Free How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee by Bart D. Ehrman Page B

becomes incarnate, in order to effect God’s will on earth—in this instance to be with Abraham in his various activities on earth.
Humans Who Become Angels
    Other Jewish texts speak not only of angels (or even God) as becoming human, but also of humans who become angels. Many people today have the view that when people die, they become angels (well, at least if they’ve been “good”). This is a very old belief indeed. In the book of 2 Baruch , one of the great apocalypses that has come down to us from early Judaism (an apocalypse is a vision of heavenly secrets that can make sense of earthly realities), we learn that righteous believers will be transformed “into the splendor of angels . . . for they will live in the heights of that world and they will be like the angels and be equal to the stars. . . . And the excellence of the righteous will then be greater than that of the angels” ( 2 Bar . 51.3–10). 7 Here, then, those who are righteous become angels who are greater than other angels—greater even than the stars, which many ancient people believed to be fantastically great angels.
    Some ancient Jewish texts portray particular individuals as being transformed into angels at death. One of the supremely mysterious characters in the Hebrew Bible is the ancient figure Enoch. We do not learn much about him in the terse comments of the principal passage that mentions him in the Hebrew Bible, Genesis 5. We learn that he was the father of Methuselah, the oldest man who ever lived in scripture (969 years, according to Gen 5:27), and the great-grandfather of Noah. But what is most striking is that when Enoch was 365 years old, he passed from this earth—but without dying: “Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him” (Gen. 5:24). This laconic statement generated enormous speculations and speculative literature throughout ancient Judaism. Several ancient apocalypses are attributed to Enoch. Who better to know about the future course of history or of the heavenly realm than one who was transported to heaven without dying first?
    In a book called 2 Enoch , written possibly around the time of Jesus, we learn one opinion about what happened to Enoch when he was taken up into the divine realm ( 2 En. 22.1–10). We are told that he came into the presence of the Lord himself and did obeisance to him. God tells him to stand up and says to his angels, “Let Enoch join in and stand in front of my face forever.” 8 God then tells the angel Michael: “Go, and extract Enoch from his earthly clothing. And anoint him with my delightful oil, and put him into the clothes of my glory.” Michael does so. Enoch reflects on his transformation in the first person: “And I looked at myself and I had become like one of his glorious ones, and there was no observable difference.” As a result of this angelification, if we can call it that, Enoch’s face became so bright that no one could look at it (37.2), and he no longer needed to eat or sleep (23.3; 56.2). In other words, he became identical to an angel.
    Something similar is said to have happened to Moses. The death of Moses is described in cryptic terms in the Bible where we learn that he died alone and no one ever knew the location of his grave (Deut. 34:5–6). Later Jewish writers maintained that he was taken up to heaven to dwell. And so, for example, in the apocryphal book of Sirach we learn that God made Moses “equal in glory to the holy ones, and made him great, to the terror of his enemies” (45.1–5). He thus is equal to the angels. Some authors think of him as even greater than the angels, as in a book attributed to a person known as Ezekiel the Tragedian, who indicates that Moses was given a scepter and summoned to sit on a throne, with a diadem placed on his head, so that the “stars” bowed down to him. Recall: stars were considered superior angels. Here they bow down in worship to Moses, who has been transformed into a being even