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The Origins of the Apocalypse of Abraham The Origins of the Apocalypse of Abraham The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Paulsen-Reed, Amy Elizabeth. 2016. The Origins of the Apocalypse of Abraham. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard Divinity School. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:27194248 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA 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
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