Canter Bridge

In the midst of one of its less inspiring genealogies, the Bible offers us a brief glimpse at the remote fringe of what must have been a remarkable story. As it is wont to do, rabbinical tradition would fill in the absence of detail regarding a certain Enoch. The biblical text presents this man in its most sparing voice:

When Enoch had lived sixty-five years, he became the father of Methuselah. Enoch walked with God after the birth of Methuselah three hundred years, and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty-five years. Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him. When Methuselah had lived one hundred eighty-seven years, he became the father of Lamech.

The comment about Enoch ‘walking with God’ and about God taking him—whatever these things might mean—stands out against a strictly patterned genealogy that merely names biological antecedents, successors, and their respective life spans.

The almost parenthetical observation regarding an extraordinary—this must be the reason it is mentioned—relationship between God and one of his otherwise unknown creatures fairly begs us to wonder what went on.

Alas, we cannot know. We can only observe that to ‘walk with God’ is in the Bible an expression of utmost intimacy, comparable perhaps to the rare designation of this or that biblical personage as a ‘friend of God’.

Enoch stands as mute testimony to the possibility that now and then a human being might so align his life with the life of his Creator that for the brief moment of a human life the vertical relationship of a Creator to his creature might be practically supplanted by the horizontal phenomenon of two men walking together along a path.

One thinks of unhurried conversation, of overlapping passions, of shared meals, of common yearnings, of covenant among brothers.

God could not let him die.