Enoch (from ; Ashkenazi, Jiddish: 'jHenosch' Greek: ενωχ, Enôkh; Arabic Name:إدريس, "initiated, dedicated, disciplined") is a Hebrew name.

Biblical occurrences

The Bible has several occurrences of that name:

• Enoch, the son of Jared, a great-grandfather of Noah, and father of Methuselah (Genesis 5:1-18). It is stated in numerous Jewish, early Christian, and mediaeval Muslim sources, that he was taken away by God because he was a good man, thus avoiding death at the age of 365, and according to a few Kabbalistic sources, became known as the angel Metatron. He is also identified as the apostle Idris (Arabic: إدريس ). The only recorded words of Enoch surviving in the European Bible are his prophesying about men, whereby God shall be coming with His saints to judge and convict them (Jude 1:14-15). According to some Muslim scholars, he earned his livelihood as a tailor and is also considered to be the inventor of the eyed metal needle used in sewing. He is the protagonist of several apocryphal books of the Old Testament:
• 1st Book of Enoch, an apocryphal book in the Ethiopic Bible.
• 2nd Book of Enoch, an apocryphal book in the Old Slavonic Bible.
• 3rd Book of Enoch, a Kabbalistic Rabbinic text in Hebrew, attributed to Kohen Gadol Yishmael (90-135 AD).
• An extended amplification of this Enoch story is found in the Pearl of Great Price (Latter Day Saints)'s Book of Moses produced by Joseph Smith, Jr., which in 6:21 – 8:19 presents an astonishing amount of detail absent from, or only found in fragmentary form in other accounts — such as about Enoch’s translation without tasting death, and an extensive cosmic apocalypse with content paralleling materials only found elsewhere long after Smith’s death.

• Enoch, son of Cain , after whom Cain named the first city he founded, is not the same Enoch son of Jared (Genesis 5:18).
• Hanoch (Enoch), son of Reuben
• Hanoch (Enoch), one of the five sons of Midian

Note: Enoch is often confused with Enos (or Enosh). Enos is recorded as a grandson of Adam (Genesis 5:5-6), and great grandfather of Enoch (Genesis 5:18).

People

• Enoch Adeboye, General Overseer, Reedeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG)
• Enoch Showunmi, British football player
• Enoch Arden, eponymous protagonist in a 1864 poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• Hanoch Bartov (born 1926), Israeli author
• Shalom Hanoch, Israeli singer, composer and lyricist
• Eduard Heinrich Henoch (1820–1910), German physician
• Hanoch Levin (1943–1999), Israeli writer
• Henoch Leibowitz, American rabbi
• Maxim Litvinov (born Meir Henoch Mojszewicz Wallach-Finkelstein) (1876–1951), Russian revolutionary and diplomat
• Moses ben Hanoch (died c. 965), Babylonian-born Spanish rabbi
• Chanoch Nissany (born 1963), Israeli-born Hungarian racing driver
• Enoch Powell (1912-1998), conservative British politician
• Enoch Pratt, 19th-century Baltimore, Maryland (USA) businessman and philanthropist
• Chanoch Henech Sufrin, Director of the Jewish Educational Institute - Chabad Brisbane, in Brisbane, Queensland (QLD) Australia.

Fictional characters

• Enoch Hopper, highly-strung boy in Ithaca, California, from The Human Comedy by William Saroyan
• Enoch Root, a recurring character in Neal Stephenson's novels Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle
• Hanoch, a villain in the Star Trek episode "Return to Tomorrow"
• Enoch, the leader of a fictional criminal organization in the animated series, Ben 10
• Enoch Emery appears in The Peeler by Flannery O'Connor and in O'Connor's Enoch and the Gorilla, a short story that eventually became part of O'Connor's first novel, Wise Blood.
• Enoch Snow, a supporting lead role in Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical "Carousel"
• Metatron, the regent to The Authority, is said to have once been Enoch, the son of Jared, in Phillip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass, the third book in the His Dark Materials trilogy.

Places

• Mt.Enoch, Victoria, Australia
• Enoch Reserve, an aboriginal settlement located west of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
• Enoch, Utah, a small town north of Cedar City
• Enoch, the name of a city in several of Samuel R. Delany's works, including the Return to Nevèrÿon series and The Mad Man
• St. Enoch Square, Glasgow, Scotland, is from a corruption of St Thenew, mother of St Kentigern of Glasgow Cathedral

Other occurences

• Enochian, an occult language and script
• Katherine Enoch, extensively written about in A Cornish Shopkeeper's Diary (R Glynn, 1843) as someone who loved a drink, leading to the author's expression of drunken abandonment 'I was enoched, not a muscle would move nor the gods awaken me.'
• Enoch Linux, a Linux distribution later renamed Gentoo Linux
• U. S. President Calvin Coolidge owned a goose named Enoch
• Henoch-Schönlein purpura, a disease

References