim texts, we will only be able to do so in a limited way. This is

because Luke and Paul give relatively little description about these experiences with

which comparison can be made. However, if we can link the descriptions in Acts and

Paul’s letters—as sparse as they are—with the descriptions of heavenly ascents in the

Merkabah accounts, we will establish the possibility that other features of the Merkabah

accounts may elaborate Paul’s mystical experiences for us.

In making these comparisons, I have borne in mind Sandmel’s caution about

“parallelomania.”17 Parallelomania refers to a mechanical matching of words and/or

15
Charlesworth 1983, ix-x.
16
Boccaccini 1991, 7-25.
17
Sandmel 1962, 1
 8

phrases which are then extravagantly used to “prove” a connection between texts. Such

matching may constitute a starting point, but, even if a great many similar terms and

phrases are identified, the underlying ideas and their use in the overall context must be

determined before texts can be said to be related. Just how the relationship can be traced

historically or literarily may be indeterminable though the historical religious, social and

political context may provide a framework for understanding. In those cases where

fundamental concepts of cosmology, Weltanschauung, philosophy, theology, etc. and

narratives, motifs, symbols, archetypes, stereotypes, literary devices, etc. are shared,

some connection between texts can be posited.

Once a connection between two works is determined, prior dating of one work

would seem to be critical if we want to claim it influenced the other. Thus, for example,

some authorities (Nickelsburg, for one18) puts the composition of “The Similitudes,”

chapters 37-71 of 1 Enoch, in the second century BCE, while others (Milik, for one19)

date it to the third century CE or later. Chapter 71 of “The Similitudes” relates that

Enoch is enthroned as “the Son of Man” in heaven. If the early dating is accepted, it is

possible that the early Christians appropriated this Jewish phrase and applied it to Jesus.

The later dating, on the other hand, would tend to invalidate that possibility. It cannot be

completely ruled out, however, for who can say definitively that an oral tradition

concerning Enoch’s enthronement as the Son of Man did not circulate among Jews in the

first century, some of whom became Christians and applied the title to Jesus? This new

version of Jesus enthroned as the Son of Man could have been transmitted to later

generations of Christians when it was finally committed to writing in the third century or

18
Nickelsburg 2005, 254.
19
Walck 1999, 20.
 9

later. Of course, it remains true that the texts are all we have, and we must deal as much

as we can in probabilities rather than mere possibilities. That being said, we are

sometimes forced to deal in possibilities when there are discontinuities in the record.

Thus, for example, though we do not know for certain what nascent rabbinic Judaism

may have “looked like” in the first century CE, we can and do project backwards from

the later Rabbinic literature what some of its features may likely have been. To do so

consciously and transparently is not irresponsible but can be a valuable tool in

constructing hypotheses.

Ironically, acknowledging the limitation of having only texts as testimony, we are

not so interested in literary connections between Paul’s and Luke’s writings and Jewish

Merkabah texts as we are in a connection between the underlying experiences that all the

accounts describe. DeConick makes this same point:

As a historian, I am not concerned whether these ancient people

“actually” experienced God. I can never know this. But this does not

make its study pointless. As Bernard McGinn has aptly remarked,

“Experience as such is not a part of the historical record. The only thing

directly available to the historian…is the evidence, largely in the form of

written records.” What I wish to understand and map is their belief that

God had been and still could—even should—be reached, that the

boundaries between earth and heaven could be crossed by engaging in

certain religious activities and behaviors reflected in the stories of their

primordial ancestors and great heroes.20

20
De Conick 2006a, 6.
 10

S. Sanders sounds a cautionary note when he observes:

The relation between literary form and religious experience may be the

single most vexed question in the study of early Jewish and apocalyptic

literature.21

The issue is trying to determine where on a continuum these texts lie between, on

the one hand, divinely-induced, pure transformational experience which is then

transcribed by the author through automatic writing and, on the other hand, self-

conscious, deliberate invention by the author using his literary craft to promote his own

agenda. Different texts will lie on different points on this continuum, and determination

of just where will always be problematic. One is tempted to regard older texts, such as

Ezekiel’s, as occupying a point far on the experiential side and later texts such as 2 Enoch

as occupying a point far on the literary end, yet this may be completely invalid. Of great

interest is the suggestion of Gibbons based on Ricoeur’s work on human understanding.

Gibbons suggests that accounts of visionary experience make use of a preconscious,

precritical, and prelinguistic framework that operates during the experience itself and

confers on the resultant text narrativity and readability. Gibbons tested this theory on the

life and writing of a seventeenth-century English visionary thusly:

When Trapnel’s utterances were recorded by a witness of the event, an

examination of the text reveals a presence of biblical language and

phraseology. Such biblical language will be taken as indicative of the

precritical language reservoir already furnished in Trapnel’s cognitive

apparatus and engaged on a preconscious level in the process of

21
De Conick 2006b, 59.
 11

comprehension. Thus, the presence of biblical language in the text

resulting from Trapnel’s vision is in no way due to conscious authorial

inclusion.

When combined with the capacity for and high value placed on memorization in

the ancient world, Gibbons suggests that, in the case of Revelation for example, the

author John may have had such powers of recall that he was “capable of retaining,

ordering, and retrieving experiences, so that when he had his visionary experience, he

could later write it down into the text.”22 In other words, the literary residue of an

author’s experience may well masquerade as a literary composition due to his particular

precritical framework. To impose historical criticism alone to such a text is not enough.

The underlying experience must be confronted on its own terms as emanating from

outside the author’s self-conscious manipulation.

Rowland discusses the use of an exegetical technique that does not rely on

rational analysis of the text but rather on a re-experience of the experience described in

the text. He elaborates:

Mysticism and apocalypticism are words we use as interpretative

categories by which we seek to make sense for ourselves of a variety of

particular characteristics within texts and in religious practice. Both relate

to the understanding of and approach to the divine, which does not usually

depend solely or even in the first instance on the exercise of rational

modes of interpretation of sacred texts, in which the interpreter by a series

of formal rites or customary practices seeks to give meaning to texts. The

22
De Conick 2006a, 44-46.
 12

discovery of meaning may entail practices of relating to them in such a

way that the reader or interpreter ceases to be a detached observer or

expositor of the texts but is instead actively involved in a performance that

allows one to be a participant and to share in that to which the text itself

bears witness.23

This seems to me to characterize Paul’s DRE and provides the reason for Paul’s

qualification of “whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows”

when he speaks of his “visions and revelations.” Paul was a Pharisee and, as such I

contend, was trained in this exegetical technique. Since Paul’s references to both his DRE

and his visions and revelations are autobiographical, there is little doubt that Paul is

speaking of his own experience.24 In the case of his DRE, Luke corroborates this, twice

putting the description of Paul’s DRE in the mouth of Paul himself.

What about the Pseudepigraphic accounts? We can only say that the internal

evidence of the text makes the claim that they are descriptions of visions of the heavenly

realm and a great deal more. Rowland, however, commenting on the Pseudepigraphic

attribution of the texts, suggests that it may be due to such a complete absorption into

experiencing the Merkabah text by the author that he believes himself to be Enoch or

another mythical hero.25

Tabor discusses the point of whether or not the Pseudepigraphic authors were

relating their own experiences or not:

23
De Conick 2006a, 48.
24
Despite Paul’s use of both the first and third person in 2 Corinthians 12. See
discussion in chapter 4 below.
25
De Conick 2006a, 52.
 13

In the case of our vast number of Jewish and Christian texts from Second

Temple times, the evidence that various reports of visions and revelations

are grounded in the experiences of the authors and/or preservers seems

indisputable. The many references to dreams, to preparations such as

fasting, special diet or drink, to special times, and to body posture, indicate

familiarity with mystical techniques.26

The later Hekhalot literature contains both accounts of theurgic practices used to

induce visions as well as reports of those who witnessed people experiencing heavenly

ascent.27 By projecting backwards in time, this also suggests that the reports produced

earlier, i.e., between 300 BCE and 200 CE, were tied to direct experience. Bowker

states—and Scholem and Neusner concur—that “some certain highly respected rabbis

had practiced Merkabah contemplation” in the first century CE. 28

One further point is to be made. Scholars have begun to apply the results of

modern neuroscientific research on Religiously Altered States of Consciousness

(RASCs),29 the modern descriptor for the mystical phenomena that resulted in the texts

we will examine. Another descriptor which modern science uses is Religiously

Interpreted States of Consciousness (RISCs).30 This acknowledges the fact that we have

already discussed, namely, that peoples’ direct experiences are always mediated by their

oral or written reports of them. As with these ancient texts, the issues of factuality and

26
Tabor 1986, 96.
27
Morray-Jones 1993, 181.
28
Bowker 1971, 157; Scholem 1954, 42-43; Neusner 1970, 135ff.
29
See Segal 2004, 322-350.
30
Segal 2004, 322-350
 14

manipulation in such reports obtain. Beyond this caveat, I am unequipped to comment on

neuroscientific findings while acknowledging, at the same time, the usefulness of this

scientific line of inquiry.

 15

CHAPTER 2

ASCENTS OF ENOCH

Since the religious, social and political situation in Palestine during middle

Judaism may provide the grist for what the authors of the texts of interest were

processing when they experienced their dream-visions, I will provide now an overview of

the history of the period.

The Hellenistic Period in Palestine

The young Macedonian, Alexander, conquered and established his rule over a

vast empire stretching from Egypt in the west to the border of India in the east, including

all of the Mesopotamian basin, from Macedonia in the north to the northern Arabian

Peninsula in the south.31 Alexander’s conquest installed a new lingua franca throughout

the Middle East. The translation of the Torah into Greek in Alexandria during the reign of

Ptolemy II (283-246 BCE) demonstrates the importance of the Greek language, in this

case, for Jews in Egypt. Historians call the period after the death of Alexander (at age

33) “Hellenistic” because of this hegemony of Greek culture.

It was a period of great instability for Palestinian Jews. A brief review of the

history of Palestinian Jews from the death of Alexander in 323 BCE to the Second Revolt

against the Romans in 132 CE reveals that the cherished institutions of the Jewish

religion were challenged from without and from within.32

31
See map May 1984, 82-83.
32
The review of Jewish history which follows is based upon VanderKam 2001, 1-49.
 16

Upon Alexander’s death at age thirty-three, a power struggle between a second

tier of leaders commenced. Soon Jews in Palestine were caught in the crossfire of

fighting between the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in Syria, both of whom sought

control of the land that lay between their domains. The Ptolemies maintained rule over

Palestine from 312 to 200 BCE, at which time the Seleucid ruler, Antiochus III the Great,

defeated the Ptolemaic forces at Panion, in the region of the headwaters of the Jordan

River. He took Jerusalem two years later, and the Seleucids maintained control of the

area until the Hasmonean family and their allies under the command of Judas Maccabeus

retook the Temple from Antiochus IV Epiphanies. The catalyst for the uprising was the

horror of the Hasmoneans at the desecration of the Temple and their resistance to

Antiochus’ attempt to force them to both abandon their own religious laws and take up

Greek religious observances. The purification and rededication of the Temple followed

its recapture (in either 165 or 164 BCE), an event still celebrated on Chislev 25 every

year as Hannukah (Hebrew for “dedication”). The Hasmoneans, however, did not enjoy

anything like complete rule in Jerusalem or Judea. The office of the high priest was still

held by Seleucid appointees until 159 and was then, apparently, left vacant for seven

years. As part of his eventually successful campaign to become the Seleucid king, one

Alexander Balas in 152 appointed Jonathan, the then-leader of the Hasmoneans, as high

priest, a post that he accepted and kept for ten years. Clearly, he gained this post because

of his military prowess and not because of priestly qualifications, an issue that posed a

great challenge for some pious Jews.

From 140 to 63 BCE, the Hasmonean leaders maintained more or less an

independent Jewish state. A struggle for power between the Hasmonean heirs, Hyrcanus
 17

II and Aristobulus II, was put to an end by the Roman general Pompey who, upon appeal

from both sides, took it upon himself to adjudicate the dispute. Rome had had an alliance

with the Hasmoneans since the time of Judas Maccabeus which legitimated Pompey’s

intervention. Aristobulus II, however, incurred Pompey’s anger by returning to Judea

before Pompey came to a decision. With the help of Hyrcanus II, Pompey pursued him

and eventually took Jerusalem and appointed Hyrcanus as high priest. Aristobulus and

his son, Alexander, however, escaped from their prison in Rome and returned to Palestine

to try to seize power. Because Aristobulus was an opponent of Pompey’s, he was backed

by Julius Caesar and even given command of two legions to defeat Pompey. In the end,

however, he was poisoned, and his son, Alexander, was beheaded.

Antipater, a wealthy Idumean (non-Jewish), had been a longtime supporter of

Hyrcanus II against Aristobulus. He was a supporter of Julius Caesar who eventually

bested Pompey in their contest for rule over the Empire. He was allowed to appoint his

own sons to high positions: Phasael became governor of Jerusalem and the territories

surrounding it, and Herod (the Great) was given rule over Galilee at age fifteen in 47

BCE. Leading citizens persuaded Hyrcanus, the high priest, to bring Herod to trial before

the Jerusalem Sanhedrin for executing some bandits without a trial. Though Herod

heeded the summons, he brought his troops with him and left before any verdict was

passed down.

Another son of Aristobulus II, Antigonus, recruited a group of followers and with

the help of the Parthians forced Herod and his family to seek refuge in the desert fortress

of Masada. Phasael and Hyrcanus, however, were captured. Antigonus cut off

Hyrcanus’ ears knowing that he could never again serve as high priest with such a
 18

deformity. Herod sailed to Rome with the intention of having his wife’s brother

Aristobulus III, another son of Aristobulus II, as king. However, it suited Roman

interests to elevate an enemy of the Parthians, namely Herod himself, to take that post.

So with the support of Mark Anthony and Octavian, Herod was appointed king of

Palestine by the Roman Senate in 40 BCE. Three years later, Herod with both Jewish and

Roman forces laid siege to Jerusalem and took it. The defenders suffered losses,

Antigonus was taken captive and beheaded by Mark Antony, whom Herod bribed to do

so. Hyrcanus was released by the Parthians. Herod appointed an undistinguished

Babylonian priest, Hananel, as high priest in his place.

Herod was an unpopular ruler. Though his wife, Mariamne, was a Hasmonean,

Herod himself was from a non-royal line and became increasingly paranoid. He had

Hyrcanus executed in 31 BCE, his brother Joseph and his wife in 29, and his mother-in-

law in 28. Herod relished building, which earned him his title “the Great.” He built the

city of Caesarea; the fortresses of Herodium and Masada; and a theatre, amphitheater,

and palace in Jerusalem. His greatest undertaking was the expansion and improvement of

the Jewish Temple, which he began in 20 BCE. Work on this continued until 64 CE, just

a few years before it was destroyed.

Herod remained loyal to the Romans. He switched his allegiance from Mark

Antony to Octavian (Augustus) after the latter defeated Antony at the Battle of Actium in

31 BCE. He had three of his sons, who were in the line of succession but who lost his

favor, executed. He appointed instead his son Archelaus as his heir, son Antipas ruler of

Galilee and Perea, and son Philip as head of other areas of his kingdom. He died in 4

BCE from illness.

 19

Herod’s will was disputed. Archelaus, Antipas, and other members of the

Herodian family who favored direct Roman rule all went to Rome to plead their cases.

Meanwhile in Palestine, outbreaks of violence were quelled by the Roman administrators.

Augustus eventually declared Archelaus not king, but ethnarch, over most of his father’s

territory; Antipas and Philip were made tetrarchs of lesser territories named in Herod’s

will. A delegation of Jewish and Samaritan nobles complained to Augustus about

Archelaus’ despotic reign, and the emperor banished him to Gaul. In 6 CE direct Roman

rule over Judea was established. It was joined administratively to the province of Syria.

Until 41 CE, it was ruled by prefects, the most famous of which is Pontius Pilate. A

Herodian, Agrippa I, reigned as king for three years, but from 44 – 66 CE Roman

procurators again administered the area. The record of the prefects and procurators in

general is one of iron-fisted rule with little respect for Jewish religious sensibilities.

Pontius Pilate, for example, was eventually removed for cruelty in disbanding a non-

threatening crowd in Samaria. The last two procurators were Albinus and Gessius Florus,

the former a taker of bribes and the latter a plunderer of entire cities. Jewish patience

wore thin. The Zealots, who favored rebellion, grew in power as did the radical Sicarii

who murdered even Jewish sympathizers of Roman rule. The catalyst for rebellion came

when Florus removed a large amount of money from the Temple treasury, was abused by

a crowd, and who then in retaliation sacked parts of Jerusalem. Full-fledged rebellion

broke out, the entire city was taken by the rebels, and a detachment of Roman soldiers

was massacred.

Cestius Gallus, the governor of Syria, was unable to retake the temple mount in

Jerusalem and was attacked when he withdrew to Antioch. The rebel forces took a large
 20

stash of war materiel. This feat emboldened the Jewish forces. In 67 CE, however, the

Emperor Nero put the campaign against the rebellion in the hands of Vespasian and his

son, Titus. By the end of 67, they controlled the entire region north of Jerusalem. In early

68, Vespasian brought the rest of Judea under his control. But the death of Nero delayed

a siege on Jerusalem. In July 69, Vespasian’s legions declared him emperor. This further

delayed concentration on Jerusalem. However, Titus laid siege to Jerusalem in 70, broke

through the walls, and waged a fierce battle in the temple compound with the result that

the Temple was burned. A great victory celebration took place in Rome. Roman forces

continued the fighting in Judea taking the fortresses of Herodium and Macherus quickly.

The fortress at Masada, however, held out until 73.

A second revolt took place from 132 to 135 CE during the reign of the Emperor

Hadrian. It seems to have been triggered by his attempt to outlaw the practice of

circumcision (but not for Jews alone) and his plans to build a temple to Jupiter on the site

of the former Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. It was led by Simon Bar Kosiba, dubbed Bar

Kokhba, “son of the star,” allegedly by the leading rabbi, Rabbi Akiba. Jerusalem was

thereafter known as Aelia Capitolina and, in fact, a temple to Jupiter was built on the

Second Temple site.

This brief review of Jewish history during the Hellenistic era shows the

contingency of Jewish life upon the rulers of the greater political powers of the eastern

Mediterranean basin. At one time or another, their fundamental religious practices of

observing circumcision, making sacrifices in the Temple, and maintaining a properly

qualified high priest were interfered with or outlawed. These troubles gave rise to

various responses, some of which coalesced into sects within Palestine in the first century
 21

BCE: Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, and the aforementioned Zealots. Mystical practice

and apocalypticism were strongest among the Essenes but could also be found among the

Pharisees and their followers, who shared power with the Sadducees.33 The Sadducees

were, in general, hierocratic and the Zealots were activist restorationists of an

independent nation. The Maccabean revolt against the offensive demands of Antiochus

IV Epiphanies and the two revolts against the obnoxious Romans demonstrate how

intolerable life became for Palestinian Jews.

It is not hard to imagine, in the light of their oppression, that one particular shift

in thought which occurred during Hellenistic times had a special appeal to some

Palestinian Jews. During the Homeric or Classical age, the accepted cosmology

consisted in a tripartite order: the earth was the proper place for human beings to live, the

underworld was the place where the dead were confined, and heaven was the domicile of

the gods. This paralleled the cosmology of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. During

Hellenistic times, men and women came to be seen as exiled on earth from their proper

dwelling place in heaven with the gods. Whereas earth had been considered the proper

place for men and women, they were now misfits on earth. Heaven, formerly the

dwelling place exclusively of the gods, was now seen as the true home of men and

women. 34 To use the phrase of E. R. Dodd, there occurred in this period a “progressive

devaluation of life in the material world.”35 It represented the “greatest revolution in

human thought” up to that time.36 Jonathan Z. Smith characterizes it this way, “Rather

33
For a discussion of apocalyptic thought in post-exilic times and early middle Judaism,
see Boccaccini 1991, 7-24.
34
Tabor 1986, 63.
35
Dodds 1968, 37.
36
Stendahl 1965, 112-113.
 22

than a celebration of the order of the cosmos, one often encounters a sense of alienation

from the created world.”37

This shift created great interest in heavenly existence. There arose the possibility

of journeys by mortals to heaven. This became a common theme of mystical literature

among many Hellenistic religions and Palestinian Jewish religion.

In Unutterable Things, Tabor gives examples of non-Jewish works which

illustrate this new, Hellenistic cosmology: Aristophanes’ Peace and the “Golden Plates,”

Plato’s “Myth of Er” in Republic 10.613D-21D, Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio,” and works

of Plutarch based upon the latter. Peace dates to 421 BCE, and in it Aristophanes greets

the apparition of a new star as being the Pythagorean poet Ion of Chios, who had recently

died. The “Golden Plates” were found in the 4th century BCE tombs in Crete, Thessaly,

and Italy and were apparently placed in the hands of the dead inscribed with words that

would assure them a blessed state when confronted by the chthonic powers of the

underworld. The inscriptions include the phrase, “I am a child of Earth and starry

Heaven; But my race is of Heaven alone,” emphasizing the cosmological shift described

above. In the “Myth of Er,” the soldier, Er, reports on his journey through the cosmos

upon returning to his body twelve days after being slain on the battlefield. On his

journey he saw, he reports, the fate of souls after death. In Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio,”

Scipio sees and experiences what is expected to happen at the final ascent of the soul at

death. Moreover, Scipio experiences a sense of detachment from all that is earthly and

mortal and is urged to concentrate on the heavenly world when he returns to earthly life.

Plutarch too uses Plato’s “Myth of Er” as a basis for his “On the Delays of Divine

37
Smith 2005, 749-51.
 23

Vengeance,” and “On the Sign of Socrates,” in which he is shown a way of escaping the

underworld and ascending to heaven.

There are Greco-Roman examples too. At Augustus’ funeral as related by Dio,

Tiberius compared his father to the god Herakles and said, “It is fitting that we should not

mourn for him, but while now giving his body back to nature should forever glorify his

soul as a god.” Numericus Atticus was said to have sworn that he had seen the soul of

the emperor ascending to heaven while the emperor’s body was being consumed on the

pyre.38

But are mortals allowed to glimpse heaven before death? (Tabor labels such a

heavenly ascent “proleptic.”) Plato’s “Myth of Er” and the other works based upon it

briefly described above are all examples of this type of proleptic ascent. This hunger for

knowledge of heaven is well documented in the Hellenistic Jewish works that follow.

Examination of Selected Works

What intertestamental Pseudepigraphic works might Paul have been familiar

with? Little doubt has been expressed about Paul’s own testimony that he was a

Pharisee. (Phil. 3:5) In his speech before the Roman tribune, Claudius Lysias, reported

by Luke in Acts, Paul says that he “was brought up” in Jerusalem “at the feet of” Rabbi

Gameliel I (grandfather of Gameliel II who appears in chapter 4 of Acts). (Acts 22:3)

From Paul’s quotations of the Bible, we know Paul was familiar with the Greek

Septuagint. Thus Paul knew those sections of the Bible from which Merkabah sprang. It

is at least possible, if not probable, that he would have been conversant with discussions,

38
Tabor 1986, passim.
 24

writings, and the practice of Merkabah within Pharisaic groups in Jerusalem. Scholem

states:

We know that in the period of the Second Temple an esoteric doctrine was

already taught in Pharisaic circles. The first chapter of Genesis, the story

of Creation (Maaseh Bereshith), and the first chapter of Ezekiel, the vision

of God’s throne-chariot (the “Merkabah”), were the favorite subjects of

discussion and interpretation which it was apparently considered

inadvisable to make public. Originally these discussions were restricted to

the elucidation and exposition of the respective Biblical passages. Thus

St. Jerome in one of his letters mentions a Jewish tradition that forbids the

study of the beginning and the end of the Book of Ezekiel before the

completion of the thirtieth year…[O]ne fact remains certain: the main

subjects of the later Merkabah mysticism already occupy a central position

in this oldest esoteric literature, best represented by the book of Enoch.39

Neusner says of Rabbi Yohnanan ben Zakkai, the chief architect of post-70 CE

rabbinism, that he was trained in the Merkabah and trained favored students in it as

well.40 Might not Paul have been in such a favored circle under the auspices of Gamaliel

I? Paul says of himself in Philippians that he was zealous to the point of persecuting the

church and “as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Phil. 3:6) and in Galatians, “I

advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more

zealous for the traditions of my ancestors.” (Gal. 1:13) And Luke has him say in his

defense before Claudius Lysias that he was “educated strictly according to our ancestral

39
Scholem 1954, 42-43.
40
Neusner 1970, 135ff.
 25

law, being zealous for God.” (Acts 22:3) And when he defended himself before Agrippa,

he claimed that his accusers knew that he had “belonged to the strictest sect of our

religion and lived as a Pharisee.” (Acts 26:5)

Paul, then, was a model Pharisee, obviously an insider among the Pharisees in

Jerusalem since he persecuted the church there and was commissioned by them to do the

same in Damascus. (Acts 26:12) He must have been considered mature in the faith. He

would then have been considered to be among those with whom the esoteric doctrine of

the Merkabah could be shared. Whether Paul was exposed as a young student or when

approaching thirty years of age or having attained the age of thirty, he would likely have

been conversant with this mystic dimension of Pharisaism.

It is interesting to note that, in his defense before Agrippa, he uses the descriptor

“from heaven” in conjunction with his DRE: “I saw a light from heaven…” (Acts 26:13)

In 2 Corinthians 12 Paul clearly speaks of heavenly ascent. Tabor points out that among

the Pseudepigraphic literature, ascents to heaven by Enoch, Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and

Isaiah are all found.41 However, the premier ascender to heaven is the enigmatic Biblical

figure of Enoch for he has inspired more text than any of the others. The earliest text

relating Enoch’s ascent to heaven is 1 Enoch. We know that all but one section, namely

The Similitudes (chapters 37-71), of 1 Enoch was produced some time in the second or
42
first century BCE or earlier. Black quotes Käsemann about apocalyptic in general and

speaks of 1 Enoch in particular:

Ernst Käsemann maintained that “Apocalyptic…was the mother of all

Christian theology;” he meant primitive Christian apocalyptic, but to this

41
Tabor 1986, 83
42
Nickelsburg 2005, 44ff.
 26

1 Enoch was a chief contributor. It is not surprising to find the Book of

Enoch cited as scripture by the author of the Epistle of Jude (vs. 14-15).

As a source of background evidence for the study of the emerging

Christian church and its literature, the Book of Enoch is a star witness. 43

1 Enoch is divided into five sections, each with its own provenance: The Book of

Watchers (chapters 1 – 36), The Parables (or Similitudes) of Enoch (chapters 37-71), The

Book of the Luminaries (chapters 72-82), The Animal Vision (chapters 83-90), and The

Epistle of Enoch (chapters 92-105). The first two books deal with Enoch’s ascent to

heaven. It is interesting to note that chapters 6-16 may antedate the final redaction of

Genesis 6:1-444 and of importance to note its reception by both Second Temple Jews and

the early Church. It was used by the Jewish authors of other pseudepigraphic books, and

its earliest portions are probably proto-Essene.45 All of 1 Enoch except for the so-called

Similitudes (chapters 37-71) has been found among the Qumran scrolls, possibly attesting

to the importance of this text to that community (probably Essene46) which continued in

existence until the revolt against Rome (66-70 CE). Some modern Ethiopian Jews accept

1 Enoch as canonical.47 Without citing evidence, Barnstone maintains that the

pseudepigraphic literature was favorite reading of the early Christians.48 As Black

pointed out, it is quoted by the author of Jude, a letter included in the Christian canon.

(Jude 1:14f. quotes 1 Enoch 1:9.) It enjoyed the favor of the early Church Fathers,

especially Tertullian, and only passed out of favor due to negative reviews by Augustine,

43
Black 1985, 1.
44
Brown 1990, 1057.
45
Charlesworth 1983, 8.
46
VanderKam 2001, 161ff.
47
Charlesworth 1983, xxiv.
48
Barnstone 1984, 486.
 27

Hilary and Jerome in the fourth century CE.49 So much influence did it have that Isaac

writes in the introduction to his translation, “[F]ew other apocryphal books so indelibly

marked the religious history and thought of the time of Jesus.”50 If Paul was aware of

heavenly ascent at all, he would in all likelihood have been familiar with as highly valued

a work as 1 Enoch. 1 Enoch may well be, then, representative of the language and

concepts that constituted that preconscious, precritical reservoir in Paul that helped filter

his experience of heavenly ascent when he wrote about it in the manner discussed in

Rowland above.51

The second book of 1 Enoch, The Parables, contains an account of the

transformation of Enoch into the “Son of man,” a highly significant title applied to Jesus.

It has, therefore, been studied in great detail because of its possible importance to early

Christology. However, its dating may be later, and so it may have been subject to

Christian recension. Though scholarly consensus seems to be forming that it is a Jewish

work completed by the end of the first century CE52, we will choose instead The Book of

Watchers as our example of a Jewish heavenly ascent in the Merkabah tradition.

2 Enoch or Slavonic Enoch elaborates on Enoch’s ascent considerably. The

description of the ascent takes up almost the whole book except for a much shorter

closing section devoted to Enoch’s sons’ history. As to the dating of its authorship,

Andersen says:

49
Brown, Fitzmyer and Murphy 1990, 1057.
50
Charlesworth 1983, 8.
51
See page 10.
52
See, for example, Nickelsburg 2005, 254-255.
 28

In every respect 2 Enoch remains an enigma…The present writer is

inclined to place the book—or at least its original nucleus—early rather

than late; and in a Jewish rather than a Christian community.53

Nickelsburg cites Scholem’s assertion that it dates to the first century CE, that it

draws upon 1 Enoch, and that it was produced in Egypt though it refers to animal

sacrifice in the Temple.54

Given the widespread familiarity with 1 Enoch and the authority it enjoyed, the

examination of a work that is so clearly related is of interest as well. Paul’s letters exhibit

such an active mind in their author that it is easy to imagine that he would have

investigated reports of visionary experiences circulating in Jerusalem. We will analyze 2

Enoch open to the possibility that this record of another author’s heavenly ascent may

also possibly suggest aspects of Paul’s mystical experiences.

When quoting these works, I will use the translation of Nickelsburg and

VanderKam for 1 Enoch55 and F. I. Andersen’s translation of 2 Enoch in its longer

recension (J) in the compilation edited by R. H. Charlesworth.56 While I am more

interested in identifying in these two works their most essential and noteworthy elements,

I will quote some passages at length in order to show the extraordinary nature of the

described experiences.

“The Book of Watchers” (1 Enoch 1-36)

The Book of Watchers can be broken down into the following sections: chapters

1-5 relate an apocalyptic vision by Enoch, chapters 6-16 deal with the origin of sin

53
Charlesworth 1985, 97.
54
Nickelsburg 2005, 225.
55
Nickelsburg and VanderKam 2004, 170.
56
Charlesworth 1983, 91ff.
 29

(expanding upon Genesis 6:1-4) and contain Enoch’s heavenly ascent (playing on

Genesis 5:24), and chapters 17-36 give an account of Enoch’s tours. I will draw out and

summarize those motifs in each section that are most relevant to our discussion.

Chapters 1-5

Four motifs are elaborated in the first section containing Enoch’s apocalyptic

vision:

(1) Enoch becomes privy to what will happen in the end times,

(2) God will come with power and judge,

(3) the righteous will be rewarded with peace and prosperity, and

(4) the wicked will be destroyed.

Enoch, the man in Genesis 5:24 who “walked with God; then he was no more,

because God took him,” has revealed to him in this section the “big picture” of salvation

history. The section comprises a brief apocalypse containing the themes of eschatology,

judgment, the duality of good and evil, and reward and punishment. Theodicy is also

upheld: God is in control of history, and he ensures that justice finally prevails. These

apocalyptic themes are all found in Daniel’s visions in chapters 7 and 12 cited above and

result from Daniel’s contemplation of Ezekiel 37 and Isaiah 66.57 Segal maintains that

the figure in Daniel 7:8, “the little horn speaking great things,” is actually Antiochus IV

Epiphanies, and the period specified in 8:9, “a time, two times, and half a time of the

little horn,” refers to his reign. As we know from our history review above, it was this

Seleucid ruler who desecrated the Temple and required Jews to break the Torah.

Specifically, he decreed that everyone including Jews must eat meat sacrificed to pagan

57
Segal 2004, 262-263
 30

gods. This latter demand was disobeyed by some who were then put to death, thus

becoming martyrs of the Jewish faith. Daniel’s vision rewards these martyrs and

punishes the persecutors:

There shall be a time of great anguish, such as has never occurred since

nations first came into existence. But at that time, your people shall be

delivered, everyone who is found in the book. Many of those who sleep in

the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to

shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the

brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the

stars forever and ever. (Dan. 12:1-3)

Here we see the double theme of God’s intervention at the end time combined

with reward for personal righteousness, which is revealed to Enoch in this first section

and reemphasized in the last section of Watchers.

Chapters 6-16

In the second section, we find within Enoch’s continuing vision a startling

account of the origin of sin/evil on earth, what God does to remedy the horrific resulting

conditions, and Enoch’s commissioning.

Some of the “Watchers” (angels called “the sons of God” in Genesis 6:2,4) leave

heaven, the place God had ordained for them, to come down to earth. We see clearly the

Hellenistic cosmology: the angels’ God-ordained location is heaven, but they have been

beguiled by the comeliness of women on earth, and leave their rightful place to live on

earth. This contravention of God’s order leads to an unnatural mutation—the women give

birth to giants (the “Nephilim” of Genesis 6:4) who devour all the food on earth and turn
 31

into cannibals. Moreover, these fallen Watchers teach men and women arts, such as

metallurgy and cosmetics, which lead them into sin. The faithful Watchers—Michael,

Surafel and Gabriel—on the other hand, seeing all this, plead to God to rectify the terrible

state of humankind. God decides, apparently, to intervene by way of The Deluge, though

he orders that Noah be forewarned and directs the fallen Watchers to be bound until the

final judgment when they will be destroyed. After that, the righteous will be planted on

the earth and prosper.

This section assaults modern, scientific theories of the existence of evil in the

world though modern men and women, too, are hard put to explain the grip of evil on

human affairs. As with Daniel’s prophecy about the resurrection of the martyrs, one can

see the historical plight of Palestinian Jewry in play in Enoch’s vision. What Nickelsburg

says in general about the Pseudepigrapha is particularly true here:

One important factor that holds together the largest part of this corpus of

literature is its common setting in hard times: persecution, oppression,

other kinds of disaster, the loneliness and pressures of a minority living

out its convictions in an alien environment. Within this context we can

read and appreciate these writings as a sometimes powerful expression of

the depths and the heights of our humanity and of human religiousness and

religious experience. In them we may see ourselves as we have been or

are or might be: the desperate puzzlement of Enoch’s decimated

humanity; the anguish and then the ecstasy of a Tobit; the courage of a

Susanna or a Judith; the defiant tenacity of the Maccabean martyrs; the

 32

desolate abandonment of an Asenath; and the persistent questioning of an

Ezra.58

The theory of the origin of evil advanced here may have resulted from meditation

upon the cause for The Deluge given in Genesis. Any reader—ancient or modern—of

the account of The Deluge (Flood) in the canonical Bible struggles to understand how

mankind had become so evil that God regretted that he had ever created human beings.

(Gen. 6:6) Given the stature that Jews ascribed to angels, Enoch’s vision offers an

extreme explanation for an extreme rupture of God’s good order. The highest of all

creatures, Watchers, had destroyed the proper order of creation resulting in the unnatural,

bestial giants who harassed humankind and whose evil spirits persisted in inducing men

and women to sin. This dream-vision may reflect the feeling of the helplessness of

Palestinian Jews to overcome the evil powers that were oppressing them during the time

the author of 1 Enoch lived. But God’s warning and care of Noah is a sign that that

portion of humankind striving for righteousness should have hope of deliverance, and

that the binding of the fallen Watchers and their eventual destruction will restore the

proper order of things—theodicy will be upheld. Perhaps, too, deflecting the cause of

evil on to someone other than mankind made their suffering the results of sin more

bearable.

Enoch is requested by the fallen Watchers to intercede on their behalf with God.

While petitioning God on their behalf he falls asleep and has a dream-vision in which he

learns that his intercession fails but learns that “the Great One” has “created and destined

me to reprimand the watchers, the sons of heaven.” (1 En. 14:2-3) The powerlessness of

58
Nickelsburg 2005, 4.
 33

Enoch, the man who “walked with God” (Gen. 5:22, 24), to persuade God to forgive the

fallen Watchers may serve to underscore once again the powerlessness of the author’s

generation over the causes of the evils they suffered. Enoch’s commissioning to

reprimand the fallen Watchers is stressed in this section by repetition.

There follows the account of Enoch’s ascension to heaven:

In the vision it was shown to me thus:

Look, clouds in the vision were summoning me, and mists

were crying out to me;

and shooting stars and lightning flashes were hastening

me and speeding me along,

and winds in my vision made me fly up and lifted me

upward and brought me to heaven.

And I went in until I drew near to a wall built of hailstones;

and tongues of fire were encircling them all around,

and they began to frighten me.

And I went in to the tongues of fire, and I drew near to a

great house built of hailstones;

and the walls of this house were like stone slabs,

and they were all of snow, and the floor was of snow.

And the ceiling was like shooting stars and lightning flashes;

and among them were fiery cherubim, and their heaven

was water,

and a flaming fire encircled all their walls, and the doors
 34

blazed with fire.

And I went into that house—hot as fire and cold as snow,

and no delight of life was in it.

Fear enveloped me, and trembling seized me,

and I was quaking and trembling, and I fell upon my

face.

And I saw in my vision,

And look, another open door before me:

and a house greater than the former one,

and it was all built of tongues of fire.

All of it so excelled in glory and splendor and majesty

that I am unable to describe for you its glory and

majesty.

Its floor was of fire,

and its upper part was flashes of lightning and shooting

stars,

and its ceiling was a flaming fire.

And I was looking and I saw a lofty throne;

and its appearance was like ice,

and its wheels were like the shining sun,

and the voice (or sound) of the cherubim,

and from beneath the throne issued rivers of flaming fire.

And I was unable to see.

 35

The Great Glory sat upon it;

his apparel was like the appearance of the sun

and whiter than much snow.

No angel could enter into this house and look at his face

because of the splendor and glory,

and no human could look at him.

Flaming fire encircled him and a great fire stood by him,

and none of those about him approached him.

Ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him,

but he needed no counseler; his every word was deed.

And the holy ones of the watchers who approached him did

not depart by night,

nor by day did they leave him.

Until now I had been on my face, prostrate and trembling.

And the Lord called me with his mouth and said to me,

“Come here, Enoch, and hear my word(s).”

(1 Enoch 14:8-24)

Both similarities—wind, clouds, lightning, fire, angels, fear, throne,

commissioning—and differences—four human-like creatures, wheels with eyes, two

houses, cherubim, details of the appearance of the enthroned one—are many between

Enoch’s ascent and Ezekiel’s. Both accounts strain language to express the ineffable,

engender exhilaration and fear, and magnify the majesty and potency of God. Both

transport the ascender to a transcendent realm unexperienced by the common man.

 36

God again commissions Enoch to reprimand the fallen Watchers and tell them

that evil spirits will come out of the bodies of their giant children. These evil spirits will

corrupt men and women until the “day of the consummation of the great judgment” (1

En. 16:1), and they will have no peace.

Chapters 17-36

The last section of the The Book of Watchers is filled with two guided tours that

Enoch takes. It is narrated by Enoch in the first person, and his guides are various angels.

Some sites imply different aspects of what will happen in the end times, some are

historical, some wondrous, and some perhaps symbolic. I summarize them in the order

in which they appear in the text:

A place with neither heaven above nor earth below where, Uriel explains, stars

which have transgressed the commandments of God are bound for ten millions years;

Another place that frightens and pains Enoch where, Ura’el explains, the angels

are detained forever;

A mountain inside which, Rufael explains, the souls of the dead will be gathered

until the day of judgment, where Abel’s spirit sues for Cain’s seed to be exterminated

from earth, and where the righteous are kept separated from sinners;

A place to the extreme west of the earth and there a burning fire “that ran and did

not rest” which, Raguel explains, pursues the luminaries of heaven;

A mountain of fire on earth and beyond that seven mountains of precious stone

which resembled the seat of a throne surrounded by fragrant trees among which was one

especially finely flowered and fruited and fragrant like no other; this place, Michael, the
 37

chief of the angels, explains is the throne of “the Great Holy One, the Lord of glory, the

King of eternity” and the tree is reserved for the righteous until the great judgment;

Mountains and valleys at which Enoch “marveled exceedingly;”

An accursed valley where, Uriel explains, the accursed will be judged and remain

forever;

A mountain in a desert from the top of which a stream gushed and cascaded

down;

Another mountain in the dessert where there was a tree which smelled like

rubbish;

To the east a valley of endless water with a tree fragrant like mastic and a

cinnamon tree;

Further to the east other mountains with trees bearing nectar and over these

another mountain with aloe and almond trees;

To the northeast seven mountains of excellent nard, fragrant trees, cinnamon trees

and pepper, then over the summits of these trees far towards the east, over the Erythraen

Sea, over the head of the angel Zutu’el—

A garden with fragrant, large trees among which was the tree of wisdom which,

Raphael explains, is the tree from which “your father of old and your mother of old” ate,

became wise, realized they were naked, and were expelled;

The extreme ends of the earth where there were huge beasts and assorted birds

and to the east the ultimate ends of the earth which rests on the heavens, the gates of

which were open so Enoch could see how the stars make their exit (with the help of Uriel
 38

he wrote the exits for each one down, “according to their number and their names,

according to their conjunction and their position and their time and their months”);

To the extreme north, a great and glorious seat and three gates through which

blow cold, hail, frost, snow, dew and rain; the winds through one gate blows good things;

winds through the other two blow violence and sorrow upon the earth;

To the extreme west ends of the earth were three gates which resembled those in

the east with respect to the number of exits;

To the extreme south ends of the earth there were three gates through which blew

the south wind, dew and rain;

To the extreme ends of the heavens where he saw open gates of heaven and small

gates above them, through one of which the stars in the east passed the stars which travel

west.

Enoch ends the tour with a blessing:

And when I saw I blessed—and I shall always bless—the Lord of glory,

who has wrought great and glorious wonders, to show his great deeds to

his angels, and to the spirits of human beings, so that they might see the

work of his might and glorify the deeds of his hands and bless him

forever. (1 Enoch 34:4)

One is struck by the grand sweep of Enoch’s tour. He travels with different

angels from a vantage point above the entire creation and moves over mountains, deserts,

and rivers from one end of the earth to the other. Perhaps such panoramic description is

less compelling to modern readers who are familiar with aerial filming at both lower and

higher altitudes, but the account is nonetheless exhilarating to the imagination. Enoch’s
 39

flight is filled with both “great and glorious wonders” that move him to bless the Creator

of them.

The entire account is shot through with the apocalyptic themes we noted in the

first sections of the book. We encounter the dualism of good and evil throughout. The

boundary between moral good and evil is blurred with physical “goodness” and

“badness.” On the one hand, we are presented, for example, with transgressing stars,

sinners, winds which blow sorrow and violence on the earth, and trees which smell like

rubbish to, on the other, the righteous, good winds, and flowering, fragrant, fruit-filled

trees. There is no sense of a morally neutral natural order; all flows from good or evil.

Next, Enoch is shown many places that will have a role in reward or punishment: a place

where the transgressing stars are bound for ten million years, a place where the (fallen)

angels are detained, a mountain where the souls of the dead will be held until “the day of

judgment” and where the righteous are kept separated from sinners, a mountain on which

is both God’s throne and a tree whose fruit is reserved for the righteous until the “great

judgment,” and an accursed valley where the accursed will be judged and remain forever.

We notice that characters, features and stories of Genesis are corroborated during

the tour: the goodness of God’s creation, Adam and Eve and the tree of wisdom (or the

knowledge of good and evil), their eating of its fruit, their recognition of their nakedness,

their expulsion from the garden, and Cain’s murder of Abel. This is significant in light of

the fact that the creation account of Genesis was the other great object of Merkabah

meditation.59

59
Scholem 1954, 42.
 40

Enoch also learns about the paths of the stars and visits the places where cold,

hail, frost, snow, dew and rain and winds originate.

What shines through this entire Book of the Watchers is a two-fold

concern: to know what God’s dwelling place in heaven is like and reassurance

that the righteous will join God there. This is the knowledge sought by

meditation upon the Merkabah passages.

2 Enoch (The Slavonic Apocalypse of Enoch)

The second work we will examine is also drawn from the Enochic

literature. The only texts that exist are in Slavonic. There are essentially two

recensions of the text. The issue of whether the longer is a later expansion of the

shorter or the shorter a condensation of the longer cannot be definitively

determined.60 Like 1 Enoch it is organized around the motifs of heavenly ascent

and revelations of the structure of the cosmos and the apocalyptic end times. We

will examine the longer recension (J).

The book can be divided into three sections: chapters 1 – 38 contain Enoch’s

heavenly ascent and return to earth; chapters 39 – 67 set out Enoch’s teaching and ethical

exhortations to his sons; and chapters 68 – 73 recount the stories of his sons Methusalam,

Nir, Noe and Melkisedek. We will be most interested in the first 38 chapters, less so in

chapters 39 – 67 and will ignore chapters 68 – 73 (though they are interesting for

different reasons).

60
Nickelsburg 2005, 221; Charlesworth 1985, 93-94.
 41

Chapters 1-38

In contrast with 1 Enoch, 2 Enoch begins with the account of Enoch’s ascent to

heaven. It starts:

There was a wise man and a great artisan whom the Lord took away. And

he loved him so that he might see the highest realms; and of the most wise

and great and inconceivable and unchanging kingdom of God almighty,

and of the most marvelous and glorious and shining and many-eyed

station of the Lord’s servants, and of the Lord’s immovable throne.61

As we did for Enoch’s tour in 1 Enoch, we will outline the storyline. Two huge

men appear to Enoch in a dream; when he awakes they are present to him in actuality and

announce to him that he will ascend to heaven. They take him to the first heaven on their

wings and place him on the clouds where he sees an ocean more vast than the earth’s.

They enter the second heaven, which is a waystation for disobedient angels who

are hanging [sic], waiting for the “measureless” judgment. They ask Enoch to pray for

them but he replies, “Who am I, a mortal man, that I should pray for angels?”

The third heaven contains both Paradise and a place of torment. Paradise is

“inconceivably pleasant,” a place in which God sometimes takes his rest, and, Enoch’s

guide explains, is the place prepared for the righteous who suffer in life. The place of

torment is for those who do not glorify the Lord and sin.

The fourth heaven contains the solar and lunar tracks, and Enoch learns many

details about the angels’ roles in regulating them and their number.

61
Charlesworth 1983, 102ff.
 42

In the fifth heaven are the Grigori, the fallen angels who have followed the ways

of their prince Satanail, who appear dejected. Three of them have descended to earth and

taken human wives and have given birth to giants. Enoch tells them of how his prayers

for their earthly brothers have been rejected. He urges them to perform their liturgy

before the face of the Lord, and they do, raising their voices “piteously and touchingly.”

Enoch enters the sixth heaven and sees there the archangels “who are over the

angels; and they harmonize all existence, heavenly and earthly; ….who record all human

souls, and all their deeds, and their lives before the face of the Lord.” In their midst are

seven phoenixes and seven cherubim and seven six-winged beings singing in unison

“And their song is not to be reported.”

In the seventh heaven, Enoch sees the Lord sitting on his throne in the tenth

heaven. His guides leave him and he becomes terrified. The Lord sends Gabriel who says

to him, “Be brave, Enoch! Don’t be frightened! Stand up, and come with me and stand in

front of the Lord forever.” Gabriel carries him up to the tenth heaven, and, as he goes,

he sees the eighth heaven where the changer of the seasons stays and the ninth heaven

where the nine zodiacs reside.

Enoch is joined by Michael in the tenth heaven and stands before the face of the

Lord:

Thus even I saw the face of the Lord. But the face of the Lord is not to be

talked about, it is so very marvelous and supremely awesome and

supremely frightening. And who am I to give an account of the

incomprehensible being of the Lord, and of his face, so extremely strange

and indescribable? And how many are his commands, and his multiple
 43

voice, and the Lord’s throne, supremely great and not made by hands, and

the choir stalls all around him, the cherubim and the seraphim armies, and

their never-silent singing. Who can give an account of his beautiful

appearance, never changing and indescribable, and his great glory? And I

fell down flat and did obeisance to the Lord. And the Lord, with his own

mouth, said to me, “Be brave, Enoch! Don’t be frightened! Stand up, and

stand in front of my face forever.”

Then the Lord bids Michael to strip Enoch of his earthly clothes, anoint him with

delightful oil, and put him in the clothes of the Lord’s glory; and Enoch declares, “And I

looked at myself and I had become like one of his glorious ones…”

The Lord has Vrevoil to bring Enoch supplies for speed writing and has Vrevoil

to instruct Enoch of what to write such that he fills 366 books: “And he was telling me

all the things of heaven and earth and sea and all the elements…” God Himself then

shares with Enoch secrets not even shared with his angels about the origins and creation

of everything including man in His image to be a “second angel…a king to reign on earth

and have my wisdom.” God called the man Adam, gave him free will, and pointed out to

him only two ways: light and darkness. He also created Eve from Adam’s rib taken while

he slept.

God commands Enoch to reveal to his sons and future generations everything in

the 366 books which he wrote. God predicts the flood and the sparing of Noah. Enoch is

given thirty days to do that, and he is then taken back up to heaven.

Chapters 39-67

The next section emphasizes Enoch’s ethical instruction and exhortation to his
 44

children but also contains some interesting aspects of Enoch’s heavenly ascent and

certain apocalyptic details.62

Enoch begins his instruction to his children, “I have been sent today to you from

the lips of the Lord, to speak to you whatever has been and whatever is now and whatever

will be until the day of judgment.” He reports that, though he is “a human being created

just like yourselves,” he has seen the face of the Lord, gazed into the eyes of the Lord,

and seen the right hand of the Lord. Of the experience, he says that if it is frightening to

stand before an earthly king who has the power of life and death over you, “how much

more terrifying it is to stand before the face of the King of earthly kings and of the

heavenly armies.”

Enoch then declares to them, “I know everything; for either from the lips of the

Lord or else my eyes have seen from the beginning even to the end, and from the end to

the recommencement.” Moreover, in his books, he says, he has written down the “height

from the earth to the seventh heaven, and the depth to the lowermost hell, and the place

of condemnation” and “how the prisoners were in pain, looking forward to endless

punishment; and I recorded all those who have been condemned by the judge, and all

their sentences and all their corresponding deeds.”

He tells also about his visit to paradise where rest is prepared for the righteous

and where, “after the last one arrives,” he will bring out Adam and the ancestors so that

they may be filled with joy, comparing it to joyful anticipation of dinner in a palace with

a friend.

He then reveals the basis of ethics: “The Lord with his own two hands created

62
Charlesworth 1983, 162ff.
 45

mankind; in a facsimile of his own face, both small and great, the Lord created. And

whoever insults a person’s face, insults the face of a king and treats the face of the Lord

with repugnance.” He goes on with the teaching: do not take vengeance on those who do

evil to you, for “the Lord is the one who takes vengeance, and he will be the avenger for

you on the day of the great judgment.”

When his son Methusalah offers Enoch food, Enoch replies, “Listen, child! Since

the time when the Lord anointed me with the ointment of his glory, food has not come

into me, and earthly pleasure my soul does not remember; nor do I desire anything

earthly.”

Enoch caps off his ethical teaching by emphasizing that “there is no repentance

after death.”

As his sons anticipate Enoch’s re-ascension into heaven, they say:

O our father, Enoch! May you be blessed by the Lord, the eternal king!

And now, bless your sons and all the people, so that we may be glorified

in front of your face today. For you will be glorified in front of the face of

the Lord for eternity, because you are the one whom the Lord chose in

preference to all the people upon the earth, and he appointed you to be the

one who makes a written record of all his creation, visible and invisible,

and the one who carried away the sin of mankind…”63

The story continues that at the end of Enoch’s instruction and exhortation, it

became dark, “and the angels hurried and grasped Enoch and carried him up to the

highest heaven, where the Lord received him and made him stand in front of his face for

63
Charlesworth 1983, 190.
 46

eternity.”

Comparison of the Two Books

Whereas The Book of Watchers begins with Enoch’s apocalyptic vision that is

amplified by his tour in the last section, 2 Enoch begins immediately with his heavenly

ascent, and it is during his ascent through ten heavens that he learns the apocalyptic truth.

The second section of 2 Enoch is devoted to ethical teaching which is absent from 1

Enoch. Let us first look for apocalyptic themes in 2 Enoch.

In the second heaven, Enoch meets disobedient angels who are awaiting “the

measureless judgment.” In the third heaven he sees both Paradise and a place of torment.

In the sixth heaven he learns that the angels are tracking all human souls and their deeds.

Thus the apocalyptic theme of reward and punishment is made known to Enoch.

In the second section devoted to ethical instruction, apocalyptic dualism is

perhaps most clearly expressed when Enoch is told by God that He had instructed Adam

that there were two ways: light and darkness. This parallels the dualism of good and evil,

though the choice of words may reflect a different emphasis on the underlying cause of

evil. In 2 Enoch, Enoch encounters in the fifth heaven the Grigori, the fallen angels (the

fallen Watchers of 1 Enoch). Only three of them have descended to earth to lay with

women and have fathered giants. So evil acts seem somewhat de-emphasized by

comparison to 1 Enoch. Also, the large amount of material on ethical instruction in 2

Enoch may imply that the vision highlights ignorance rather than bad will to be at the

root of evil.

2 Enoch is at pains to show the completeness of Enoch’s knowledge, including

events of the end time. Does Enoch learn that God will come in power to judge? Though
 47

this motif appears in the text, it is not so explicitly nor as forcefully stated as in 1 Enoch.

The text refers to “the day of judgment,” and Enoch comes to know of heaven and the

“lowermost hell” and “the place of condemnation.” He also encounters prisoners who

anticipate “endless punishment.” On the reward side, he envisions a scene after the last

righteous one has arrived when Adam and the ancestors shall join them, and they shall all

experience joy, joy akin to the anticipation of dinner in a palace with a friend. These are

all intimations of a last-days scenario, though set in the context of the ethical practice that

will bring reward or the sin that will reap punishment. Another passage speaks of the

last days while emphasizing theodicy. It is Enoch’s teaching on vengeance. He teaches

to leave vengeance to the Lord, for “he will be the avenger for you on the day of the great

judgment.”

So we find all the apocalyptic themes: reward and punishment, dualism,

eschatology and theodicy. However, unlike in 1 Enoch, they play a subsidiary role in the

context of both the heavenly journey and ethical instruction. More noticeable and

significant is 2 Enoch’s soteriology and its elevation of Enoch to a messiah-like status.

Upon gaining admittance to the tenth heaven where God is enthroned, Enoch is

joined by Michael, and God commands Enoch to be stripped of his earthly clothing,

anointed, and clothed “in the clothes of the Lord’s glory.” Enoch had become “like one of

his glorious ones.” This transformative step is missing from 1 Enoch and adds an

important soteriological element to Enoch’s heavenly journey. The sons’ prayer carries

the connotation that Enoch occupies even a redemptive role: “[Y]ou are the one whom

the Lord chose in preference to all the people upon the earth, and he appointed you to be

the one who makes a written record of all his creation, visible and invisible, and the one
 48

who carried away the sin of mankind.” Coupled with his anointing, this implies even a

messianic status.

2 Enoch also adds another dimension of personal soteriology, namely, that Enoch

is meant to return to heaven “to stand in front of his face for eternity.” Enoch’s journey

has been, it turns out, proleptic—an experience of the heavenly life to come experienced

in a vision during one’s earthly life.

The concern about the origins and persistence of evil, as has been said, is much

attenuated in 2 Enoch. The lengthy and vivid elaboration of the evil done by the giants is

missing in 2 Enoch, whereas it occupies a central place in The Book of Watchers, taking

up almost the whole of the ten chapters of the second section. The origin of evil spirits

coming out of the bodies of the giants which will corrupt men and women until the “day

of the great conclusion” is missing from 2 Enoch. The space given to Enoch’s ethical

instruction to his children in 2 Enoch renders the mention of these fallen angels a distant

second to the space given to the responsibility of men and women to lead upright lives

and worship the Creator God.

The status afforded Enoch has interesting similarities and differences in The Book

of Watchers and 2 Enoch. Both visions agree that Enoch does not have the power to

intercede successfully on behalf of the fallen angels. In Watchers, the commissioning of

Enoch to report to the fallen angels their sentence by God is emphasized. It seems almost

a footnote during Enoch’s heavenly journey in 2 Enoch. The important commissioning

in 2 Enoch is to provide his children and successors with the ethical instruction and

exhortation that will make them righteous. In Watchers, there is an implied inferiority of

human beings to the Watchers, since the latter are successful in interceding with God to
 49

alleviate the suffering of humankind, whereas Enoch is unsuccessful in interceding on

behalf of the fallen Watchers. In 2 Enoch, Enoch seems to acknowledge this same

inferiority when he demurs from interceding for the fallen angels. Yet in 2 Enoch, Enoch

achieves the status of Michael, one of God’s great ones. There is even the implication

that Enoch enjoys a more privileged status for he is told secrets denied to the angels. In

addition, the intercession by the faithful Watchers in Watchers is missing from 2 Enoch,

but Enoch is elevated in 2 Enoch to a redemptive or messianic role.

The description of the actual Merkabah vision of God on his throne is much more

elaborated in 2 Enoch (chapters 20 – 22) than in The Book of Watchers (1 Enoch 14:8 –

15:1), but both try to give expression as best they can to the dazzling magnificence of the

throne. In Watchers, Enoch is summoned to heaven by natural forces that also serve as

the means of his ascent, and no guide accompanies him. The description of his vision

uses metaphors of architecture, materials, fire, and ice. Upon entering a first house, great

fear seizes him, he trembles and falls down and experiences a vision within the vision of

a second, even more dazzling house. Within this house he sees a throne with the “Great

Glory” upon it. He hears the voice of the cherubim but none of the angels or no one “of

the flesh” among the tens of millions that stood before him was able to come and see the

face of “the Excellent and Glorious One.” The Lord “with his own mouth” bids Enoch to

come near.

By contrast, Enoch’s heavenly ascent in 2 Enoch is up through ten heavens. He is

accompanied by two huge, extraordinary men who serve as Enoch’s guides until he

enters the seventh heaven. He is then guided by Gabriel through the eighth and ninth

heavens and by Michael who takes him to see the face of God in the tenth heaven which
 50

“is not to be talked about,” “supremely awesome,” and “supremely frightening.” 2 Enoch

is concerned with the details of the entire structure of ten heavens, their astronomical

features and enumerations, and most especially the hierarchy of the angels that do God’s

bidding and regulate the workings of God’s Creation. While Watchers separates Enoch’s

heavenly ascent from his far flung journey of mostly earthly geography which contains

sites revealing features of the end times, 2 Enoch rolls many of these into the landscapes

of the ten heavens.

Also, God’s words to Enoch fill fifteen chapters in 2 Enoch (23–37) whereas it

takes up only two in The Book of Watchers (15–16). God’s speech to Enoch in Watchers

recapitulates and confirms what the reader has already learned about the fallen angels—

their punishment and Enoch’s failed intervention on their behalf. His speech in 2 Enoch

contains secrets that not even the angels know and a detailed account of the Creation.

Will we find in God’s speech in 2 Enoch the motifs that we found in the long third

section of Watchers, Enoch’s tour of earth?

Firstly, are characters, features, and stories of the Hebrew Bible corroborated by 2

Enoch? Yes, to an even greater degree than in Watchers. Chapters 24 to 32 are both a

recapitulation and amplification of the creation account in Genesis by God Himself.

Secondly, the angelology of 2 Enoch is more highly developed than in Watchers and

much more positive. As already mentioned, the fallen Watchers are only mentioned in

passing in the fifth heaven, and no evil spirits coming out of the giants are cited in 2

Enoch. Yet the numbers and importance of angels in the entire scheme of the cosmos is

much more elaborately described in 2 Enoch.

 51

Thirdly, while The Flood is predicted in 2 Enoch, the earth does not figure

prominently into the apocalyptic end times as it does in Watchers. This segues into the

fourth point, namely, that 2 Enoch’s rich and lengthy depiction of ten heavens may

exemplify a continued development of the Hellenistic shift from earth as the proper place

for human beings to a fascination with heaven as the true home of men and women in the

afterlife.

Enoch’s vision in 2 Enoch is more elaborated than in Watchers. We have noted

some amplifications already: the multiplicity of heavens, the more extensive angelology,

the length and content of God’s address to Enoch, and the revelation of secrets to Enoch

unknown to the angels. Watchers certainly portrays God as Creator and upholds

theodicy, but 2 Enoch emphasizes both points in God’s own portrayal of himself:

And now, Enoch, whatever I have told you, and whatever you have

understood, and whatever you have seen in the heavens, and whatever you

have seen on the earth, and whatever I have written in the books—by my

supreme wisdom all these things I planned to accomplish…And there is

no adviser and no successor to my creation. I am self-eternal and not

made by hands. My thought is without change. My wisdom is my adviser

and my deed is my word. And my eyes look at all things. If I look at all

things, then they stand still and shake with terror; but, if I should turn my

face away, then all things would perish.64

One salient feature of 2 Enoch is the recording of all knowledge in 366 books by

Enoch at God’s behest and God’s command that they be distributed, “children to children

64
Charlesworth 1983, 140.
 52

and family to family and kinsfolk to kinsfolk.”65 The Lord instructs the archangel

Vrevoil, “swifter in wisdom that the other archangels, and who records all the Lord’s

deeds”66 to bring all of his (God’s) books from his storehouses, to outfit Enoch with a

speed-writing pen, and to dictate to Enoch:

And he was telling me [Enoch] all the things of heaven and earth and sea

and all the elements and the movements and their courses, and the living

thunder, the sun and the moon and the stars, their courses and their

changes, and seasons and years and days and hours, and the coming of the

clouds and the blowing of the winds, and the number of the angels and the

songs of the armed troops; and every kin of human thing, and every kind

of language and singing, and human life and rules and instructions and

sweet-voiced singing, and everything that it is appropriate to learn.”67

As if this were not extraordinary enough, God himself instructs Enoch:

Listen, Enoch, and pay attention to these words of mine! For not even to

my angels have I explained my secrets nor related to them their origin, nor

my endlessness and inconceivableness, as I devise the creatures, as I am

making known to you today.68

This rivals if not surpasses the Biblical revelations of God to Moses on Sinai.

Does it testify to the adequacy, even superiority, of God’s ethical revelation to mankind

in the pre-Mosaic age? It, at least, opens a door to thinking that another besides Moses

65
Charlesworth 1983, 140.
66
Charlesworth 1983, 140.
67
Charlesworth 1983, 140.
68
Charlesworth 1983, 142.
 53

was the recipient of supreme ethical revelation, astounding both in breadth and depth and

perhaps even more complete.

In summary, then, we have in The Book of Watchers and 2 Enoch, two accounts

of Merkabah visions. Both texts give us, insofar as language can, notions of the

vividness, transcendence of the throne and the elation and fear which the pseudepigrahic

authors experienced during their journey to heaven. Both were commissioned by God

himself; in the case of The Book of Watchers, to tell the fallen Watchers of God’s

sentencing; in 2 Enoch, to instruct his children in the way of righteousness. Both suggest

that humankind ranks below the angels, but in 2 Enoch, Enoch is transformed into one of

the great angels, is told secrets denied to the angels, and is ascribed a redemptive, even

messianic role. In both accounts, the heavenly traveler also learns a great deal about the

roles of angels, the courses of the heavenly bodies, and the end time which will be

characterized by God’s judgment, eternal rewards for the righteous and punishments for

sinners, and thus the restoration of theodicy. In other words, they envision the

apocalypse. In 2 Enoch, the ascender is given knowledge of everything, commanded to

commit it to writing and to share it with his descendents. Also in 2 Enoch, the heavenly

journeyer is summoned to return to heaven for eternity.

If we can link Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus and/or his self-reported

“visions and revelations” with the visions reported in The Book of Watchers and 2 Enoch,

we may then have some fuller idea of what Paul experienced.

 54

CHAPTER 3

ASCENTS OF PAUL

“Visions and revelations of the Lord”

I have said that our focus is on the accounts of heavenly ascenders in the Jewish

Merkabah tradition as illuminating the content of Paul’s experience as a heavenly

ascender. Since Paul so clearly speaks of himself as a heavenly ascender in 2

Corinthians, let us consider first the light which the accounts of Jewish Merkabah we

have examined shed on this experience.

Despite the dearth of facts about Paul’s life, it can be ascertained that the “visions

and revelations” to which Paul refers in 2 Corinthians 12 are almost certainly not a

reference to his Damascus Road Experience (DRE). Many scholars’ estimate for dating

Second Corinthians (though in actuality it may be two separate letters that have been

combined) is circa 55CE69. The fourteen years earlier which Paul specifies would be

circa 41CE, most certainly much later than Paul’s conversion, which Horrell puts as circa

33 CE.70 It is possible, however, that Paul may be alluding to both his DRE and other

experiences by using the plural, “visions and revelations.” My thesis, moreoever, is that

Paul was trained in Merkabah mysticism and thus had had “visions and revelations” even

before his DRE. He does though single out “fourteen years ago” as a period in which he

experienced presumably particularly memorable “visions and revelations” apart from his

DRE.

69
Horrell 2000, 39; Meeks and Fitzgerald 2007, 44.
70
Horrell 2000, 37.
 55

Some scholars have construed his parallel construction—“I know a person…And

I know that such a person…”—as indicating two heavenly ascents while Tabor maintains

that Paul is describing only one.71 For our purposes, it makes little difference. The

important point is that it or they seem to have been as significant to Paul as his DRE,

which has received much greater attention, it being considered the pivotal event in Paul’s

life.

It cannot be denied, I think, that Paul is talking of a heavenly ascent in this

passage in 2 Corinthians—“caught up to the third heaven” and “caught up into Paradise”

make this clear. As we have seen, 1 and 2 Enoch are also speaking of heavenly ascent.

The Book of Watchers, which we have examined in detail, illustrates the pseudepigraphic

author’s vision of heaven and God enthroned. 2 Enoch contains an even lengthier

description and is clearly proleptic, for God commands Enoch to return to earth for thirty

days and then to rejoin him in heaven.

Though Paul gives a very brief account72 of the heavenly ascent, I believe we can

establish links between the much longer Enochic accounts and Paul’s. Let us then

examine Paul’s description at 2 Corinthians 12:1 – 10:

It is necessary to boast; nothing is to be gained by it, but I will go on to

visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a person in Christ who

fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the

body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. And I know that such

a person—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God

knows—was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be

71
Tabor 1986, 115.
72
See below the discussion of possible reasons for his reticence.
 56

told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. On behalf of such a one I will

boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses.

But if I wish to boast, I will not be a fool, for I will be speaking the truth.

But I refrain from it, so that no one may think better of me than what is

seen in me or heard from me, even considering the exceptional character

of the revelations. Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn

was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me

from being too elated. Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that

it would leave me; but he said to me, “My grace if sufficient for you, for

power is made perfect in weakness.” So, I will boast all the more gladly

of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.

Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions,

and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am

strong.

Due to the context of this passage (all of 2 Corinthians), it must necessarily be

considered as part of Paul’s defense of his stature as an apostle. That said, I believe

Tabor was correct at the time that he wrote (1986) in noting that the “visions and

revelations,” to which Paul referred but did not elaborate, had not been considered for

their own sake.73 Rather, they are characterized as a charisma that Paul somewhat

ambivalently proposed as a partial proof of his apostleship. Such a statement supposes,

of course, that Paul is speaking of his own visions and revelations of the Lord. There are

good reasons to suppose that he is. The chief argument is that the shift to the first person

73
Tabor 1986, 1ff.
 57

in verses 7b ff.—“Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, etc.”—would make no

sense if Paul were not speaking of his own visions and revelations. The other rationale

sees Paul as rhetorically “soft-peddling” that it is his own revelation. Why would he do

so? We know that the rabbis were later very reticent about speaking about personal

mystical experiences. This may have been true among first century Pharisees as well. Or

Paul may be following the precedent of the Pseudepigraphic authors, i.e., he attributes his

heavenly ascent to someone else out of modesty just as the authors of 1 and 2 Enoch

attributed their own visions to Enoch.

The most obvious point of contact between Paul’s visions and revelations and the

accounts of the visions of Enoch in The Book of Watchers and 2 Enoch is Paul’s

characterization of them as having an “exceptional character” [τῆ ὑπερβολῆ τῶν

ἀποκαλυψεων]. Recall the list of things that are revealed to Enoch in one or the other

of these works:

(1) God himself enthroned in majesty upon his throne-chariot (see passages

quoted above),

(2) knowledge of the end times including the destruction/punishment of the fallen

Watchers and sinful human beings and the reward of the righteous,

(3) the nature and locations of the places of punishment and reward,

(4) ethical instruction of God for mankind in its entirety,

(5) secrets of the Creation hidden from the angels,

(6) God’s sending of the Flood and his binding of the fallen angels,

(7) all the workings of the cosmos and their regulation by the angelic hosts.
 58

Paul’s words to describe his own vision would be apt to describe Enoch’s. It is

clear from his writings that Paul’s interest lies in God’s design of salvation. (See all of

Romans, but particularly, Rom. 1:16ff, 8:19ff, 9-11, 13:11) His zeal for upholding the

Law to the point of persecuting “the Way” (Gal. 1:13,14; Acts 22:3-5) testifies to the

importance he attached to righteous behavior before he became an Apostle, and his letters

are full of exhortation and ethical instruction throughout his mission. The principal

content of Enochic visions is beatific vision, soteriology and eschatology, all aspects of

salvation. Is it too much of a stretch to imagine that Paul’s visions and revelations

contained many such wonderful facets of knowledge as Enoch’s?

A second feature in linking Paul’s exceptional visions and revelations to the

Enochic accounts is the audition by the Lord in the case of the former (2 Cor. 12:9) and

by God in the latter. Whether Paul’s Christology attributed divinity to his Lord is a much-

debated subject, the resolution of which is beyond the scope of this thesis. However,

Paul’s understanding that Jesus was Messiah and shared in God’s divine agency is quite

certain.74 Such an audition was another characteristic of Merkabah visions and adds to

the likelihood of Paul’s visions being of the same fabric as the Enochic visions.

Again, Paul’s language establishes another link with the Enochic accounts. He

says, that he “was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no

mortal is permitted to repeat” (2 Cor. 12:4). The reading given to this phrase by the

translation in the New Revised Standard Version connotes a proscription from telling

others about what the ascender has seen in his visions. Other translations connote the

impossibility of telling these things, i.e., the ineffability of what has been seen. The

74
See Dunn 1998, 252-260 and Bauckham 1998, 25-42 for a discussion of Paul’s
Christology
 59

authors of Watchers and 2 Enoch are self-conscious of the ineffability of the wonders of

these visions. For example, in the twenty-second chapter of 2 Enoch we read:

Thus even I saw the face of the Lord. But the face of the Lord is not to be

talked about, it is so very marvelous and supremely awesome and

supremely frightening. And who am I to give an account of the

incomprehensible being of the Lord, and of his face, so extremely strange

and indescribable? …Who can give an account of his beautiful

appearance, never changing and indescribable, and his great glory?75

As imaginative and as flamboyant as the language is in the works, the reader has a

sense that the descriptions fall short of the experience of the visions and revelations.

Supposing, however, that the NRSV connotation is correct, i.e., that Paul was

proscribed from telling what he saw, is there material in the Enochic accounts that would

explain this? In 2 Enoch, we read:

And now therefore, my children, I know everything; for either from the

lips of the Lord or else my eyes have seen from the beginning even to the

end, and from the end to the recommencement. I know everything, and

everything I have written down in books, the heavens and their boundaries

and their contents. And all the armies and their movements I have

measured.76

Let us suppose that through his visions Paul became privy to the timing of the

destruction of the Temple. Such knowledge could be dangerous, and Paul might have

been forbidden to reveal it. In 2 Enoch, God shares with Enoch secrets of his creation,

75
Charlesworth 1983, 136.
76
Charlesworth 1983, 164.
 60

which even the angels do not know. Based on this, it is easy to imagine that some of

what is revealed to Paul would be for him alone.

In addition to hearing God’s words directly, in 2 Enoch the heavenly ascender

hears the heavenly liturgy. In chapter 17, Enoch saw in the fourth heaven “armed troops,

worshiping the Lord with tympani and pipes and unceasing voices, and pleasant voices

and pleasant and unceasing and various songs, which it is impossible to describe. And

every mind would be quite astonished, so marvelous and wonderful is the singing of

these angels. And I was delighted, listening to them.”77 In the nineteenth chapter, the

archangels, phoenixes, cherubim, and six-winged beings all sing in unison and “their

song is not to be reported.”78 In chapter 21, Enoch hears the cherubim and seraphim

singing with gentle voice in front of the face of the Lord, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord

Sabaoth, Heaven and Earth are full of his glory.”79 The rapture of the heavenly singing

defied description for the author of Enoch and perhaps for Paul as well.

Another possible link—though not with the 2 Corinthians passage—is the

proleptic aspect of 2 Enoch. Enoch learns that he is to return to heaven to stand before

the face of God through all eternity. Does Paul have such knowledge in mind when he

writes to the Philippians?:

[D]ying is gain….my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far

better…I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God

in Christ Jesus. (Phil.1:21, 23; 3:14)

Is not his own return to heaven included when he says more generally?:

77
Charlesworth 1983, 130.
78
Charlesworth 1983, 134.
79
Charlesworth 1983, 134.
 61

Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be

changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For

the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we

will be changed. For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and

this mortal body must put on immortality. (1 Cor. 15:51-53)

Another observation about the Enochic accounts needs to be made which sheds

light upon Paul’s experience. The two different structures of the heavens in Watchers

and 2 Enoch suggest that different adepts had different experiences of ascent. Watchers

suggests that Enoch passed through two magnificent houses and came to God’s throne. 2

Enoch speaks of Enoch ascending to the seventh heaven from which he can see God on

his throne and then actually coming before the face of the Lord in the tenth heaven.

Gooder makes a great deal over the differences in these two works and the other accounts

of heavenly ascent that she examines in order to support her interpretation that Paul is

parodying his own visions and revelations, that his ascent to heaven was a “failed ascent”

since he only reached the third heaven and not the seventh heaven.80 This imputes to

Paul, first, a rather exhaustive familiarity with the Pseudepigrapha. This could be true. If

so, it imputes to Paul manipulation of these literary (or oral) traditions to describe his

own experience. Is Paul playing “fast and loose” with the nature of his own vision even

though he declares that were he to boast he would be telling the truth? And what could

be made of his description of the visions and revelations as having an “exceptional

character?” Finally, if the ascent was a failed one, why would there be a need for the

thorn in the flesh to keep him from being too elated? I rather interpret Paul as truthfully

80
Gooder 2006, passim.
 62

describing his heavenly ascent and that, in his case, Paradise and the third heaven

provided an exceptional and ineffable experience to him, so much so that God deemed a

corrective necessary so that Paul would not think too highly of himself.

For what would someone who had been privileged to experience some or all of

what is described in Watchers or 2 Enoch have thought of himself, granted such

experience? How would it make one feel to be in possession of what was believed to be a

true vision of how salvation history was going to play out? This had to be important to

Paul’s self-understanding of having been commissioned to play a significant, in fact, a

unique role in salvation history, reinforcing the sense of prophetic call given him in his

DRE. Paul and Paul alone among the apostles had the special qualification of being

trained as a Pharisee and being steeped in Jewish mystical tradition. His commission was

given him in his DRE and confirmed in his other visions and revelations that he was to

declare the good news that Jesus of Nazareth was indeed the Messiah promised by the

Scriptures to usher in the Day of the Lord. This is the self-understanding standing behind

Paul’s declaration to the Galatians (Gal. 1:15-16).

But there was another revelation, another insight, that Paul was to be the bearer of

as well, which is the real significance of his discussion of his visions and revelations in 2

Corinthians. Such privileged experiences and so august a calling would indeed tend to

puff one up and tempt one to think of oneself as extraordinary and superior. Paul, who in

Philippians describes himself “as to righteousness under the law blameless,” was not

immune to such a temptation to pride. So God sees fit, in Paul’s view, to give him a

thorn in the flesh to remind him that he is a man like others, weak in the face of

temptations to be haughty, to think himself wiser than he actually was. (See Rom. 12:16.)
 63

The other revelation concerned the paradoxical nature of the revealed Messiah, a paradox

that Paul would embody in his own life—that salvation came not through power but

through weakness, that the Messiah was a suffering servant, reviled and rejected, one

whose power—as revealed to Paul in his visions—was perfected in weakness. So it is

that Paul writes to the Corinthians previously:

But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose

what is weak in the world to shame the strong… (1 Cor. 1:27)

Indeed, this paradox is the scandal of the cross:

When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the

mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know

nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” (1 Cor. 1:27 –

2:2)

There are other points of connection between this passage in 2 Corinthians and

Merkabah that should be noted. Is there significance that Paul uses the plural, i.e.,

“visions and revelations of the Lord?” One way that Watchers might help explain this is

by recalling that Enoch had a vision within a vision, thus visions. In the very origin of

Merkabah, the book of Ezekiel, the prophet records two visions of heaven (chapters 1 and

43) This suggests that heavenly ascents were not once-for-all experiences but could

occur multiple times:

The vision that I saw was like the vision I had seen when he came to

destroy the city, and like the vision that I had seen by the river Chebar;

and I fell upon my face. (Ezek. 43:3)

 64

Paul’s knowledge of these two experiences of Ezekiel may also throw some light

on Paul’s somewhat mysterious uncertainty about whether he was in the body or out of

the body. Ezekiel 1 records that Ezekiel was stationary while experiencing God

enthroned. But Ezekiel 43 relates Ezekiel being taken bodily up to the gate then into the

inner court where God was enthroned.81 Having both precedents in the tradition may

have caused devotees, including Paul, to be unsure of the physical nature of their own

experience. Or the explanation may rest simply in the often-noted vividness of dreams to

such a degree that people report that they thought their dreams were real. A third

possibility is that Paul was in extremis from hunger, thirst, loss of blood, exhaustion, etc.

(see 2 Corinthians 11:23-28), acknowledged causes of religiously altered states of

consciousness as reported, for example, in the book of Daniel 10.2-10.82 It does not

matter whether the extreme state was induced unintentionally as is possible in Paul’s case

or intentionally as with Daniel who had fasted for three weeks in mourning.

All these resonances in Paul’s terse phrases concerning his “visions and

revelations” and the other passages cited taken together establish, in my opinion, (1) the

validity of Segal’s contention that Paul’s experiences should be treated as a first-century

instance of Jewish Merkabah mysticism83 and (2) that the visions in Watchers and 2

Enoch may supplement our knowledge of what Paul experienced.

The Damascus Road Experience

As we have already suggested, there certainly exists the possibility and perhaps a

probability that Paul himself was trained in contemplation of the Merkabah like some

81
Dean-Otting 1984, 260.
82
Segal 2004, 323-324.
83
Segal 1990, 34ff.
 65

favored students of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai and had had episodes of Merkabah

mystical experience even prior to his DRE and the “visions and revelations” he refers to

in 2 Corinthians. I base this upon (1) Neusner’s biography of R. Yohanan which

contains examples of the Talmudic accounts of R. Yohanan’s Merkabah contemplation

with his students, 84 (2) Paul’s own attestation of his zeal for Pharisaism (Phil. 3:5-6), and

(3) Luke’s report (put in the mouth of Paul) of his training by Gamaliel I in Jerusalem

(Acts 22:3) which would qualify him as someone mature in his faith development.

My thesis is that Paul’s Damascus Road Experience constituted a Merkabah

mystical experience that Paul accepted as legitimate because he had been trained in the

practice during his training in Jerusalem to be a leader among the Pharisees. If we ignore

the differences among Luke’s three different accounts and pay attention to the general

features of Luke’s portrayal, the parallels to Ezekiel’s vision and commission to prophecy

(Ezek. 1:26-2:7) are evident. And the same elements appear in Enoch’s heavenly ascents

in Watchers and 2 Enoch. All contain the following elements:

Element In Ezekiel In Acts In Watchers In 2 Enoch

(1) Overpowering light or luminosity X X X X

(2) Fear, falling to the ground X X X X

(3) God’s voice giving instructions X X (Jesus’) X X

(4) God’s commissioning X X X X

Luke’s description compared to any of these three Merkabah texts is bare bones.

However, it was not Luke’s purpose to establish a link between Paul’s experience and

Merkabah visions. Also, Luke has often been characterized as a “God-fearer,” i.e., an

84
Neusner 1970, 135ff.
 66

admirer, perhaps even a proselyte, of Judaism, but not a Jew or a Pharisee. Since

Merkabah was not much spoken of beyond the circle of initiates, Luke was in all

likelihood unaware of Merkabah at all. Luke was dependant upon Paul, and we have

already suggested that Paul, respecting Pharisaic practice, would not have elaborated on

his DRE as a Merkabah experience. Still, key features are present in Luke’s descriptions

and constitute a basis for claiming commonality with Merkabah.

Paul points out the significance of the event in Galatians:

But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me

through his grace, was pleased to reveal his son to me, so that I might

proclaim him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with any human being

nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before

me…(Gal. 1:15-17a)

Thus Paul expresses the private nature of the revelation and his complete

confidence in it. I believe this indicates training in Merkabah which eliminated any

skepticism in Paul that it was not proper or not God’s doing.

At this point, let us examine the Talmudic reports of Rabbi Yohanan’s and his

students’ contemplation of Merkabah. These reports were recorded much later and may

be pseudepigraphic accounts by later authors. Or they may describe the actual experience

based on oral or lost written reports. If they are, in fact, reports of actual experiences,

then perhaps only a decade or two separates them from Paul’s experience.

I depend here on the observations of Bowker, who examines four fragments of

texts from the rabbinic literature, viz., Mekilta de R. Simeon b. Yohai, Tosefta Hag. ii. I,

Jerushalmi. Hag. ii. I(77a) and Babli Hag. 14b. Points of similarity are: allocation to the
 67

third heaven, occurrence while journeying, the light from heaven, falling to the ground,

the heavenly voice speaking, and resultant ecstasy. Bowker concludes:

Yet if in fact Paul was, like the rabbis (in the passages he

examines), reflecting “on the road” on the opening vision of Ezekiel, it

gives a very coherent context for the sudden reversal of his beliefs: what

may have happened is that Ezek. ii, in association with Ezek. i, took on a

dramatically new meaning; and here it is of extreme importance to note

that Ezek. ii. 1 and 3 is quoted, in part, in Acts xxvi.16…It seems entirely

possible that Paul, in the perfectly ordinary process of merkabah

contemplation, reflected on the voice of commission to Ezekiel in ch.

ii…as well as on the “chariot” chapter…[T]here are sufficient points of

contact between the J. [Jewish] and P. [Pauline] trads. [sic – traditions] to

suggest that Saul practiced merkabah contemplation as an ordinary

consequence of his highly extended Pharisaic training. There was nothing

heterodox about it…[T]he argument advanced here at least suggests a

basis on which the seeing of a vision of the resemblance of God’s majesty

was far from being unusual…85

Not much is known about Gamaliel I, whom Luke has Paul to claim was his

teacher (Acts 22:3) and appears in Acts 6 as a cautious leader (Acts 6:34ff.). Might

Gamaliel have done the same for Paul as Yohanan did for his advanced students?

A dimension of Paul’s visionary experience that jumps out in the chart above is

that Jesus takes the place of God in Ezekiel’s and Enoch’s visions. Being familiar with

85
Bowker 1971, 171-173.
 68

the accounts of these other Merkabah visions, this “substitution” would no doubt have

caused Paul to reflect on the status of Jesus vis-à-vis God himself. Much work has been

done recently on the role that Merkabah accounts may have played in the development of

early Christian Christology. It is not the purpose of this paper to explore how Merkabah

influenced Paul’s thought so much as to consider how Merkabah may have affected

Paul’s own self-understanding. Yet without the notion of Christ as the powerful,

messianic agent of God ushering in the Day of the Lord, Paul would have no

commission, for he would have no revelation to declare, no message to preach. So it is

almost unavoidable to point out that, assuming Paul’s knowledge of 1 Enoch and perhaps

2 Enoch, coupled with his own Merkabah visions surely played a part in Paul’s

understanding of the Lord whom he served. Along with this came Paul’s sense of

apostleship.

Still it remains puzzling that if Paul was in fact defending his apostleship to his

Corinthian opponents, he did not cite his DRE as proof of his status as an apostle. His

first letter implies that he had shared this with them as he did with the Galatians (1 Cor.

1:1, 17; 9:1). Perhaps he felt that he had advanced that argument and that it had been

ignored. Or perhaps his DRE, though pivotal, was not primary in Paul’s mystical

experience. Perhaps it was the “visions and revelations” which he experienced years

after his DRE and after the experience of “far more imprisonments,” “countless

floggings,” “stoning,” “shipwreck,” “danger from rivers…bandits…his own

people…Gentiles…in the city…in the wilderness…at sea…from false brothers and

sisters,” “toil and hardship,” “many a sleepless night,” hunger, thirst, nakedness, and the

daily pressure of the anxiety for all the churches (see 2 Corinthians 11:23-28) that
 69

unlocked for him the paradoxical truth about being “a servant of Jesus Christ.” (Rom.

1:1) Though Paul would have known that he enjoyed a special status first as a young,

zealous Pharisee sharing visions of the Glory of the Lord upon his chariot throne, then

privileged in a vision on the road to Damascus to know Jesus as Lord and be

commissioned to share his revelations regarding the salvation of the world, this ultimate

revelation of God’s power through weakness was primary for Paul. Is it not of this

hyperbolic revelation that Paul is speaking in 1 Corinthians:

But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed

before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood

this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But,

as it is written,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart

conceived, what God has prepared for those who love

him”—

these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit…And we speak of

these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the

Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual. (1 Cor. 2:7-

10a, 13)

Paul understood both the sublimity of mystical experience and the paradox of

God’s preference for working through weakness because of his participation in Merkabah

mysticism.
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CHAPTER 4

CONCLUSIONS

In his book, My Brother Paul, Rubinstein testifies that one of the “take-away”

lessons from reading Paul was that Paul trusted his own experience.86 What does he

mean? Paul was grounded in Second Temple Pharisaism, and though the historical record

of this sect at that time is scanty, so that only its outlines can be drawn, we do know that

this sect was one of the groups that opposed the Jesus movement from very early in

Jesus’ public life.87 The fact that Paul, a zealous Pharisee, persecuted “the Way” makes

perfectly good sense. What is puzzling is his about-face. His Damascus Road

Experience, recounted three times in Acts, is supposed to satisfy us about how this could

happen. Yet such a movement of the heart and mind in a person so committed to

defending a certain outlook and way of life is difficult to understand. Rubinstein is

impressed that Paul trusted his own revelation even at the peril of ostracism and

persecution by his fellow Pharisees.

My thesis is that Paul’s Damascus Road Experience and his heavenly ascent

some time later, both of which Paul refers to in his own writings, should be understood

as two particularly preeminent instances of a life-long practice of Pharisaic Merkabah

mysticism, a technique by which Paul sought to and did re-experience his own vision of

the Merkabah. This thesis is hypothetical, yet it is suggested by connections between

reports of Merkabah visions in the Hebrew Bible, The Book of Watchers, and 2 Enoch on

86
Rubenstein 1972, 6ff.
87
See, for example, Mark 3:6.
 71

the one hand, and Paul’s and Luke’s writings on the other. I have also cited historical,

albeit sketchy, evidence for such a connection. My argument in summary can be stated

thus: identified at an early age as “far more zealous for the traditions of [his] ancestors”

(Gal. 1:14), he was initiated into Merkabah contemplation by his teachers in Pharisaism

(Gamaliel I and his circle). He understood himself as one “advanced in Judaism beyond

many among my people of the same age” (Gal. 1:14), in fact, “as to righteousness under

the law, blameless” (Phil.3:6). His early mystical experiences gave him knowledge of

God’s heavenly life among the angels, caused him to identify with Enoch, and convinced

him that he was called to be a prophet. Like Ezekiel, he would find resistance to his

proclamation. (See Ezek. 2:3ff.) Most importantly, it legitimized mystical experience as

an appropriate praxis for someone as dedicated as he and gave him confidence in visions

as a vehicle for communication between God and himself. Following the lead of his

Jerusalem superiors who recognized his zeal, he opposed the new sect of messianists, the

“Way,” (Acts 9:2) arising out of Galilee to the point of persecuting them even to death by

stoning. On his way to Damascus to curb the heresy of the “Way” there, he took up

contemplation of the Merkabah as he had many times before. It resulted in a fearsome

“revelation of Jesus Christ” (Gal. 1:12) that left him on the ground, quaking and blind.

Never doubting its validity, he became convicted after further instruction and

contemplation that God had appointed him to be a prophet of a new type, a prophet to the

Gentiles, “an apostle—sent neither by human commission nor from human authorities,

but through Jesus Christ and God the Father” (Gal.1:1) proclaiming the startling good

news of the “Way” which he had scorned as heretical. This impelled him on a mission

that would test him sorely. Yet the overpowering vision was reinforced and new
 72

revelations given in the midst of this testing. Taken up again to paradise in the heavenly

realm, he experienced the transcendent, ineffable splendor of God in which he might one

day share through his Lord Jesus Christ and heard of things that would come to be which

he must not tell. Yet more than all this, the greatest and paradoxical truth about God’s

saving power was revealed to him by his messianic Lord:

My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.

(2 Cor. 12: 8)

Only a person practiced in mysticism could trust such a revelation in the face of

the hostility which he encountered. Paul’s knowledge about and experience of the

Merkabah both established his apostolic calling and sustained him in it. This is what

stands behind what he writes to the Galatians:

Am I now seeking human approval, or God’s approval? Or am I trying to

please people? If I were still pleasing people, I would not be a servant of

Christ. For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that

was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from

a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation

of Jesus Christ. You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism. I

was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it. I

advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for

I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors. But when God,

who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace,

was pleased to reveal his son to me, so that I might proclaim him among
 73

the Gentiles, I did not confer with any human being, nor did I go up to

Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me… (Gal. 1:10-17)

If my thesis is true, the implication is that early Christianity owes to Jewish

Merkabah mysticism the shaping of the self-consciousness of its most zealous promoter

who, quite literally, put Christianity on the map. If true, Merkabah is but one more strand

of “the rich root of the olive tree” from which “the wild olive shoot” of Christianity

sprang. (Rom. 11:17)

 74

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