2 - The Nature of the Beast: Literary Evidence for Animal Apocalypse(s) of Enoch

Summary

The Animal Apocalypse is an allegorical history in which various species of animals stand in for humans and groups of humans of both good and ill repute – something like Animal Farm for the ancient world. At this point, here in my opening paragraph, I would normally provide a summary of the dating, provenance, contents, and literary and theological themes of the Animal Apocalypse. It is the purpose of this chapter, however, to radically re-evaluate all of these descriptors. We should begin, then, with this: what is the Animal Apocalypse?

The Book of Dreams (1 En 83–90) contains two dreams, which seem to represent two subsidiary works, meaning (as we have previously established the function of the term “work”) that they represent two separate hypothesized sites of composition. The first, corresponding to Gəʿəz Enoch chapters 83–4, is sometimes called the Flood Vision. The second, corresponding to Gəʿəz Enoch chapters 85–90, is called the Animal Apocalypse and is the independent subject of a great many articles and monographs. It is the Animal Apocalypse that will be the subject of this chapter.

Here is the crux of the issue with the Animal Apocalypse: Our documents of the work attest similar but different texts, especially when it comes to length. The documentary sets we will discuss here are fragments from Qumran sorted into three Aramaic manuscripts, as well as Ethiopic codices dating from the fifteenth century onwards. There are also two Greek witnesses that contain about five verses apiece that will be addressed along the way, though their fragmentary nature limits their impact on our conclusions.

Our earliest documents from Qumran contain the least amount of text. Our latest documents, the Ethiopic codices, contain the most. Scholars have granted the later Ethiopic tradition conceptual priority in determining what comprises the “work” of the Animal Apocalypse: the Animal Apocalypse is 1 En 85–90. This means that the Animal Apocalypse, the work, is understood to be the series of words-in-order – the text – that we find in the Ethiopic manuscript tradition. The work becomes equivalent to one text or set of words-in-order. This is a conceptual collapse between two philological levels, but imagining the full “work” by way of text that emerges from the best preserved documentary set is an understandable attraction.