The Nature of the Beast: The Animal Apocalypse(s) of Enoch

Abstract

This project reimagines the textual history of the Animal Apocalypse, a subsection of an early Jewish work called 1 Enoch, which narrates a history of the Israelites and their adversaries stretching from Eden to the eschaton in which all are represented as different species of animals. The dissertation disrupts the scholarly consensus that the entirety of the Animal Apocalypse belongs to the Maccabean revolt, and proposes that a crucial piece of it belongs in first-century CE Roman Judaea—specifically, to the world of the First Jewish Revolt. It is proposed that the Animal Apocalypse as extant in Ethiopic manuscripts breaks into two separate works. One of these works is attested among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and likely belongs to the world of second-century BCE Judaea. The other, comprising the portion of the text that brings the allegorical history into the post-exilic era and leads into the eschaton, is not attested at Qumran. It then becomes the task of this project to ascertain a new provenance for the work that comprises the second half of the Animal Apocalypse—a work called here the Seventy-Shepherd Schema. A second-century CE readership (Barnabas and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs) is identified, and provides an external terminus ante quem. Finally, it is argued that the historical allusions in the apocalyptic progression most closely match the events of the First Jewish Revolt. In this way, what seems at first to be a simple methodological move inspired by New Philology—resisting the urge to restore later text around earlier fragments—reveals a startling new perspective on revolution in the first century CE, and a dynamic and evolving animal apocalyptic tradition.