The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The ... - josephprestonkirk

EPHRAIM ISAAC 367
virgin to test him. He prays for death with the privilege of returning to
life. This is granted: he dies, but returns to life at once; visits hell, where
he sees from the wall of division the horrors of Gehenna; and is then led
to the gate of paradise. Refused admittance by the custodian, he lifts himself
over the wall by clinging to a branch of the tree “Tuba,” the tree of
knowledge, which God for his benefit caused to bend over the wall. Thus
Idris entered paradise while still living. It is possible that these legends
contain traces of lost haggadahs. Mas)udi reports that Enoch (Uhnukh)
was the son of Lud, and is identical with Idris. He lived on earth for 300
years and perhaps longer; he is credited with the invention of the needle
and the art of sewing; and he received from heaven thirty leaflets containing
the praises of God and prayers.
III
There is a tradition found in some Jewish haggadic and Qabbalistic
literature that Enoch became the Archangel Michael. The link in this
identification is to be found in an angel named Metatron.
There has been a great deal of debate about the meaning of the name
of this latter angel, found also as metator, a loan-word in Jewish
Aramaic. 16 The two most commonly suggested etymologies of the name
are the Latin metator “front guard, commander,” and the Greek metaturannos,
contracted from (ho) meta thronon, “(the) one next to the throne.”
According to Alexander, the name could simply be gibberish, like the
magical names (Adiriron and Dapdapiron. 17 According to Ludwig Blau,
“Kohut identifies Metatron with the Zoroastrian Mithra; but probably
only a few bits were borrowed from the latter. Sachs, Gruenbaum,
Weinstein, and others think “that Metatron is identical with Philo’s
Logos”; but L. Cohn, the eminent Philonist, contradicts this view. M.
Friedlander, on the other hand, takes Metatron to be, both in name and
in nature, none other than Horus, the “frontier guardian” and “surveyor
of the frontier” of the early Gnostics. 18
16. Cf. Matthew Black, “The Origin of the Name Metatron,” VT 1 (1951): 217–19;
Saul Lieberman, “Metatron, the Meaning of His Name and His Functions,” in
Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism (ed. I. Gruenwald; AGJU 14; Leiden: Brill, 1980),
235–41.
17. Philip S. Alexander, “3 (Hebrew Apocalypse of) Enoch (Fifth to Sixth Century
C.E.),” OTP 1:223–315.
18. See JE 8:519.