Book of Enoch, Chapter 17:1.
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Enoch’s Journeys Through the Earth and Sheol
The First Journey
17:1 And they took and brought me to a place in which those who were there were like
flaming fire, and when they wished, they appeared as men.
17:1 Scriptures support this picture in Psalms 104:4, “Who maketh His angels spirits; His ministers a flaming fire.”
Judges 13 provides the only explicit Scriptural account of a visible being becoming a flaming being. In this story, a messenger of Yehuveh appears and speaks with Manoah’s wife, then disappears. Later he reappears to Manoah and again disappears. At the end of the story, in Judges 13:19-20, this being disappears in flames: “So Manoah took a kid with a meat offering, and offered it upon a rock unto Yehuveh: and the angel did wonderously; and Manoah and his wife looked on. For it came to pass, when the flame went up toward heaven from off the altar, that the angel of Yehuveh ascended in the flame of the altar. And Manoah and his wife looked on it, and fell on their faces to the ground.”
When Elijah is translated, it is amidst flames of fire: “And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.” According to The Book of Jasher 3:36, in identical language, “Enoch scended into heaven in a whirlwind, with horses and chariots of fire.” 2 Kings 2:11.
If these fiery beings who can appear as men are indeed heavenly beings, then “the place in which” they were, the place to which Enoch was taken, being their dwelling place, must be heaven.
Gael Bataman
Originally Written: 11 July 2006
Latest Update: 30 November 2011
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