The Witness of Scripture
The canonical account of Enoch is contained in a few verses of Genesis 5:18-24. There he appears in the line of descent from Adam through Seth: the son of Jared, the father of Methuselah, and the great-grandfather of Noah. The text reports that he lived 365 years, a span conspicuously shorter than that of the surrounding patriarchs, before the formula that distinguishes him from all the others in the chapter: he "walked with God; and he was not, for God took him" (Genesis 5:24).
Where each preceding patriarch in the genealogy closes with the refrain that he "died," Enoch's notice ends differently, and this difference has been read across the tradition as a translation from this life without death. The Orthodox Church honors him on this account, together with the Prophet Elijah, as a figure who was taken up rather than dying in the ordinary way.
The New Testament Witness
Enoch is named three times in the New Testament. He appears in the genealogy of Christ in Luke 3:37. The Letter to the Hebrews places him among the examples of faith: "By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him" (Hebrews 11:5), reading the Genesis notice as an act of faith rewarded.
The Letter of Jude (verses 14-15) cites a prophecy of judgment attributed to "Enoch, the seventh from Adam." Scholars commonly identify the quoted material with a passage from the apocryphal Book of Enoch (1 Enoch 1:9); the citation in Jude does not make that book canonical Scripture, and the Orthodox Church does not receive it as such (see below).
Among the Holy Forefathers
Enoch belongs to the company of the Holy Forefathers -- the Old Testament ancestors and forebears of Christ according to the flesh, including patriarchs such as Adam, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, together with the prophets and the righteous who lived before and under the Law. The Church gathers their commemoration into the weeks preceding the Nativity of Christ.
The Sunday of the Holy Forefathers is kept on the second Sunday before Christmas (within the period of roughly December 11-17), honoring those who prefigured or anticipated Christ's coming and so binding the genealogy of the Savior to the celebration of His birth. Enoch's individual commemoration falls on December 14.
Tradition: Enoch and Elijah
Because Genesis says only that God "took him," Orthodox interpretation has traditionally understood Enoch to have been removed from the world alive, not having tasted death -- a destiny he shares in the tradition with the Prophet Elijah, who was taken up in a whirlwind (2 Kings 2). The two are commonly paired as the witnesses of Scripture who did not see death in the ordinary way.
A strand of patristic and popular tradition further holds that Enoch and Elijah will appear again before the coming of the Antichrist, to bear witness to Christ and to strengthen the faithful. This is held as tradition and interpretation rather than as plain narrative of Scripture, and it is presented here as such.
The Books Attributed to Enoch
Several pseudepigraphal works circulate under Enoch's name -- chiefly 1 Enoch (the so-called Book of Enoch, composed in Hebrew and Aramaic and surviving complete in Ge'ez, generally dated to the 3rd-1st centuries BC), along with 2 Enoch (in Old Church Slavonic) and 3 Enoch (in Rabbinic Hebrew). These texts narrate elaborate heavenly ascents and visions.
These writings are NOT part of the canonical Orthodox Scriptures. The Eastern Orthodox Church regards 1 Enoch as apocryphal; among Christian communions only the (Oriental Orthodox) Ethiopian Church includes it in its biblical canon. The book was received into neither the Hebrew canon nor the Septuagint. Accordingly, the visions and biographical details these works supply are not treated here as factual accounts of the patriarch's life; the reliable witness to Enoch remains the canonical passages of Genesis, Hebrews, and Jude.
