Two Powers in Heaven: How Enoch Became the Lesser YHWH

Two Powers in Heaven: How Enoch Became the Lesser YHWH

Almost 2,000 years ago, a rabbi went up to heaven and saw something that should not have been there. Not God alone, another figure seated, enthroned, writing in the heavenly court. Now, in ancient Jewish thought, that is impossible because angels stand, servants stand, messengers stand. Only one being in heaven sits, and that being is God. So, when this rabbi, his name was Elisha ben Abuya, and we’ll come back to him. When Elisha walked into the throne room and saw a second figure seated there, he asked the forbidden question. Perhaps, God forbid, there are two powers in heaven. And heaven panicked. The figure on the second throne was dragged out, whipped with 60 lashes of fire, publicly humiliated in front of the entire heavenly court. Not because he had sinned. The text is explicit on that. He had done nothing wrong. He was whipped because somebody had seen him sitting too close to God. And as for Elisha, the rabbi who asked the question, when he came back down to Earth, the rabbis stripped him of his name. They refused to say it. They called him only one word, Aher, the other. Every story about him in the Talmud uses that name, Aher, the stranger, the man who is no longer one of us. They erased him from his own life all for the offense of looking at heaven honestly. Now, I want you to understand what just happened. The rabbis preserved this story in their own foundational text, the Talmud. They copied it for centuries. They argued about it. And the story is a confession because the figure on that second throne was not an accident. He was not a hallucination. He was a real character inside Jewish tradition. The rabbis knew him. His name was Metatron. And Metatron, according to Jewish mystical literature, was not always Metatron. He used to be a man. He used to walk the Earth. He used to have a different name.

In the next 60 minutes, I’m going to show you one of the strangest stories in ancient Jewish religion. It runs from four verses in the book of Genesis about a patriarch named Enoch who the Bible says walked with God and was suddenly gone. All the way to a Hebrew mystical text in which that same patriarch is enthroned in heaven, given a body of fire, granted a crown of 49 stones, and called by a modified form of the divine name itself. And here’s the part that ought to keep you watching. This story is not just about Enoch. It is about an entire tradition, a whole crowd of Jewish texts in which the high God of Israel is not acting alone. There is an angel in the book of Exodus who carries God’s name and can forgive sins. There is a son of man in the book of Daniel who rides on the clouds and sits on a divine throne. There is a figure called wisdom who is with God at creation and is described as the radiance of his eternal light. There is a heavenly Melchizedek in the Dead Sea Scrolls who judges the divine beings and proclaims liberation. There is an angel named Yahoel whose name fuses the divine letters guiding Abraham through the heavens. There is a Greek-speaking Jewish philosopher in the first-century Alexandria named Philo who calls the divine word a second God. And there is, at the climax of the tradition, the lesser Yahweh himself. All of these are Jewish. All of them existed before or alongside the rise of Christianity. And when the rabbis figured out in the 2nd and 3rd centuries of the common era what was happening, what the Christians were doing with this material, what the Jewish mystics were doing with this material, what was implied by all those second figures piling up beside God’s throne, the rabbis tried to shut it down. They tried for a thousand years. They failed. This is the story they could not erase. Welcome to MythVision. The deep cut for this video, extended footnotes, the full reading list, the working bibliography from the scholars I cite, is up on Patreon for early access subscribers. The video itself stays free. We are going up to the throne.

Here’s the part of the story the apologists do not want to start with. Because if you grew up evangelical like I did, you were taught that strict monotheism is the foundational, original, bedrock position of the Hebrew Bible. One God, period. No second figures, no divine intermediaries, no exalted angels who get confused with the Lord. That story is not what the Hebrew Bible actually says. The door was not pried open by mystics. The door was not pried open by Christians. The door was already open in the Bible itself. Let me show you four places. Open the book of Exodus, chapter 23. The Israelites have just left Egypt. God is speaking to Moses. And listen to what God says he’s going to send with them. Behold, I send an angel before you to guard you on the way and bring you to the place that I have prepared. Pay careful attention to him and obey his voice. Do not rebel against him, for he will not pardon your transgression, for my name is in him. Read that last line again. My name is in him. God is sending an angel. And God says this angel will not forgive your sins because my name is in him. In ancient Jewish thought, forgiveness of sins is a divine prerogative. Only God forgives. That’s the assumption that hangs in the background when Jesus, centuries later, forgives a paralytic and the scribes mutter that only God can do that. But Exodus says the angel can do that or refuse to do that because the angel carries the name. Now, stop and ask the question. What kind of being is this? It is not God. It’s called an angel, a messenger, but it has God’s name in it and it acts with God’s authority. Jewish mystics for the next 2,000 years are going to be obsessed with that question.

And it gets stranger because all through the Hebrew Bible, there’s a figure scholars call the angel of Yahweh, the angel of the Lord. In Hebrew, Malak Yahweh. And this figure has a habit that drives every careful reader crazy. Open Genesis chapter 16. The runaway slave Hagar is alone in the desert. The angel of Yahweh appears to her. The angel talks to her. And then the text says, and this is in the Bible, Hagar called the name of the Lord who spoke to her. The angel was the Lord. Genesis 22. Abraham raises the knife to sacrifice Isaac. The angel of Yahweh calls down from heaven. And angel says, quote, by myself I have sworn, declares the Lord. The angel speaks in the first person as God. Exodus chapter 3. Moses meets the burning bush. The text says the angel of Yahweh appeared to him in a flame of fire. And then, without explanation, the text just calls the figure God. The burning bush starts as the angel and ends as Yahweh himself. Judges chapter 13. The angel of Yahweh appears to the parents of Samson. Samson’s father asks the angel for his name. And the angel says, quote, why do you ask my name, seeing it is wonderful. Then Samson’s father says, we have seen God. The Hebrew Bible itself blurs the line between God and a particular angelic figure over and over across multiple books and multiple authors. The text is, at the very least, complicated. And every later Jewish writer who develops the figure of Metatron or Yahoel or the lesser Yahweh, every one of them is starting from these passages. They are reading the Bible the way it is written. Now, jump forward. Book of Daniel, chapter 7. Daniel has a vision. He sees the throne room of heaven. And the first thing the text says, and you have to read it slowly, the first thing the text says is that the thrones were set. As I looked, thrones were placed and the Ancient of Days took his seat. Thrones, plural. In the throne room of heaven. Jewish and Christian commentators have argued about this verse for 2,000 years. Whose are the other thrones? Why does the singular God need more than one? And then a few verses later, the answer arrives. I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven, there came one like a son of man. And he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. A figure comes with the clouds of heaven. In the Hebrew Bible, riding the clouds is something only God does. There is no human cloud rider. There is no angel cloud rider. The cloud rider in the rest of the Hebrew Bible is Yahweh. But in Daniel, there’s a second cloud rider coming to the Ancient of Days, receiving eternal dominion, being served by all nations. And the word translated served in Aramaic, the verb palach, is in the Bible primarily used for the service rendered to a god. Daniel chapter 7 gives us a second figure on a second throne receiving divine worship from the nations. This is in the Hebrew Bible. This is before Christianity. This is before third Enoch. This is the text that every later Jewish and Christian writer about exalted heavenly figures is going to be reading. And finally, Psalm 110. This is the single most quoted Hebrew Bible passage in the New Testament. The first verse alone is cited more than two dozen times. There’s a reason for that. The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.” Let’s read it again. The Lord said to my Lord, There are two Lords in this verse. The first is Yahweh, the divine name in the Hebrew. The second is Adonai, a title of authority and lordship. The first Lord invites the second Lord to sit beside him at his right hand. Remember what Aher said when he saw Metatron seated in heaven? Perhaps there are two powers. Psalm 110 in the Hebrew Bible already has two Lords. Already has a second figure seated. Already has a second power problem. Now, to be clear, I’m not saying the Hebrew Bible teaches a trinity. I’m not saying it teaches binitarianism. I’m not saying any one of these passages on its own forces the conclusion that ancient Israel believed in two divine powers. What I am saying is much narrower and much more important. The Hebrew Bible contains the raw material for that conclusion. It contains an angel with God’s name. It contains an angel of the Lord who speaks as the Lord. It contains plural thrones in heaven and a second figure receiving divine service. It contains two lords in the same Psalm. Every Jewish text we are about to look at and there are a lot of them is reading these passages and asking what they imply. The door is open in the Bible. The mystics did not break it down, they walked through it.

And now we come to Enoch. Genesis chapter 5, the genealogy from Adam to Lamech. Every patriarch gets the same treatment. Adam lived, Adam had a son, Adam lived more years, Adam died. Seth lived, Seth had a son, Seth lived more years, Seth died. Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, they all die. The chapter is a drumbeat of mortality except for one name, the seventh from Adam. Enoch walked with God and he was not for God took him. Enoch didn’t die. Every other man in the chapter dies. Enoch is taken. The Hebrew word is laqach. It means to seize, to carry off, to remove. The same verb the Bible will later use when the prophet Elijah is swept up to heaven in a chariot of fire. Genesis gives us four verses on Enoch. 365 years old, which happens to be the number of days in a solar year, which is the first hint that something cosmic is being said about this man. He walks with God, and then he’s gone. The text closes the book on him, but Jewish writers in the centuries that followed could not stop staring at those four verses because the Bible had left a door open. If Enoch didn’t die, then he’s still alive somewhere. If God took him, then he is with God. If he is with God, then he has seen what God sees. He has stood where no other human has stood. And the question Jewish writers started asking sometime around the 3rd century before Christ was simple. What did he see up there? And more importantly, what happened to him while he was there? James VanderKam at Notre Dame, the leading scholar on this material, calls the Enoch tradition one of the largest mountains ever built on the smallest stone. Four verses become 100 chapters in multiple languages over 1,000 years about a figure who is no longer recognizable as the quiet patriarch of Genesis chapter 5. But before we follow that growth, before we get to Enoch becoming Metatron, we need to look at the company he ended up in because Enoch was not alone. By the 1st century of the common era, the Jewish world was crowded with exalted heavenly figures. And every one of them is sitting on or near the second throne.

This is the part of the story most documentaries about early Christianity skip because once you start looking, you find that ancient Judaism was full of candidates for the second throne. Not one, many. Let me walk you through six of them. First, wisdom. In Hebrew, Hokhmah. In Greek, Sophia. She shows up first in the book of Proverbs, chapter 8. And what she says about herself is extraordinary. The Lord possessed me at the beginning of his way, before his works of old. From everlasting, I was established. From the beginning, before the earth ever was. When he established the heavens, I was there. Then, I was beside him as a master craftsman. Wisdom existed before the world. She was with God when he made the heavens. She was beside him as a master craftsman during the act of creation itself. This is in the Hebrew Bible. In the book of Proverbs, pre-Christian, Jewish. And the Jewish tradition did not stop there. In the book of Sirach, written in the 2nd century before Christ by a Jewish scribe in Jerusalem named Yeshua ben Sira, wisdom comes down from heaven and takes up residence in Israel. She is described as having existed from the beginning. She is the divine presence in the world. In the Wisdom of Solomon, a Greek Jewish text from the 1st century before Christ, wisdom is described in language that should stop you cold. She is a breath of the power of God, a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty, a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness. Pause. A breath of the power of God? A pure emanation of his glory? A reflection of eternal light? A mirror of the working of God? An image of his goodness? Now, keep that language in your head. Hold it. Because we’re going to come back to it when we look at how the New Testament describes Jesus. And just giving you a spoiler alert, it’s going to sound almost identical. Wisdom is a Jewish hypostasis, a divine figure described in personal female terms beside God, sharing in his glory, participating in creation, present in the world. She’s one of the candidates for the second throne.

Second, the Son of Man. We already looked at Daniel 7, the one like a son of man who comes on the clouds and receives eternal dominion. But Daniel was not the only Jewish text developing this figure. Inside First Enoch, that sprawling Aramaic apocalyptic book, there’s a section called the Similitudes, or the Book of Parables, chapters 37 through 71. I need to be careful here. The dating of the Similitudes is debated among specialists. Most scholars place them around the turn of the era, 1st century before Christ, or 1st century after. But this section was not found at Qumran, unlike the other parts of First Enoch. So, the dating cannot be locked down by Dead Sea Scroll archaeology. What is not debated is what the text says. The Similitudes described a heavenly figure called the Chosen One, the Righteous One, the Anointed One, and the Son of Man. This figure is seated on a throne of glory. He will judge the wicked at the end of days. He existed, the text says, before the creation of the world. His name was named before the stars were made. And then in chapter 71, an angel walks up to Enoch and says something that almost no Christian reader has fully processed. “You are the Son of Man who was born for righteousness.” Oh, wait. Enoch is the Son of Man. The figure he has been watching for 30 chapters, the heavenly judge, the one on the throne, the one who will come at the end of days, is him. Now, scholars debate exactly how to read that identification. George Nickelsburg at Iowa and James VanderKam at Notre Dame, who together wrote the standard commentary, treat it carefully. Some interpreters say Enoch is being literally identified with the pre-existent Son of Man. Others say it’s an honorary investiture. Either way, the wall between human prophet and heavenly figure has been crossed, and the Son of Man category is now occupied by another candidate.

Third, Melchizedek. Most people who’ve read the Bible know Melchizedek as a strange, minor character in Genesis chapter 14. He shows up out of nowhere, blesses Abraham, gets called priest of God Most High, and disappears in three verses. But the Dead Sea Scrolls have a different Melchizedek. In a Hebrew document cataloged as 11Q13, also called 11Q Melchizedek, the figure has been transformed. He’s no longer just a Canaanite priest from Genesis. He is a heavenly being. He stands in the divine council. He proclaims the year of Jubilee, the eschatological liberation of captives. He executes God’s judgment. He defeats Belial, the chief of evil. And this is the line that ought to stop you. The text takes biblical passages that originally referred to God himself and applies them to Melchizedek. Psalm 82, quote, “God has taken his place in the divine council. In the midst of the Elohim, he holds judgment.” The Qumran text reads that as Melchizedek standing in the council. Psalm 7, quote, “The Lord will judge the peoples.” The Qumran text reads that as Melchizedek will judge. Isaiah 52 the herald who announces salvation the Qumran text reads that as Melchizedek announcing. This is the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is Hebrew. This is Jewish. This dates to the 1st century before Christ. Paleographers are confident on this. And what the document shows us is that a Jewish religious community in the late Second Temple Palestine was completely comfortable taking biblical language used of Yahweh and applying it to a heavenly Melchizedek. Another candidate for the second throne.

Fourth, Yahoel. This is a figure most people have never heard of. He appears in a text called the Apocalypse of Abraham. A Jewish work probably composed in the late 1st or early 2nd century of the common era. Like Second Enoch it survives mainly in Old Church Slavonic. The Apocalypse of Abraham takes the patriarch Abraham on a heavenly ascent. And he is accompanied by a guide. An angelic figure of overwhelming glory. The figure’s name is Yahoel. Now look at the name. In Hebrew it is Yah the short form of Yahweh combined with El the basic Semitic word for God. Yah-El or in another rendering Yahoel. The angel’s name fuses elements of the divine name. And the text says explicitly that Yahoel possesses the ineffable name of God. The name that observant Jews refuse to pronounce. Yahoel carries it. And Yahoel guides Abraham through heaven, teaches him liturgical formulas, leads heavenly worship. Andrei Orlov at Marquette, who has written a whole monograph on Yahoel and Metatron, treats Yahoel as the older relative. Before there is Metatron, there is Yahoel. Another name-bearing angel, another heavenly intermediary, another candidate for the second throne.

Fifth, the Logos. Philo of Alexandria was a Jewish philosopher. He lived in the first half of the first century of the common era, overlapping the lifetime of Jesus. He was Greek-speaking, Hellenistic, educated in Greek philosophy, and devoted to Jewish religion. Philo wrote dozens of treatises trying to reconcile Greek thought with the Hebrew Bible. And the central figure in his theology was the Logos, the word, the divine reason, the mediator through whom the transcendent God interacts with creation. Philo says the Logos is the firstborn son of God, the eldest of all things, the image of God, the agent of creation, the mediator between heaven and earth. And in one famous passage, Questions and Answers on Genesis, Book 2, Section 62, Philo calls the Logos, quote, the second God. For nothing mortal can be made in the likeness of the most high God, the father of all things, only in the likeness of the second God, who is the Logos of the most high God. Listen to that. The second God. In Greek, deuteros theos. Philo is a first-century Jew writing in Greek, devout, loyal to Jewish monotheism. And he calls the Logos the second God. Not because he was a Christian. There were no Christians yet in any meaningful sense when Philo was writing. Not because he was a heretic. He was the most prominent Jewish intellectual of his city. Because the theological problem the Jewish tradition was wrestling with, how does a transcendent God interact with creation, kept producing the same kind of answer. There’s a second figure beside the high God through whom the high God acts.

Sixth, and briefly, Moses. There is a fragment from a Jewish play written in the 2nd century before Christ by a Hellenistic Jewish playwright named Ezekiel the Tragedian. The play is about the Exodus. And in one scene, Moses has a dream. He dreams that he sees a great throne on top of Mount Sinai. A figure of majesty is seated on it. And then, the figure gets up. He hands Moses his crown. He gives Moses his scepter. He motions for Moses to sit on the throne. And then the stars of heaven bow down to Moses. Moses in this Jewish dramatic text is enthroned in the divine seat and receives the worship of the angelic host. There’s also a strange text called the Prayer of Joseph preserved only in a fragment quoted by the church father Origen in which the patriarch Jacob turns out to be an angel of the Lord, the Archangel Israel, an exalted heavenly being come down into human form. Patriarchs, wisdom figures, heavenly priests, name-bearing angels, the divine logos, a son of man on a throne, a Melchizedek in the divine council. This is what the Jewish world looked like before Christianity in the time of Christianity. A whole crowd of candidates for the second throne. And against that background, against that crowded heavenly stage, the most explicit, the most theologically extreme, the most legally dangerous version of the second figure tradition is the one we have been building toward. Because the Jewish mystics took the patriarch Enoch and they did something to him that none of these other texts dared. They gave him fire for flesh. They gave him a throne the size of God’s. They gave him the divine name.

Before we get to the full transformation, there’s a bridge text. It’s called Second Enoch, sometimes also called the Slavonic Apocalypse of Enoch or the Book of the Secrets of Enoch. And I need to be honest with you about the dating up front. Many scholars believe Second Enoch preserves early Jewish mystical traditions, possibly from the 1st century, written in a Greek-speaking Jewish community, perhaps near Alexandria, perhaps a little before or after the writing of the New Testament. But the dating is debated. Some specialists argue for a later composition. The text survives, like the Apocalypse of Abraham, mainly in Old Church Slavonic because Christian monks in Eastern Europe preserved it after the Jewish original disappeared. So, treat this text as a witness to early Jewish mystical material, but with a question mark about exactly when the final version was written. The traditions inside it are old. The packaging may be later. What the text says is what matters. In 2 Enoch, the patriarch is taken up by two enormous angels and flown through seven heavens. He sees the storehouses where God keeps the snow. He sees the rebel angels chained beneath the second heaven. He passes through paradise, and he arrives finally in the seventh heaven, where God is. And in chapter 22, God turns to the Archangel Michael and gives an instruction. Listen carefully. Take Enoch. Extract him from his earthly clothing. Anoint him with my delightful oil and put him into the clothes of my glory. Take him out of his earthly clothing. In context, the text is clear. Earthly clothing means flesh, mortal flesh, the body Enoch was born into. Michael is being told to strip Enoch of his humanity, and then anoint him with the delightful oil, the oil that anoints priests, the oil that anoints kings. In this Jewish mystical tradition, the oil reserved for things that belong to God. And then dress him in the clothes of my glory. Garments worn in this tradition by God himself. Michael does it. He removes Enoch’s mortality. He anoints him. He dresses him in divine clothing. And the text says Enoch becomes, after this transformation, like one of the glorious ones. The angels can no longer tell him apart from themselves. This is apotheosis. That is the technical word.

Apotheosis, the transformation of a human being into a god. It is the pattern the Greeks knew from Heracles. The pattern the Romans used when they officially deified Julius Caesar and Augustus. The pattern Phoenician religion used in the resurrection of Melqart. Here it is happening in a Jewish text. To a Jewish patriarch. In a Jewish religious context. Andrei Orlov at Marquette calls Second Enoch the bridge text. The moment Enoch stops being a visitor to heaven and becomes a permanent member of the heavenly court. His mortal envelope has been removed. His new substance is the substance of the angels. He’s not going home. And the Third Enoch text, the one we are about to look at, takes this transformation and pushes it past every theological boundary. Because in the third text, Enoch does not just become like the angels. He becomes bigger than the angels. He becomes the size of the universe. And the text gives him the divine name.

The text is called Sefer Hekhalot. The Book of the Palaces. It is also known as Third Enoch. It is the most theologically extreme document in the entire surviving corpus of early Jewish mysticism. The palaces in the title are the seven heavenly chambers that a mystic has to pass through to reach the throne of glory. It is the architecture of Jewish mystical ascent going back through the throne vision of the prophet Ezekiel. Sefer Hekalot was given its modern critical edition in 1928 by a Swedish scholar called Hugo Odeberg. The standard English translation today is by Philip Alexander at the University of Manchester published in volume one of the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha edited by James Charlesworth. This is not fringe scholarship. This is the standard academic literature. Now, the apologetic objection. Conservative apologists, when confronted with what we are about to read, like to say that Sefer Hekalot is late. That it’s medieval. That it has nothing to do with the world of the New Testament. Here’s what is true. The final form of Sefer Hekalot as we have it probably dates to the 5th or 6th century of the common era, possibly later. Philip Alexander himself, the standard translator, places it in that range. The text we hold is not a Second Temple period composition. But, the traditions inside Sefer Hekalot are demonstrably older than the manuscript. We can prove this. We just spent 20 minutes proving it. The angel with the name in Exodus 23 is in the Torah itself. The plural thrones and the cloud rider in Daniel 7 are in the Hebrew Bible. The Son of Man identification with Enoch in First Enoch dates to around the turn of the era. The transformation of Enoch into a heavenly being is already in Second Enoch. The heavenly Melchizedek is in the Dead Sea Scrolls before Christianity. Yahoel, the name-bearing angel, is in the Apocalypse of Abraham. Philo’s second God is first century. The building blocks are old. Sefer Hekalot is the assembly. It is the explicit no-holds-barred statement of a tradition whose components are documented across centuries. And now we read it. Sefer Hekalot is framed around a second-century rabbi named Ishmael who ascends to heaven. He passes through the seven palaces. He survives the angelic guards at each gate. He reaches, finally, the seventh palace, the innermost chamber, the throne room. And there, in the deepest part of heaven, he meets a being not God, someone next to God, a figure of overwhelming glory. And the figure speaks first.

I was once Enoch, son of Jared. Listen to that. The being on the second throne, the figure Rabbi Ishmael has found in the heart of heaven, identifies himself by saying, “I was once Enoch.” Same Enoch, the seventh from Adam, the one from Genesis 5 who walked with God and was taken, the one nobody has heard from in 2,000 years. He’s here. He’s not a man anymore. Sefer Hekalot describes, in long detail, what God did to Enoch when he was taken up. And I’m going to read it to you slowly because the imagery is so extreme that if you read it fast, you will miss what is actually being said. He enlarged my stature and my breadth to match the dimensions of the world. He made me grow 365,000 parasangs. He gave me 72 wings. Each wing covered the entire world. He fixed in me 365,000 eyes. Each eye was like a great light. Decode that. Enoch’s body has been enlarged to the size of creation. 365,000 parasangs. A parasang is an ancient Persian distance unit. The number is huge, cosmic. And there’s the solar number again, 365. The same number as the days in a year. The same number of years Enoch lived on Earth. The text is laying down a deliberate pattern. 72 wings, each one the size of the world. 365,000 eyes, each one like the sun. 365,000 suns in a single body. This is not casual metaphor. This is the technical imagination of Jewish throne mysticism. The vocabulary used when ancient Jewish texts describe the cosmic transformation of a human being into a divine one. Enoch’s body is the universe now. And then the text takes the final step. My flesh was turned to flame. My sinews to blazing fire. My bones to juniper coals. My eyelashes to lightning flashes. My eyeballs to fiery torches. Let’s look at that one more time. Flesh into flame. Bones into coals. Eyes into torches. Enoch is no longer made of human stuff. He’s made of fire. Which in Jewish angelology is what the seraphim are made of. What the divine chariot is made of, what the substance of God’s glory is made of, he has been remade into the substance of the divine world. And then it gets bigger, because the transformation does not stop with the body. The Holy One, blessed be he, fashioned for me a throne like the throne of glory. And he spread over it a coverlet of splendor, brilliance, beauty, grace, and mercy, like the coverlet of the throne of glory. God builds Enoch a throne, not just any throne, a second throne, identical in glory and decoration to the throne God himself sits on, and puts Enoch on it. Not as a visitor, not for a brief audience, as the permanent occupant. Then the crown. He fashioned for me a kingly crown, 49 refulgent stones, each like the sun. And he set it upon my head, and he called me, in the presence of his entire household, Yahweh ha-katan, the lesser Yahweh. Stop. Don’t move past that. God gave a transformed human being a version of his own name, Yahweh, the four letters that observant Jews to this day will not pronounce aloud, the personal name of the God of Israel. And this title, Yahweh ha-katan, literally means the lesser Yahweh.