Where we are
If the Book of Moses has a summit, this is it. Moses 7 holds the single most astonishing thing in the entire Pearl of Great Price, maybe in the whole Restoration: a prophet watches God cry. Not the mortal Jesus weeping at a tomb — God, the God of heaven, looking down on his children and weeping over them, until Enoch, stunned, blurts out the question no one in scripture had ever dared ask: how is it that thou canst weep? And God answers him. Hugh Nibley spent a career on the ancient Enoch literature and still called these verses (Moses 7:28–40) the most remarkable passage in our scripture. I think he was right.
But the weeping is the center of a larger vision, and the whole thing is enormous. Enoch builds a city so righteous that God takes it up into heaven. He sees the giants and the wars of his own violent age. He's shown all of human history, the coming of Christ, the latter-day gathering, and the New Jerusalem. It's the most expansive single vision in the Old Testament, and it ends with God and Enoch and two cities falling on each other's necks.
This is also, frankly, the chapter where I most have to watch my own footing — because the Enoch material is where the apocryphal parallels are richest and where the temptation to overreach is strongest. So I'll do two things in this essay that I haven't had to do as sharply before: I'll show you a genuinely unexplainable convergence, and I'll point out, just as plainly, the place where the chapter's greatest treasure has no ancient parallel at all. Both kinds of honesty matter.
Six movements: Enoch's ministry and the power of his word (vv. 1–13); the wars and the building of Zion (vv. 14–21); the vision of the Lord at his side (vv. 22–27); the weeping God (vv. 28–40); the coming of Christ (vv. 41–57); and the latter-day New Jerusalem (vv. 58–69).
The power of the word, and the name in the desert (verses 1–17)
Enoch, the stammering boy of Moses 6, has become something else entirely. "So great was the faith of Enoch that he led the people of God… he spake the word of the Lord, and the earth trembled, and the mountains fled… so powerful was the word of Enoch." The Lord kept the promise from the last chapter — "open thy mouth, and it shall be filled" — and filled it past anyone's imagining. The slow tongue became the voice that moved mountains.
And right here, at the start of his ministry, the thread from Moses 6 reappears: "there came a man unto him, whose name was Mahujah" (v. 2). The same name — Mahijah at 6:40, Mahujah here — the man who comes to question Enoch. Keep holding it. We'll close the loop in a moment, because this chapter also gives us the giants: "there were wars and bloodshed among them; but the Lord came and dwelt with his people, and they dwelt in righteousness" (vv. 16–17). The violence of the antediluvian world, the giants of Genesis 6, the man named Mahujah, the prophet Enoch standing against all of it — that whole cluster is about to matter.
Zion — and the city that was taken up (verses 18–21)
And the Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them. — Moses 7:18
There it is — the definition of Zion, in one sentence, and it's worth memorizing because everything the Restoration says about gathering and consecration flows out of it. Zion is three things at once: one heart and one mind (they want the same things), righteousness (they are good), and no poor among them (the goodness reaches all the way into the economy). Not one of the three by itself. All three together.
And then the line that opens a door no other scripture opens:
And Enoch… beheld, and lo, Zion, in process of time, was taken up into heaven. And the Lord said unto Enoch: Behold mine abode forever. — Moses 7:21
A whole city — translated. We know from Hebrews that Enoch himself "was translated that he should not see death" (Heb. 11:5). Moses 7 tells us he wasn't taken alone; his entire community was so perfected that God lifted it up and called it home. That's not just a marvel; it's a promise with teeth, because it means a society can be made that good. The latter-day New Jerusalem this same chapter prophesies isn't a fantasy. It's been done once, and Enoch's translated city is coming back to meet it.
The God who weeps (verses 28–40)
Now the heart of everything. Enoch is shown the wickedness of the people who would not come into Zion — and then he sees something that breaks the categories he came in with:
And it came to pass that the God of heaven looked upon the residue of the people, and he wept; and Enoch bore record of it, saying: How is it that the heavens weep, and shed forth their tears as the rain upon the mountains? — Moses 7:28
God wept. And Enoch can't process it — because, like nearly every religious person before and since, he'd assumed that God, being holy and eternal and perfect, was above that kind of thing. So he asks it straight out: "How is it that thou canst weep, seeing thou art holy, and from all eternity to all eternity?" (v. 29). It's one of the most important questions in scripture, and notice what the Lord does not do. He doesn't correct Enoch and say "I don't really weep; that's just a figure of speech." He weeps, and then he explains why.
They are the workmanship of mine own hands… and unto thy brethren have I said, and also given commandment, that they should love one another, and that they should choose me, their Father; but behold, they are without affection, and they hate their own blood. — Moses 7:32–33
That's the reason for the tears. Not that his commandments were broken in the abstract — that his children are destroying each other. The image-bearers are murdering the image. He made them, gave them knowledge, gave them agency, asked them for one thing — love one another — and they "hate their own blood." A parent who has watched their children turn on each other knows this grief exactly. That's the grief God is described as feeling.
I want to stop the apocryphal machinery here and tell you something plainly, because it's the most honest thing I can do with this chapter. The weeping God is the crown jewel of Moses 7 — and it has almost no real parallel in the ancient books. The Enoch literature gives us cosmic tours and judgment and giants, but it does not give us this tender, grieving Father in tears over his children. (There are later rabbinic stories of God weeping over the destroyed temple, but those are centuries after Christ, and they're not the same thing.) So I'm not going to manufacture a convergence where there isn't one. This doctrine doesn't come to us corroborated by an old manuscript. It comes to us as something closer to pure gift — a thing the restored text simply gives that the ancient world had lost so completely it left no copy behind. The method of this whole project is to let the apocrypha confirm the Restoration where it can. Part of being honest about that method is admitting that its single most beautiful page stands without that kind of witness. Some restored truth is just restored.
The vision, the Christ, and the name in the buried book (verses 41–69)
Enoch's own heart, watching all this, stretches to hold it: "his heart swelled wide as eternity; and his bowels yearned; and all eternity shook" (v. 41). To stand near the weeping God is to start weeping with him; the prophet's heart grows to the size of the grief. Then the Lord shows Enoch the whole arc — the coming of the Only Begotten "in the meridian of time" (v. 47), the Crucifixion, and the latter days, when "truth will I send forth out of the earth, to bear testimony of mine Only Begotten" (v. 62) — which Latter-day Saints have always read as the Book of Mormon coming up out of the ground. And it ends in an embrace: Enoch's translated city and the latter-day Zion will meet, "and we will fall upon their necks, and they shall fall upon our necks, and we will kiss each other" (v. 63) — the very gesture of the father running to the prodigal (Lk. 15:20). The whole cosmic vision lands on a reunion hug.
Now I owe you the close of that thread I keep pulling — Mahujah — and here is the convergence I'd stake the most on.
Sit with the Book of Giants for a second, because it's the strongest thing in this whole undertaking. A young man with a third-grade education dictates, in 1830, a story in which a prophet named Enoch, in a world of giants facing a coming flood, is approached by a man named Mahujah. More than a hundred years later, archaeologists pull a scroll out of a cave that no one had read since the time of the Romans — and it tells of the giants of that same flood-doomed world sending a messenger named Mahaway to that same prophet Enoch. You can reach for coincidence. But the name is specific, the role is specific, the setting is specific, and the document was in the ground the entire time. I've spent these essays being hard on weak parallels precisely so that when I reach this one I can say, without hedging: I do not have a natural explanation for it.
How this chapter changes the reader
Moses 7 changes, more than any other chapter, who you think you're praying to.
You're praying to a God who weeps. Not a serene, untouchable abstraction safely above the reach of your life, but a Father who is genuinely moved by it — grieved when you grieve, grieved most of all when his children wound each other. That single fact rearranges the spiritual life. It means your pain registers in heaven. It means the distance you sometimes feel from God is not because he's far or cold, but is something the chapter actually answers: he is nearer and more affected than you dared think. And it sets the standard for your own heart — Enoch's heart "swelled wide as eternity" because he was standing next to a God whose heart is that wide. A small, hard, self-protected heart is the one thing this chapter quietly rules out as a destination.
And it leaves you with Zion — not as a metaphor, but as a buildable thing, because it was built once and lifted into heaven. One heart, one mind, no poor among them. That's the assignment. It has been done. And the promise at the end of the vision is that the city which was taken up is coming back, and when it lands, there will be an embrace — God and Enoch's people and ours, falling on each other's necks. The whole vision of history, with all its giants and floods and crucifixions, resolves into a homecoming hug. That is the God of Moses 7, and he is worth giving your heart to.