Genesis 5:24
Genesis 5:2424Enoch walked with God, and then he was no more, because God had taken him away.
Watchtower teaching holds that no human has gone to heaven except Jesus (appealing to ). So Enoch's "taking" in 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."
The Hebrew laqach is the same verb used for Elijah's translation in , 9, 10 — where it unambiguously describes a bodily being taken up. (the NT commentary on ) 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. does not override this — it is Jesus's revelatory-authority claim in conversation with Nicodemus, echoing , not a historical census of translations.