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By Root 2507 0

behold I saw the clouds: And they were calling me in a vision and the fogs were calling me; and the course of the stars and the lightnings were rushing at me and causing me to desire; and in the vision, the winds were causing me to fly and rushing me high up into heaven. And I kept coming (into heaven) until I approached a wall which was built of white marble and surrounded by tongues of fire; and it began to frighten me. And I came into the tongues of the fire and drew near to a great house which was built of white marble, and the inner wall(s) were like mosaics of white marble, the floor of crystal, the ceiling like the path of the stars and the lightnings between which (stood) fiery cherubim and their heaven of water; and flaming fire surrounded the wall(s), and its gates were burning with fire. (1 En 14:8-12, Charlesworth, I, 20)

In back of this description is the blueprint for the heavenly Temple, on which the earthly Temple in Jerusalem was patterned. Apparently, even before the Second Temple was destroyed during the war with the Romans, religious Jews fretted over the condition of the earthly Temple, either because of the behavior of the priests or the plan of the building itself, which differed from the original plan and also from the visionary rebuilt temple described in Ezekiel.27

As we have already seen in Isaiah 66, the visible presence of God in His Temple is often called “God’s Glory,” linking it with the vocabulary in Exodus 24:16-17 (also see LXX), other significant places in the Hebrew Bible, and preeminently in Ezekiel. The Greek term doxa has little to do with “opinion” or “praise” in standard Greek but rather it is translation Greek and became the technical Hebrew term Kābôd, which is translated by doxa in the LXX and which thereafter can indicate God’s principal angelic mediator, who carries the divine name, or even God’s human manifestation.28

Besides the major transformation motif, which parallels Daniel 12, Enoch also reports on the final disposition of the dead. Such a report has the immediate effect of confirming the Bible’s presumed promise that the righteous will be rewarded, the sinners punished. This, we find elaborated in 1 Enoch 22, the first (and in many ways the most instructive) of many, many tours of heaven, confirming heaven as the realm of the transformed dead. It is included in a part of the work known as The Book of the Watchers:

Then I went to another place, and he showed me on the west side a great and high mountain of hard rock and inside it four beautiful corners; it had [in it] a deep, wide, and smooth (thing) which was rolling over; and it (the place) was deep and dark to look at. At that moment, Raphael, one of the holy angels, who was with me responded to me; and he said to me, “These beautiful corners (are here) in order that the spirits of the souls of the dead should assemble into them-they are created so that the souls of the children of the people should gather here. They prepared these places in order to put them (i.e., the souls of the people) there until the day of their judgment and the appointed time of the great judgment upon them. I saw the spirits of the children of the people who were dead and their voices were reaching unto heaven until this very moment.” I asked Raphael, the angel who was with me, and said to him, “This spirit, the voice of which is reaching (into heaven) like this and is making suit, whose (spirit) is it?” And he answered me saying, “This is the spirit which had left Abel, whom Cain, his brother, had killed; it (continues to) pursue him until all of (Cain’s) seed is exterminated from the face of the earth, and his seed has disintegrated from among the seed of the people.” At that moment, I raised a question regarding him and regarding the judgment of all, “For what reason is one separated from the other?” And he replied and said to me, “These three have been made in order that the spirits of the dead might be separated. And in the manner which the souls of the righteous are separated (by) this spring of water with light upon it, in like