---
title: Genesis 5:24
url: https://jw-apologetics.app/verses/genesis-5-24/
markdown: https://jw-apologetics.app/verses/genesis-5-24.md
type: verse
perspective: Protestant (historic Nicene) response to Jehovah's Witness teaching
reference: Genesis 5:24
testament: OT
section: Law
index: https://jw-apologetics.app/llms.txt
---

# Genesis 5:24

## Text (Berean Standard Bible)

> Enoch walked with God, and then he was no more, because God had taken him away.

## JW Usage

Watchtower teaching holds that no human has gone to heaven except Jesus (appealing to John 3:13). So Enoch's "taking" in Genesis 5:24 is re-read as God ending his life mercifully before persecution caught up with him — a compassionate death, not a bodily translation. The Hebrew verb laqach ("took") is narrowed to "took away in death."

## Protestant Usage

The Hebrew laqach is the same verb used for Elijah's translation in 2 Kings 2:3, 9, 10 — where it unambiguously describes a bodily being taken up. Hebrews 11:5 (the NT commentary on Genesis 5:24) settles the question: "By faith Enoch was transferred so as not to see death, and he was not to be found because God had transferred him." "Did not see death" excludes the merciful-death reading — if Enoch died peacefully, he still saw death. The text says he did not. Enoch is the Old Testament's unanswerable second witness to bodily translation alongside Elijah: two humans taken bodily out of this age without dying. John 3:13 does not override this — it is Jesus's revelatory-authority claim in conversation with Nicodemus, echoing Proverbs 30:4, not a historical census of translations.

## Arguments Using This Verse

- [Visible, Bodily, Every Eye — The Return Acts 1:11 Promised](https://jw-apologetics.app/arguments/visible-bodily-return-acts1.md) — Acts 1:11 / Revelation 1:7 / 1 Corinthians 15:51-53 [Eschatology]