The Animal Apocalypse: World History as a Fable About Animals

In shortThe Animal Apocalypse is a dream that Enoch tells his son Methuselah in chapters 85 to 90 of 1 Enoch. The dream unfolds history, from Adam to the end of days, as a fable in which human beings are animals.

One night, before he had taken a wife, Enoch dreamed a dream with not a single human being in it. It had bulls and cows, sheep and wolves, ravens and eagles, and also stars that fall from heaven and begin to graze in the pasture. Years later he told the dream to his son Methuselah.

This dream, which takes up chapters 85 to 90 of 1 Enoch, is known as the Animal Apocalypse. It is one of the strangest and most sophisticated texts written in the Second Temple period: all of history, from Adam to the end of days, without one name of a person or a people.

How to read the code

The dream opens with a white bull coming up out of the earth, a heifer, and two calves, one black and one red. And then:

The black calf gored the red one and chased him across the earth, and after that I never saw the red calf again.

1 Enoch 85:3

Anyone who has read Genesis recognizes the story at once. The white bull is Adam, the heifer is Eve, the black calf is Cain and the red one is Abel. From here the code almost deciphers itself. A star falls from heaven and begins to graze among the bulls, and many stars fall after it: these are the angels who came down. The cows give birth to elephants, camels and donkeys: these are the giants. And then a bull appears whose fate is unlike all the others:

One of those four went to one of the bulls and revealed a secret to him, and he trembled greatly. He was born a bull and became a man. He made himself a great vessel and lived in it, and three bulls lived with him in that vessel, and it was closed over them.

1 Enoch 89:1

The bull who becomes a man and builds a vessel is of course Noah. But what does “became a man” mean? In this vision all human beings are animals, so a human figure stands for something higher, an angel. Noah, and Moses after him, rise to a different rank.

After the flood the three sons of Noah bring forth all the wild animals and the birds of the sky: lions and leopards, dogs and wolves, hyenas and wild boars. These are the nations. Among them a white bull is born, Abraham. Of his grandsons, one is a black wild boar and the other a white sheep, and that sheep fathers twelve sheep.

From bulls to sheep

The decline is worth noticing. The first patriarchs were bulls, large and powerful animals. Their descendants are sheep: weak, prone to stray, dependent on a shepherd. The author loves his people, but he does not flatter them.

From here the history of Israel is told as the story of a flock. One of the sheep is handed over to the donkeys, and the donkeys hand it over to the wolves: this is Joseph, and the wolves are the Egyptians. Another sheep leads the flock out, and it too becomes a man: Moses. A house is built, and later a high tower, the Temple. The sheep stray again and again, and their eyes, in the language of the vision, are blinded. The Lord of the sheep sends messengers to them, and they kill them. One of the messengers escapes and is taken up on high: Elijah. And in the end the lions and the leopards come, and the house is destroyed.

The seventy shepherds

Here comes the most original part of the vision. After the destruction, the Lord of the sheep no longer manages the flock himself:

He drove the sheep away from him and called seventy shepherds to tend them. He said to the shepherds and their helpers: From now on each of you will tend the sheep, and you will do everything I command you. I am handing them over to you by number, and I will tell you which of them are to perish, and those you shall destroy. And he handed the sheep over to them.

1 Enoch 89:60–61

Seventy shepherds receive the flock, each for his own period, with precise instructions about how many sheep may be destroyed. At the same time another angel is appointed, whose job is to write down in a book every sheep the shepherds kill beyond the quota. Most scholars see the shepherds as angels, the heavenly princes of the nations that ruled Israel from the days of Babylon to the days of the Greeks.

It is a daring idea. The author lives in a world where his people has been ruled by foreigners for centuries, and he asks the obvious question: where is God? His answer is that God delegated authority, that the appointees exceeded it, and that someone is documenting everything. Evil in history is explained here as a management failure, with minutes.

The vision is critical toward the inside as well. The sheep who return from exile rebuild the tower and set a table before it, but all the bread on it is unclean. In the author's eyes, something about the Second Temple was flawed from the start.

The sheep that grew a horn

Toward the end the pace quickens, and the details multiply. Little lambs are born, open their eyes and cry out to the sheep, who do not hear. The ravens swoop down on them. And then:

I saw how horns grew on the lambs, and the ravens broke off their horns. Then I saw a great horn sprout on one of the sheep, and their eyes were opened.

1 Enoch 90:9

The sheep with the great horn fights the ravens, the eagles and the kites, and they cannot overcome it. Most scholars identify it with Judas Maccabeus, and the ravens with the Seleucid rulers. This identification is also the key to the date. Up to this point the vision “predicts” events that have already happened, and from here on it predicts in earnest: a great sword is given to the sheep, a throne is set up in the delightful land, the stars and the shepherds are judged, and a new and greater house is set up in place of the old one. The conclusion is that the vision was written in the middle of the revolt, in the 160s BCE, at about the same time as the animal visions of the Book of Daniel.

Why animals

Animal fables are familiar to us from Aesop to George Orwell's Animal Farm, and the reason is similar in every case. A fable makes it possible to say hard things about rulers without naming them, and it arranges a complicated world into a simple division: we are the sheep, they are the wolves.

But at the end of the vision something happens that this division does not prepare us for:

I watched until all their kinds were changed, and they all became white bulls. The first among them became a very great animal, with great black horns on its head. And the Lord of the sheep rejoiced over them and over all the bulls.

1 Enoch 90:38

The sheep do not defeat the wolves. The wolves, the ravens and the sheep alike change their kind, and go back to being what Adam was: white bulls. An author who wrote in the middle of a war, and who described his enemies as birds of prey, ends with a dream in which there are no kinds at all. It is much easier to imagine our own side winning. It takes a different sort of imagination to imagine a world with no sides left.