Metatron

Somewhere above the seventh palace there is a seat no created thing is supposed to occupy, and in the oldest surviving account of it somebody is already sitting there, writing. The ledger records the merits of Israel. The hand around the pen belonged, once, to a man who walked out of the world in the seventh generation after Adam and never came back for his own funeral.

Genesis hands that man one strange sentence and no explanation. Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him. Every other patriarch in the chapter is given his years and then his death notice, tidily, like a ledger being closed. Enoch gets the years and no death, and the hole where the ending should be was filled over the following thousand years with the most spectacular career any figure in Jewish tradition has ever had.

The name that career runs under is Metatron, and nobody has ever managed to say where it comes from. One line of argument reaches for Latin, for the metator, the surveyor who went ahead of a Roman legion and staked out the ground where the camp would stand, which would make Metatron the one who walked in front of Israel through the wilderness marking the route. Another reaches for Greek, for metathronos or synthronos, the one whose chair stands beside the throne. Gershom Scholem looked hard at both and refused them, and the question has stayed open ever since. It is a fitting muddle. The text that made him famous gives him seventy names and then says the real one is hidden.

That text is Sefer Hekhalot, the Book of Palaces, better known as 3 Enoch, in which Rabbi Ishmael ascends through the heavens and is met at the last door by a being who introduces himself with a line worth the whole journey: I am Enoch son of Jared. What follows is one of the most physical transformation passages in ancient religious literature. His flesh turned to flame and his sinews to blazing fire, his bones to the coals of juniper, his eyelashes to lightning and his eyeballs to torches, the hair of his head to fire and every limb to a wing of burning fire. The heat of it is the point. He was not clothed in glory; he was cooked into it. Then he was enlarged until his height and breadth matched the height and breadth of the world, given seventy-two wings, thirty-six to a side and each broad enough to cover the earth, and eyes counted in the hundreds of thousands, each one burning like the great light. A crown of forty-nine stones went on his head and threw light into the four quarters of heaven, and a throne was set for him at the door of the seventh palace, which is a promotion no angel had ever received and several of them said so out loud.

They called him the Youth. It is the joke buried in the tradition and the best line in it: the oldest human being in heaven is the newest arrival, and so the household on high calls him Na’ar, the boy, the junior. They also called him Prince of the Presence, the angel permitted to stand where the rest must look away. And in the phrase that caused all the trouble, they called him the Lesser YHWH, on the strength of a verse in Exodus in which God says of the guiding angel that his name is within him.

The trouble arrived in the form of a rabbi called Elisha ben Abuyah. The Talmud records that four sages entered the orchard of celestial vision and that only one came out whole. Elisha came out a heretic and is called ever afterwards Aher, the Other, and what broke him was seeing Metatron seated. In that court, one being sits and everything else stands. So Elisha said the sentence that cannot be taken back: perhaps there are two powers in heaven. The response in the text is fast and physical. Metatron was brought out and given sixty lashes of fire, and the beating had a purpose, since a thing that can be flogged is not God. He was permitted the chair, the Talmud explains, because a scribe has to sit to write. Elisha was not persuaded and went out of Judaism entirely.

He can be hit. That is the whole theology of him in three words.

He surfaces twice more in the Talmud, and both passages are arguments about what he is not. In one, a heretic tells Rabbi Idith that a figure carrying the divine name deserves worship, and Idith reads the same verse back at him to prove the opposite: the name was lent, not shared. In the other, he takes a shift in God’s own timetable, teaching Torah to the schoolchildren who died before they could learn it, which is the gentlest thing anybody in the record ever says about him.

His powers all run through that pen. He writes what Israel has done and the writing stands, he transmits what passes between the throne and the world below, he holds the keys to the palaces and the knowledge of what is coming. His limits run through the same place. Everything he has was given, which means everything he has can be taken, and the flogging is the tradition making sure nobody forgets it. The seat that ruined Elisha is in some tellings removed from under him afterwards.

The honest dating of all this matters, because the fiery vice-regent is not an ancient biblical figure wearing a later name. Peter Schäfer has argued that the identification of Enoch with Metatron is a Babylonian development of the late Sasanian and early Islamic period, and that it should be held apart from the older Enoch speculation it borrowed from. Between the verse in Genesis and the angel with three hundred and sixty-five thousand eyes lie centuries of scribes deciding what the silence was for.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Metatron?

Metatron is the highest angel of Jewish mysticism, described as heaven’s chief scribe and vice-regent. In the text known as 3 Enoch he identifies himself as Enoch son of Jared, the patriarch of Genesis, transformed into a being of fire and installed above the angelic household. He carries the titles Prince of the Presence and the Lesser YHWH.

Was Metatron a human being?

Yes, according to the tradition that made him famous. 3 Enoch presents him as the biblical Enoch, taken up bodily and remade, with his flesh turned to flame, his bones to burning coals and his limbs to wings of fire. This human origin is what makes him unusual among angels and what several of the other angels are said to have objected to.

Why was Metatron punished with sixty lashes of fire?

The Babylonian Talmud in Hagigah 15a reports that the sage Elisha ben Abuyah saw Metatron seated in heaven and concluded there might be two powers in heaven. Metatron was given sixty lashes of fire to demonstrate that he was an angel and not a second deity, since a being that can be punished is not God. The Talmud explains his seated posture by his function as a scribe.

What does the name Metatron mean?

No agreed meaning exists. Proposals include the Latin metator, a Roman military surveyor who marked out a camp in advance, and the Greek metathronos or synthronos, meaning one enthroned beside another. Gershom Scholem rejected both derivations, and 3 Enoch itself says that beneath his seventy names the true one is hidden.

Where does Metatron appear in Jewish texts?

He is named three times in the Babylonian Talmud, at Hagigah 15a, Sanhedrin 38b and Avodah Zarah 3b, and he is the central figure of Sefer Hekhalot, also called 3 Enoch, a work of Merkabah mysticism from late antiquity. He does not appear in the Hebrew Bible at all. Scholarship generally treats his identification with Enoch as a Babylonian development rather than an ancient inheritance.

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