3 - Material Evidence for Animal Apocalypse(s) of Enoch

Summary

Fragments sorted into four manuscripts at Qumran seem to attest the Animal Apocalypse. Said with my particular terminology: these documents contain text which aligns closely enough with the text of the Gəʿəz Animal Apocalypse, to which we accord “work” status, that we feel comfortable saying these documents attest the work, the Animal Apocalypse. But what changes in the interpretation of these documents if we hold open the door for the possibility of multiple works?

As it turns out, quite a bit changes. As I will demonstrate in this chapter, every fragment found at Qumran attests text corresponding to the Vision of the Beasts. Not one attests to text corresponding to the Apocalypse of the Birds. In the following chart, the sections in grey are those for which we have at least one fragment at Qumran containing text which parallels the Gəʿəz text.

This visual representation quickly clarifies that we have no material evidence for the Apocalypse of the Birds at Qumran. This is not necessarily conclusive evidence of its absence, but it is a fascinating absence of evidence. It may help texture the quality of our data to look at what we do have preserved, noting that our manuscripts occasionally overlap in the sections they preserve. These four manuscripts – 4Q204, 4Q205, 4Q206, and 4Q207 – are dated on paleographic grounds from the early Hasmonean period (4Q207) to the early Herodian period (4Q204).

Three sections of the text are found in two manuscripts at Qumran apiece. It is surely going too far to say that this is evidence of “popularity” of these sections at Qumran (or in another imagined site where writing occurred), but it is multiple attestation nevertheless. Our documents may provide some, albeit limited, data on the frequency with which this work was copied and/or read.

We can also observe that we have directly overlapping text in multiple documents. The sections narrated above, after all, are a scholarly convention that I have borrowed from prominent voices in the field to make sure I can clearly communicate the macro-structure of a long literary composition. A document attesting more than one section might not indicate actual overlap all that directly.