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

IF 0.4 0 RELIGION
Emily Olsen
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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.
人类的三种颜色以诺书 1 的《动物启示录》中早期犹太人的种族划分
自弗兰克-斯诺登(Frank Snowden)出版其开创性专著《古代黑人》(Blacks in Antiquity)以来的几十年间,学者们对了解古代人所使用的民族和种族框架越来越感兴趣。关于古典文学中种族、肤色和民族的交叉点的讨论由来已久,但古代犹太文献往往被排除在这些讨论之外。在本文中,我首先以希腊化时代的环境理论为背景,分析了《以诺一书》中的《动物启示录》,说明它通过对有色公牛的区分,展示了早期的种族制造形式。尽管尼克尔斯伯格和蒂勒提供的主要注释拒绝对《动物启示录》中的有色公牛进行种族解读,但马修-布莱克(Matthew Black)在 20 世纪 80 年代的注释却没有这样做。我表明,古希腊人对肤色、种族和由环境决定论塑造的行为的观念支持马修-布莱克理解《动物启示录》使用肤色的框架,即他将第 89 章的黑公牛等同于含,这与尼克尔斯堡和蒂勒的观点相反。其次,我强调《动物启示录》的有色公牛模式反映了这样一种观点,即全人类的祖先分别来自白色、红色和黑色,这三种颜色的排序构成了人类的等级排序,按降序分为三种不同类型的人。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.40
自引率
33.30%
发文量
13
期刊介绍: The last twenty years have witnessed some remarkable achievements in the study of early Jewish literature. Given the ever-increasing number and availability of primary sources for these writings, specialists have been producing text-critical, historical, social scientific, and theological studies which, in turn, have fuelled a growing interest among scholars, students, religious leaders, and the wider public. The only English journal of its kind, Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha was founded in 1987 to provide a much-needed forum for scholars to discuss and review most recent developments in this burgeoning field in the academy.
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