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The Origins of the Apocalypse of Abraham
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Paulsen-Reed, Amy Elizabeth. 2016. The Origins of the Apocalypse of Abraham. Doctoral
dissertation, Harvard Divinity School.
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The Origins of the Apocalypse of Abraham

A dissertation presented
By

Amy Elizabeth Paulsen-Reed

To

The Faculty of Harvard Divinity School

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Theology

In the Subject of

Hebrew Bible

Harvard University

Cambridge, Massachusetts

March, 2016
© 2016 Amy Paulsen-Reed
All rights reserved
Jon Levenson Amy Paulsen-Reed
The Origins of the Apocalypse of Abraham
Abstract
The Apocalypse of Abraham, a pseudepigraphon only extant in a fourteenth century Old
Church Slavonic manuscript, has not received much attention from scholars of Ancient Judaism,
due in part to a lack of readily available information regarding the history and transmission of the
Slavonic Pseudepigrapha. This dissertation examines the historical context of these works with
the aim of assessing the probability that they contain ancient Jewish material. The rest of the
dissertation is focused on the Apocalypse of Abraham specifically, discussing its date and
provenance, original language, probability that it comes from Essene circles, textual unity, and
Christian interpolations. This includes treatments of the issue of free will, determinism, and
predestination in the Apocalypse of Abraham as well as the methodological complexities in
trying to distinguish between early Jewish and Christian works. It also provides an in-depth
comparison of the Apocalypse of Abraham with 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch and takes up the question
of the social setting for these texts based on relevant precedents set by recent scholars of midrash
who seek to probe the “socio-cultural and historical situatedness” of midrashic texts. This
discussion includes a survey of parallels between the content of the Apocalypse of Abraham and
rabbinic literature to support the argument that a sharp distinction between apocalyptic ideas and
what later became rabbinic tradition did not exist in the time between 70 and 135 C.E. Overall,
this dissertation argues that the Apocalypse of Abraham is an early Jewish document written
during the decades following the destruction of the Second Temple. While seeking to warn its
readers of the dangers of idolatry in light of the apocalyptic judgment still to come, it also
provides sustained exegesis of Genesis 15, which gives cohesion to the entire document.
iii
LIST OF TABLES
Table 2.1………………………………………………………………………………. 127
Table 2.2………………………………………………………………………………. 130

iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE……………………………………………………………………………………... i

COPYRIGHT PAGE…………………………………………………………………………….. ii

ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………………….. iii

LIST OF TABLES……………………………………………………………………………… iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS……………………………………………………………………….. v

INTRODUCTION………………………………………………….……………………. 1

CHAPTER 1: THE MEDIEVAL SLAVIC CONTEXT FOR THE SLAVONIC

PSEUDEPIGRAPHA……………………………………………………………. 7

CHAPTER 2: PROLEGOMENA……………………………………………………..... 74

CHAPTER 3: 4 EZRA, 2 BARUCH, AND THE APOCALYPSE OF ABRAHAM… 136

CHAPTER 4: THE SOCIAL SETTING OF 4 EZRA, 2 BARUCH, AND THE
APOCALYPSE OF ABRAHAM……………………………………………... 205

CONCLUSIONS……………………………………………………………………… 256

BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………... 265

v
Introduction

The Apocalypse of Abraham is a fascinating and understudied Jewish response to the
destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE. It narrates how Abraham attempts to
convince his father Terah, an idol-maker, of the folly of worshipping idols, after which he
ascends to heaven with the help of an angel and is shown cosmic and eschatological secrets.
While the first eight chapters closely resemble rabbinic tales regarding Abraham and his idol
worshipping father, the remaining twenty-four chapters resemble ancient Jewish apocalyptic
literature with what appear to be traces of nascent Jewish mysticism. The book as a whole is a
response to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, emphasizing God’s control over
history and holding out eschatological hope in the face of tragedy. It was not preserved by any
Jewish communities that we know of and it owes its survival to the Greek Orthodox Church, at
least until the ninth and tenth centuries. It only came to the attention of modern scholars in the
nineteenth century when a fourteenth-century Old Church Slavonic translation of it was found in
a Russian monastery. This is not the usual provenance of sources for Ancient Judaism and the
lack of familiarity amongst Biblical and Jewish Studies scholars with the circumstances
surrounding the history and transmission of the Slavonic Pseudepigrapha has served as a barrier
to the incorporation of the Apocalypse of Abraham in many treatments of Ancient Judaism.
Language presents another barrier: the putative Semitic and Greek texts of the Apocalypse of
Abraham have been lost to history, and one must have a working knowledge of Old Church
Slavonic and Russian in order to study it seriously.
In addition to these practical barriers of familiarity and linguistic access is the existence of
traditional biases against apocryphal and pseudepigraphal literature in the field of Biblical
Studies. The influence of Julius Wellhausen, one of the most important biblical scholars of the
nineteenth century, has played a significant role in the scholarly neglect of apocalyptic literature.
Wellhausen viewed prophecy as the height of ancient Israelite religion; in his developmental
schematic, Judaism constitutes a late, corrupt deviation from this ideal, thus creating the
implication that apocalyptic literature represents a religious devolution. Accordingly, he devotes
scarcely any room to apocalyptic literature in his well-known Prolegomena to the History of
Ancient Israel.1
There exists a similar historical Protestant bias against the Pseudepigrapha, that is, the texts
that were not included either in the Christian canon or in the deutero-canonical corpus of the
Apocrypha (the latter is part of the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Bibles). In fact, Johann
Albert Fabricius (1668-1736), the man who coined the term “Pseudepigrapha,” did so in an overt
attempt to discredit these documents and expose them to “contempt” as base forgeries.2 The
discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has done much to revive interest in pseudepigraphal literature
and this historical bias has slowly begun to be countered in the subsequent decades.
Another factor is that some modern scholars have been put off by the supposed association of
apocalypse with radical religious groups.3 For example, John J. Collins argues that because of its
popular association with “fanatical millenarian expectation,” many Christian theologians are
often reluctant to acknowledge that apocalyptic literature played a formative role in early

1 S. L. Cook, Prophecy and Apocalypticism: The Postexilic Social Setting (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
1995), 3.

2 Ibid., 2.

3 This sort of thinking is reflected by, for example, David E. Aune, who writes, “Apocalypses can be
broadly characterized as protest literature. That is, they typically represent the perspective of an oppressed
minority” [“Understanding Jewish and Christian Apocalypse,” Word & World 25, no. 3 (June 1, 2005), 235]; cf.
Matthias Henze, who discusses this at length [Jewish Apocalypticism in Late First Century Israel: Reading 'Second
Baruch' in Context (Tübingen: Mohr, 2011), 5-6].

2
Christianity.4 This supposed association of apocalypse with radical sectarianism is based on the
now out-dated idea that there existed such a thing as a “normative” Judaism in the Second
Temple period, against which outsiders constructed their own idiosyncratic ideologies.5 The
assumption that apocalypses were written solely for small outsider groups has been repeatedly
challenged, but traces of the old bias still remain. Klaus Koch writes (in 1970) that “perplexed”
and “embarrassed” best describe the prevailing scholarly attitudes towards apocalyptic literature,
and he laments the fact that the primary apocalyptic texts have been inconsistently studied, if not
purposefully shunned.6 To sum up in the words of Matthias Henze, “apocalyptic literature has
always been, and continues to be, the enfant terrible of early Jewish literature.”7
In the decades since Koch wrote this assessment, there has been a growing interest in the
Pseudepigrapha for their own sake, and not simply to round out the context for the development
of Early Christianity and what later became Rabbinic Judaism. The Apocalypse of Abraham,
however, has largely escaped the attention of scholars because of the barriers mentioned above.
Of the scholars with the required linguistic skills, some have produced excellent critical editions
of the text and general surveys of its content (Kulik, Philonenko, Rubinkiewicz),8 while others

4 John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 1.

5 James H. Charlesworth, “In the Crucible: The Pseudepigrapha as Biblical Interpretation,” in The
Pseudepigrapha and Early Biblical Interpretation (ed. James H. Charlesworth and Craig A. Evans; Sheffield,
England: JSOT Press, 1993), 23; Matthias Henze, Jewish Apocalypticism, 5, 231; George W. E. Nickelsburg,
“Social Aspects of Palestinian Jewish Apocalypticism,” in Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near
East: Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Apocalypticism, Uppsala, August 12-17, 1979 (ed. David
Hellholm; Tübingen: Mohr, 1983), 643-645.

6 Klaus Koch, Ratlos vor der Apokalyptik (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1970); English trans., The Rediscovery of
Apocalyptic: A Polemical Work on a Neglected Area of Biblical Studies and Its Damaging Effects on Theology and
Philosophy (Naperville, Ill: A.R. Allenson, 1972).

7 Henze, Jewish Apocalypticism, 5.

8 Alexander Kulik, Retroverting Slavonic Pseudepigrapha: Toward the Original of the Apocalypse of
Abraham (Atlanta, Ga.: Society of Biblical Lit, 2004); Marc Philonenko and Belkis Philonenko-Sayar,
3
have focused on particular passages or themes within the text. All agree that the Apocalypse of
Abraham is an ancient Jewish text, but no one has laid out the basis for this conclusion in a
detailed, in-depth way that can allow other scholars to weigh the evidence for themselves. Thus,
even though there are no scholars claiming outright that the Apocalypse of Abraham is not an
ancient Jewish text, many still have doubts. For this reason I provide as thorough and detailed a
case as I can for the antiquity and Jewish provenance of the Apocalypse of Abraham in the hopes
that this will help to bridge the barriers that have kept this text from being utilized as a source for
Ancient Judaism.
Towards this end, Chapter 1 is devoted to the history and transmission of the Slavonic
Pseudepigrapha with the goal of assessing the level of probability that ancient Jewish documents
could have been transmitted in such a way as to preserve ancient material. This chapter does not
reach any conclusions about the Apocalypse of Abraham specifically; rather, it addresses the
circumstances surrounding all of the Slavonic Pseudepigrapha. This is a necessary step before
analysis of any particular text can be conducted.
Having dealt with the history of the Slavonic Pseudepigrapha in general in Chapter 1, Chapter
2 is devoted exclusively to the Apocalypse of Abraham and deals with basic, yet crucial
preliminary matters, such as the probability of a Semitic original, date, provenance, manuscript
evidence, textual unity, the possibility of Christian interpolations, and the history of scholarship.
This involves discussions of both external and internal evidence, as well as methodological
considerations for how one goes about distinguishing early Christian from Jewish works.
Chapter 3 turns to the issue of comparative evidence and considers the Apocalypse of
Abraham alongside 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch, the main representatives of apocalyptic literature from

“L’Apocalypse d’Abraham,” Semitica 31 (1981): 1-119; Rubinkiewicz, L’Apocalypse d’ Abraham en vieux slave:
Introduction, Texte Critique, Traduction Et Commentaire (Lublin, 1987).

4