Enoch walks with God and is taken

Everyone in that list dies, in the same words, in the same position in the sentence. One man does not. Enoch's entry replaces the closing formula with something else twice over: he walked faithfully with God, and then he was no more, because God took him.

The numbers around him are strange. He lives three hundred and sixty-five years, by a very wide margin the shortest span in a list where the next lowest is seven hundred and seventy-seven. The figure matches the days in a solar year, which readers have noticed for a long time without anything being made of it in the story itself. His son is Methuselah, who outlives everyone in the Bible, so the shortest and the longest lives in Scripture stand next to each other as father and son.

The verb used for his departure means simply to take or to receive. The same word is used of Elijah, carried up in a whirlwind while his successor watches. Those two are the only people in the Hebrew scriptures who leave without a recorded death, and the older account is far more restrained than the later one: no chariot, no fire, no witness, and nowhere named as a destination.

The phrase about walking with God is used of only one other person in these chapters, Noah, a few paragraphs later, and the repetition ties the man who is spared death to the man who is spared the Flood.

A short letter near the end of the New Testament quotes a prophecy attributed to Enoch, describing the Lord coming with thousands of his holy ones to judge. That raises a question worth being straightforward about. The words correspond closely to a passage in a Jewish work written in stages between roughly the third century BC and the first century AD, which is not part of the Hebrew scriptures and not part of the Protestant Bible, though the Ethiopian Orthodox Church includes it. Quoting it establishes that the writer knew the material and thought the saying true. What else follows from that has been argued among Christians for centuries and is not settled by the quotation itself.

The same letter calls him the seventh from Adam, counting inclusively down the line. Seventh position in a Hebrew list is rarely accidental.

One complication in the surrounding chapters deserves mention. Cain's descendants also include an Enoch, and a Lamech, and several other names in the two lines resemble each other closely. Some scholars read the two genealogies as variant forms of a single tradition. Others point to the differences in order, in the number of names and in what is said about each man, and treat them as distinct lines sharing common name elements, which was ordinary across the ancient Near East. Neither position can be demonstrated.

What the entry leaves is a man who is remembered for none of the things people are usually remembered for. He conquers nothing, builds nothing, fathers no nation and says nothing that was written down. The whole account of him is that he kept company with God for three centuries and then was not there.