Genesis 5:24

He was not; for God took him. The most significant event of the antediluvian era, an event that filled the faithful with hope and joy, the translation of Enoch, is related by Moses in these few simple words. Enoch was translated “that he should not see death” (Heb. 11:5). This meaning is implicit in the word laqach, “he [God] took away,” a word that is never used to denote death. Modern Christian usage of the expression as a euphemism for death is without Scriptural authority. The word is used, however, in connection with Elijah’s translation (2 Kings 2:3, 5, 9, 10). The LXX renders it “for God translated him,” an expression taken over literally in Heb. 11:5. So far as we know, Enoch was the only antediluvian believer not to see death. As a paragon of virtue, Enoch, “the seventh from Adam,” stands in sharp contrast to the seventh generation of the Cainite line, Lamech, who added the crime of murder to the vice of polygamy (Jude 14; cf. Gen. 4:16-19).

Enoch’s departure was witnessed by some of both the righteous and the wicked (see PP 88). The translation of Enoch was designed by God, not only to reward the piety of a godly man, but to demonstrate the certainty of God’s promised deliverance from sin and death. The memory of this remarkable event has survived in Jewish tradition (Ecclesiasticus 44:16), in the Christian record (Heb. 11:5; Jude 14), and even in heathen fables. The Apocryphal Book of Enoch describes the patriarch as exhorting his son and all his contemporaries, and warning them of coming judgment. The Jewish Book of Jubilee says that he was carried into Paradise, where he wrote down the judgment of all men. Arabic legends have made him the inventor of writing and arithmetic. His departure must have made a tremendous impression upon his contemporaries, if we are to judge by the extent to which the story of Enoch has come down to later generations. Enoch’s exemplary life with its glorious climax testifies in our day of the possibility of living in a wicked world without being “of it.”