The Animals Will Testify Against Us: The Ethics of 2 Enoch
Before he is taken up to heaven, Enoch gives his sons an unusual warning: on the day of judgment the animals will stand there too, and they will accuse humankind of what was done to them.
In shortAccording to chapters 58 and 59 of 2 Enoch, God appointed the human being as ruler over the animals, but their souls are kept until the great judgment, where they will accuse humans who treated them badly. Whoever harms an animal in secret or kills it improperly defiles his own soul.
A man who knows he has thirty days left chooses his words carefully. That is Enoch's situation in the second part of 2 Enoch. He has ascended through ten heavens, heard the secrets of creation from the mouth of God, and been returned to earth for a limited time, to say goodbye to his sons and to teach them.
One might expect him to talk about what he saw above. He does, but a large part of what he says deals with very earthly matters: how to behave when angry, what one may say about a neighbor, and also, to the reader's surprise, how to treat a farm animal.
Why they are silent
Enoch starts from the beginning. God, he reminds his sons, brought all the animals before Adam, and Adam gave them names. Then he appointed him ruler over them all. So far this is Genesis. Then the book adds its own explanation for a fact that nobody before it had bothered to explain: why animals do not speak. God, it says, made them mute and without understanding, so that man might command them and they would obey him.
The silence of the animals is therefore part of the order of rule. Whoever cannot speak cannot refuse, and cannot complain. And right after that comes the sequel:
God will not judge a single animal soul for man's sake, but he will judge human souls for what they did to their animals in this world. For human beings have a special place. And just as every human soul is counted, so the animals will not perish either, not one of the animal souls God created, until the great judgment, and they will accuse man if he treated them badly in their feeding.
2 Enoch 58:6–7
The silence, it turns out, is temporary. The animals are not judged, since they bear no responsibility. But they are present at the judgment, and there they speak. The one who ruled them all his life will hear them for the first time in the very place where he no longer controls anything.
The picture has one precedent in the Torah. In the story of Balaam the donkey opens her mouth and asks her owner why he has struck her three times. It is the only time in the Torah that an animal speaks to a human being, and the first thing she does is complain.
The first count of the indictment is also worth noticing: “if he treated them badly in their feeding.” The crime is not some extraordinary cruelty. It is the everyday neglect of someone who keeps an animal and does not bother to feed it properly. The author knew farmers. He may have been one himself.
What is done in secret
The next chapter comes back to the matter from another angle:
But whoever kills an animal improperly kills his own soul and defiles his own flesh. And whoever does any harm to an animal in secret, it is an evil deed, and he defiles his own soul.
2 Enoch 59:5–6
The important words here are “in secret.” Harming an animal is the easiest offense to hide. There are no witnesses, and the victim will not tell. The book closes this loophole twice. Once when it announces that the victim itself will testify, and a second time when it rules that the harm returns to the one who caused it: whoever defiles the soul of an animal defiles his own soul.
The book does not ask people to give up meat or sacrifices. The same chapter says explicitly that everything has been given to humans for food, and that the offering of a clean animal heals a person's soul. The demand is that it be done properly, and in the open. The line it draws runs between use and abuse.
A long tradition, and one step beyond it
Concern for animals was not born in 2 Enoch. The Torah forbids muzzling an ox while it treads the grain, commands sending the mother bird away from the nest, and requires helping even the donkey of an enemy when it collapses under its load. The Book of Proverbs says that “a righteous man regardeth the life of his beast.” And the Talmud rules that a person may not eat before feeding his animals, a law that fits the language of the book remarkably well.
But 2 Enoch takes a step that these sources do not. It gives the animals standing in court. They are no longer only creatures one is obliged to pity. They are a party to the case. In ancient literature this idea has almost no parallel.
The human face
The same logic returns in Enoch's words when he speaks about human beings:
God created man with his own hands, in the likeness of his own face; God made him small and great. Whoever reviles the face of a ruler and loathes the face of God despises the face of God. Whoever lashes out in anger at someone who has done him no harm, the great anger of God will cut him off. And whoever spits in a person's face to shame him will be cut off in God's great judgment.
2 Enoch 44:1–2
The structure is identical. Someone who spits in a person's face thinks he has hurt one person, weaker than himself. According to the book he has hurt a face made in the likeness of the face of God. Someone who abuses an animal thinks he has hurt a mute creature. According to the book he has hurt his own soul. In both cases, what looks like an injury to the weak turns out to be an injury to something far greater.
And right after the warning comes the blessing. Happy is the one who helps the injured, lifts up the broken and gives charity to the needy. On the great day of judgment, Enoch says, every weight and every measure will hang as in the market, and everyone will recognize his own measure.
The list of witnesses
We tend to think that the question of how animals ought to be treated is a new one, a product of recent times. 2 Enoch shows that it troubled someone about two thousand years ago, and that he phrased it with a sharpness that is hard to ignore: what will those who cannot speak say about us, if one day they are allowed to speak?
The author was thinking of an ox, a donkey and a few sheep in the yard. He could not have imagined a world in which humans keep tens of billions of animals, most of them in places nobody sees. If there is anything to the picture he drew, the list of witnesses today is far longer than he ever supposed.
And if there is nothing to it, the principle on which he built it remains, and it does not depend on any day of judgment. The character of those who hold power can be learned mainly from what they do when nobody is watching, to those who cannot complain.
