Of all the figures in ancient Jewish mystical tradition, Metatron is perhaps the most extraordinary. He is described in texts like the Third Book of Enoch (3 Enoch) as the highest of all angels — the one who stands closest to the divine throne, the one through whom God's will is communicated to the lower heavens. He bears titles like "the Prince of the Divine Presence" and "the Lesser YHWH."
And according to this tradition, Metatron was once a human being. His name, before his transformation: Enoch.
The Transformation of Enoch
The biblical account in Genesis 5:24 is famously brief: "Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him." No death. No burial. Just — taken. The Book of Enoch begins to fill in what happened: Enoch was transported through the heavens, shown the divine courts, and given privileged knowledge of cosmic architecture and eschatology.
3 Enoch — a later text, composed likely between the 3rd and 7th centuries AD — goes further. In this account, Enoch is transformed bodily. His flesh becomes flame, his bones become fire, his eyelashes become flashes of lightning. He is invested with 72 wings and given a throne beside the divine throne. He is renamed Metatron and appointed as God's primary angelic representative — the one who governs all the angelic hosts and executes divine decrees.
Why This Matters for Reading the New Testament
The figure of Metatron sits at the intersection of two extraordinary theological ideas: the exaltation of a human being to divine status, and the idea of an angelic intermediary who shares something of God's own nature and authority. Both ideas have obvious relevance for how early Christianity framed the exaltation of Jesus.
Scholars like Alan Segal have argued that the Metatron tradition represents one strand of Second Temple Jewish speculation about "two powers in heaven" — a divine principal agent alongside God — that formed part of the conceptual background for early Christology.
The Full Enochic Tradition
The journey from 1 Enoch — where Enoch is a scribe and heavenly traveler — to 3 Enoch, where he has become the supreme angel of the divine court, spans several centuries of Jewish and early Christian theological development. Reading 1 Enoch is the starting point for understanding all of it.