Who Was Enoch in the Bible?

Genesis 5 is otherwise a repetitive formula: a person is born, lives a number of years, has children, lives more years, and dies. Enoch breaks that pattern — no death is recorded — which is why later Jewish and Christian tradition read this as Enoch being taken up to heaven without dying, similar to how Elijah is later described in 2 Kings 2.

Enoch is mentioned twice more: in Hebrews 11:5, listed among the examples of faith, again noting he "did not experience death," and in Jude 1:14-15, which directly quotes a prophecy attributed to Enoch — a passage that doesn't appear anywhere in Genesis.

The Jude quotation points to a much larger ancient text called the Book of Enoch, an extensive Jewish work not included in most biblical canons but preserved in full within the Ethiopian Orthodox canon. It expands significantly on Enoch's story, including visions and content about angels that isn't found in Genesis at all.

The combination of a minimal biblical mention, an unusual "taken by God" ending, and a substantial non-canonical text bearing his name has made Enoch one of the more discussed minor figures in biblical studies — more written about him outside Scripture than within it.

Related reading: who wrote the Bible and how many books are in the Bible (including which books different traditions accept).