The three colors of humanity: Early Jewish race-making in 1 Enoch’s Animal Apocalypse

Abstract

Over the past several decades since Frank Snowden published his seminal monograph Blacks in Antiquity, scholars have become increasingly interested in understanding the ethnic and racial frameworks deployed by ancient peoples. The intersections of race, color, and ethnicity in classical literature have long been debated, but ancient Jewish texts tend to be left out of these discussions. In this article, I first analyze 1 Enoch’s Animal Apocalypse against the backdrop of Hellenistic-era environmental theory to show that it displays early forms of race-making through its differentiation of colored bulls. Although leading commentaries offered by Nickelsburg and Tiller reject racial readings of the Animal Apocalypse’s colored bulls, Matthew Black’s commentary from the 1980s does not. I show that ancient Hellenistic conceptions of peoples’ color, ethnicity, and behaviors shaped by environmental determinism support Matthew Black’s framework for understanding the Animal Apocalypse’s use of color, namely his equating of Chapter 89’s black bull with Ham, contra Nickelsburg and Tiller. Second, I stress that the Animal Apocalypse’s schema of colored bulls reflects the view that all of humanity derives from white, red, and black ancestors and that this ordering of the three colors constitutes a hierarchal sequencing of humankind, classified into three different types of people in descending order.