The Soul’s Holding Pattern
1Then I went to another place, and he showed me on the west side a great and high mountain of hard rock 2and inside it four beautiful corners; it had [in it] a deep, wide, and smooth (thing) which was rolling over; and it (the place) was deep and dark to look at.
3At that moment, Rufael, one of the holy angels, who was with me…
Among the mysteries revealed to Enoch was the fate of souls after death. In older Israelite traditions, whether a person was good or bad in life, their soul existed after death as a wraith or ghost in a shadowy underworld known as Sheol—the equivalent of the Greek Hades. In the postbiblical book of 1 Enoch, the souls of the good and bad are separated: the wicked suffer punishment while the righteous experience joy, anticipating their fate on the day of judgment. This inaugurates a long tradition of describing “tours of heaven and hell,” which reaches its climax in Dante’s Inferno and Paradiso.
