“... It comes as something of a shock to learn that this exalted be- ing, second only to God in the cosmic hierarchy, is none other than the patriarch Enoch, the son of Jared, who, having been taken up to heaven as a witness to God’s justice in bringing the flood,”® was transformed into an angel. Like 2 Enoch, 3 Enoch clearly envisages bodily ascent and so postulates the physical metamorphosis of Enoch: “When the Holy One, blessed be He, took me to serve the throne of glory, the wheels of the chariot and all the needs of the Shekhinah, at once my flesh turned to flame, my sinews to blazing fire, my bones to juniper coals, my eyelashes to lightning flashes, my eyeballs to fiery torches, the hairs of my head to hot flames, all my limbs to wings of burning fire, and the substance of my body to blazing fire.””? So Enoch becomes, like the other angels, physically composed of fire. Another part of his transformation involved the enlargement of his body until it equaled the dimensions of the world: “I was enlarged and in- creased in size until I matched the world in its length and breadth. He made to grow on me seventy-two wings, thirty-six on one side and thirty-six on the other, and each single wing covered an en- tire world. He fixed in me 365,000 eyes and each eye was like the Great Light. There was no sort of splendor, brilliance, bright- ness, or beauty in the luminaries of the world that he failed to fix in me.”*° We shall return later to the possible significance of this bizarre tradition. Metatron and Enoch, like Enoch and the heavenly Son of Man, were originally distinct figures. The similarities of their roles led to convergence and finally to identification. The result of the iden- tification of Metatron and Enoch is clear: Enoch, a man with an earthly existence and genealogy, has been deified. Moreover there is a hint in 3 Enoch that this process of deification will be repli- cated in the case of other men. 3 Enoch presents a significant ...”