Your post #129:
"... Enoch's translation is described on a horizontal plane, not a vertical one."
You introduced horizontal and vertical translation. Please try and keep track of your own argument.
I introduced horizontal and vertical translation because you said:
OK. Elijah, Enoch, no body. Romulus, no body. Asklepios, no body. Heracles, no body. Where are the stories where a body is left behind?
You asked this after I said the following in post #106:
Your adherence to the idea that for both Jews and Gentiles in the ancient world, the very idea of a resurrection leaving behind a mouldering corpse in a tomb would have been considered an anomaly is incorrect.
In Post #106, I made a specific claim about
resurrection, a process that happens to someone who has died, undergone burial, and whose body is in a tomb, because you made a claim about resurrection in post #85, saying: “I'd say for the Jew and Gentile contemporary with the event [resurrection], the idea of a dead body mouldering in the tomb would have been an anomaly.” You then jumped to a list of living translations (Enoch, Elijah, Romulus, Heracles) and asked: “
Where are the stories where a body is left behind?” You made quite the logical leap: my understanding is you are saying that because living translation myths leave no corpse, ancient audiences would automatically assume a post-mortem resurrection must work the exact same way. Your conclusion does not follow from the premise because the initial conditions are completely different. You started with a logical non-sequitur: “
Of course in the Jewish and some of the Gentile myths, the ascendee is still living when they depart this world . . .” As far as I can tell, you changed the original question from “How did ancients view dead bodies in tombs during resurrection?”
I provided an example of how such thinking backfires when applying it to all ancient Jewish opinion.
First of all, I would like to point out it is inaccurate to assume that all ancient Jews agreed that “they depart this world.” I would argue that in the original biblical context, Enoch was taken alive to a mythical location on earth (like the Garden of Eden or the ends of the earth) where he could continue to “walk with God.” How is this irrelevant? Rather, it is highly relevant. Interestingly, 1 Enoch 32 places the “Garden of Righteousness” in an earthly geography. 1 Enoch 106 describes Methuselah physically traveling to the “ends of the earth” to consult Enoch. This shows that Enoch (despite dwelling alongside angels) was still sought out on earth rather than in heaven. Maybe he died there too and left his physical body (
Jubilees 7.39), so Enoch’s corpse was not left in a tomb because he was still using his physical flesh in Eden according to some ancient Jews. Locating Enoch in heaven was a later Hellenistic development. In the
Book of Jubilees, Enoch’s translation is basically geographical and functional; it is not an ontological transformation into a pneumatic body. Hence the writer keeps Enoch’s physical feet on the ground in the Garden of Eden, an earthly sanctuary (one of “four places upon the earth”).
I would like to explore a bit further.
Jubilees was heavily influenced by 1
Enoch. But which parts? Only the earliest portions.
1 Enoch is not a single manuscript, but a vast collection of written manuscripts across centuries.
Jubilees was written around 160–150 BCE (roughly contemporary with the
Book of Dreams and
Epistle of Enoch), so the writer most likely had the following to work with: the
Astronomical Book (1 Enoch 72-82) from the 4th to 3rd century BCE, the
Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 1-36) from 3rd century BCE, and the
Book of Dreams / Animal Apocalypse (1 Enoch 83-90) from 165-160 BCE.
In the
Book of the Watchers Enoch functions as a human mediator who travels across the Earth, visits the underworld, and journeys to paradise. He ascends to the heavenly throne room in visions, but he remains human. Like
Jubilees, his connection to an earthly paradise is there. If this is closer to the original understanding, then I do not see how your version of Enoch’s translation (e.g., 2 Enoch, 3 Enoch) applies to Jesus’ special event - the resurrection.
Do Second Temple texts on post-mortem resurrection (like
Jubilees 23.31 and 1
Enoch 103–104) describe divine exaltation while physical bones remain in the dirt, yes or no?
In my opinion, yes.
What about the
Book of Parables (or
Similitudes, chapters 37-71)? Out of the 11 Aramaic Enoch scrolls found at Qumran, fragments were recovered for every major section of the book except the
Book of Parables. Chapter 71 survives only in the Classical Ethiopic (Ge'ez) manuscripts preserved by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, so the oldest surviving and complete Ge’ez copies are much later than the manuscripts found at Qumran composed in Aramaic/Hebrew around 300–100 BCE.
In the section critical for our discussion about the transformation of Enoch in the
Book of Parables, it says:
71.11:
I fell on my face, And my whole body became relaxed, And my spirit was transfigured; And I cried with a loud voice, . . . with the spirit of power, And blessed and glorified and extolled.
The Ge'ez verb used here refers to physical collapse or prostration in the presence of the Divine - the exact same apocalyptic trope found in Daniel 10.8 (“
No strength was left in me; my face turned deathly pale and I was helpless”). Enoch's physical body collapses in weakness while his spirit experiences transfiguration before God's throne. It is similar to falling as dead before the divine glory (Ezekiel 1.28, Revelation 1.17).
To further complicate matters, multiple scholars date 1 Enoch 70-71 as a late addition around the late 1st century CE or early 2nd century CE (around 70-120 CE), placing it after Paul’s death. The main body of the
Parables of Enoch (chapters 37-69) was composed earlier - dated by the Enoch Seminar consensus to the 1st century BCE. This is possibly the material Paul would have had access to from the
Parables of Enoch.
As stated before, not all ancient Jews or Christians agreed about what happened to Enoch. Some assume that he died:
“
Although some clearly referred to Enoch, Moses, and Elijah as being immortalized, others indicate that they would die just before the ultimate end of history. In the Testament of Benjamin, Enoch all of a sudden appears as resurrected along with Noah, Shem, Abraham, and Isaac. Being resurrected, he had, of course, to have died prior to this.”
-Dag Øistein Endsjø
The
Wisdom of Solomon also implied Enoch died. If he died, he obviously left his physical body behind somewhere. I have my own theory, so let’s speculate about
translation even further.
In 1QHa XI 21–23, the hymnist celebrates:
“You have redeemed my life from the pit . . . and a perverted spirit you have purified from great sin
that it might take its place with the host of the holy ones.” Paired with 1QS III–IV, this cleansing marks a present-tense transfer of the believer out of Darkness and into Light. Ancient Near Eastern anthropology understood human personhood through a key distinction: a person’s physical body-life (
nepeš habbāśār) was distinguished from their animating spirit (
rûaḥ). Because death was anciently understood as the departure of the
rûaḥ from the physical corpse, ritual purification cleansed the covenanter's
rûaḥ and translated it into heavenly communion, while their physical body stayed grounded in the Judaean desert.
Qumran did not invent this present-tense translation alone. Human transformation into heavenly life was rooted in Jerusalem's ancient Temple ideology. Priests entering the Holy of Holies were understood to be stepping into the divine council and functioning as earthly manifestations of angels. The Qumran community inherited and radicalized this. They democratized Enoch’s translation: what was once a translocation reserved for special apocalyptic patriarchs or high priests became a present experience for their entire community. Through strict purity and shared liturgy - such as chanting the
Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (4QShirShab) alongside angels - covenanters created an angelomorphic identity within their surrogate temple.
In doing so, the community completely redefined death and stripped physical mortality of its ultimate reality. As John Collins notes, because the sectarians experienced present heavenly communion, “they attach no significance to death, and seldom speak of resurrection
.” Physical death was no longer seen as a cosmic barrier, but merely as the eventual, natural decay of the earthly body in a desert cave - a secondary footnote to a spirit already living in heaven. The physical body is left behind like a discarded shell in the soil, while the purified
rûaḥ continues. In this sense, the covenanters did not view themselves as waiting to be saved from death; through spiritual translation, they had already bypassed true death, experiencing Enoch's “non-dying” status collectively.
Perhaps this Enochic paradigm informs early Christian realized eschatology. Through union with Christ, the believer undergoes a spiritual rebirth - being “born from above” (John 3.3-5) - and is translated out of the sublunar realm of darkness into the celestial kingdom (Colossians 1.13). Since believers have already undergone this transition (
metabebēken) from death to life (John 5.24), physical death loses its ultimate power, which fulfills Jesus' declaration in John 11.25–26 that “
whoever lives and believes in me will never die.” As Paul reiterates in 2 Corinthians 5.1–5 and 1 Corinthians 15, the physical body or earthly tent is left behind in the grave to decay because flesh and blood cannot inherit the incorruptible realm. Instead, the spirit continues, clothed in a “spiritual body” (
soma pneumatikon).
To wrap it all up, for both Qumran and early Christian writers, physical decay in a cave or tomb was rendered meaningless. This explains Paul’s silence about an empty tomb. It also explains why that,
despite the presence of hundreds of graves at Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls rarely dwell on physical death. Physical remains were left behind in the earth, while every member of the covenant had already been translated into eternal divine life. They experienced, like Enoch, an exemption from the ultimate reality of death.
Where are the stories where a body is left behind?
They are buried right under your feet in
Jubilees 23.31,
1 Enoch 103–104, Qumran's
Hodayot, and Paul’s epistles - where the spirit joins the heavenly council while the physical bones are left behind to rest in the dirt.
