Does everyone die, or did Enoch escape death?

Hebrews answers the question about Enoch itself. Its writer says plainly that Enoch “was translated that he should not see death” (Hebrews 11:5), and then quotes the Greek translation of Genesis 5:24: he “was not found, because God had translated him”. The verb, metatithēmi, means to move a person to another place. When the same writer says a few verses later that “these all died in faith” (11:13), he means the people he has just been describing: Abraham, Sarah, Isaac and Jacob, who lived in tents as strangers while they waited for the promised land (11:8–12). What follows fits only them: they could have gone back to “that country from whence they came out” (11:15), Abraham’s homeland. A writer who had just said that Enoch did not see death was not counting him among those who died.

Hebrews 9:27 and Romans 5:12 state the rule that has held for mankind since Adam’s sin: people die, and they die once. The stress in Hebrews 9:27 falls on ‘once’ (Greek hapax): as men die once and then face judgment, so Christ was offered once (9:28). A rule like this is not overturned by an exception that God himself makes and Scripture records. The Bible names two, Enoch and Elijah (2 Kings 2:11), and Paul adds the believers who are still alive when Christ returns: “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed” (1 Corinthians 15:51). Gill, on Hebrews 9:27, notes these exceptions. As for Melchizedek, “having neither beginning of days, nor end of life” (Hebrews 7:3) means that Genesis records no birth or death for him, so that he can picture the Son of God; it does not say he never died.

When Jesus says that the believer “shall never die” (John 11:26), or that the one who keeps his saying “shall never see death” (John 8:51), he means death in its full sense, being cut off from God, not the death of the body. The verse before shows this: the one who believes in him, “though he were dead, yet shall he live” (John 11:25). Jesus says both in one breath, so he was not denying that his followers would die in the body.

Enoch and Elijah as the two witnesses

Some suggest that Enoch and Elijah will return as the two witnesses of Revelation 11, who are killed, so that in the end they too will die once. Revelation does not name the two witnesses, so this is a guess, and the answer above does not need it.

Enoch died after all

Some Jewish interpreters, Rashi among them, read ‘God took him’ in Genesis 5:24 as an early death, and a few writers take Enoch’s removal the same way and count him among ‘these all’ in Hebrews 11:13. Most find this hard to square with Hebrews 11:5, which gives the purpose of his removal: “that he should not see death”.

Scripture does not say where Enoch was taken or what change his body underwent.