And Enoch walked with God,.... Which is repeated both for the confirmation of it, and for the singularity of it in that corrupt age; and to cause attention to it, and stir up others to imitate him in it, as well as to express the well pleasedness of God therein; for so it is interpreted, "he had this testimony, that he pleased God",
and he was not; not that he was dead, or in the state of the dead, as Aben Ezra and Jarchi interpret the phrase following,
for God took him, out of the world by death, according to
1 Kings 19:4 "for he was translated, that he should not see death", Hebrews 11:5 nor was he annihilated, or reduced to nothing, "for God took him", and therefore he must exist somewhere: but the sense is, he was not in the land of the living, he was no longer in this world; or with the inhabitants of the earth, as the Targum of Jonathan paraphrases it; but the Lord took him to himself out of the world, in love to him, and removed him from earth to heaven, soul and body, as Elijah was taken; Hebrews 11:5. The Arabic writers u call him Edris, and say he was skilled in astronomy and other sciences, whom the Grecians say is the same with Hermes Trismegistus; and the Jews call him Metatron, the great scribe, as in the Targum of Jonathan: they say w, that Adam delivered to him the secret of the intercalation of the year, and he delivered it to Noah, and that he was the first that composed books of astronomy x; and so Eupolemus y says he was the first inventor of astrology, and not the Egyptians; and is the same the Greeks call Atlas, to whom they ascribe the invention of it. The apostle Jude speaks of him as a prophet,
#Jude 14 and the Jews say z, that he was in a higher degree of prophecy than Moses and Elias; but the fragments that go under his name are spurious: there was a book ascribed to him, which is often referred to in the book of Zohar, but cannot be thought to be genuine.
u Elmacinus, Patricides, apud Hottinger. p. 239. 240. Abulpharag. Hist. Dynast. p. 9. w Juchasin, fol. 5. 1. Pirke Eliezer, c. 8. x Shalshalet Hakabala, fol. 74. 2. y Ut supra. (Apud Euseb. Evangel. Praepar. l. 9. c. 17. p. 419.) z Shalshalet Hakabala, fol. 1, 2.