Seven, ten, and the palaces

1 Enoch’s earth is wide. 2 Enoch’s heaven is stacked. 3 Enoch’s heaven is palatial. The Watchers, in the Slavonic book, sit miserable in the fifth.

2 Enoch’s recensions cannot agree whether there are seven heavens or ten. The contents are stable enough: correspondence and ice, paradise and torment in the third, solar armies, silent Grigori in the fifth, a throne at the top. The two hundred are still in the building. They are not on the top floor.

3 Enoch turns the stack into hekhalot — palaces — and Enoch into Metatron, a prince who must not be confused with a second power. Existence here is court etiquette all the way up. To know the furniture (Kesehiel’s crime) is almost to sit. Sitting is how Elisha ben Abuyah fell.

The multiplication of heavens is not greed. It is a way of saying that there is more interior to the world than the Watchers sold. They taught the keys to weather and metal. They did not teach the palaces. That is why later mystics can read Enoch without enrolling in Hermon’s faculty.