Apocalypse of Abraham

The Apocalypse of Abraham is a pseudepigraphic work (a text whose claimed authorship is uncertain) based on the Old Testament. Probably composed between about 70–150 AD from earlier writings and tradition possibly kept from the time of Abraham, it is of Jewish origin and is usually considered to be part of the Apocalyptic literature. It has survived only in Old Slavonic recensions and it is not regarded as authoritative scripture by Jews or any Christians, though it likely held some prominence up into the first century A.D.

The text of the Apocalypse of Abraham has been preserved only in Slavonic; it occurs in the Tolkovaja Paleja (or Explanatory Paleja, a Medieval compendium of various Old Testament texts and comments that also preserved the Ladder of Jacob). The original language of this text was almost surely Hebrew: it was translated into Slavonic either directly from Hebrew or from a lost intermediate Greek translation. The whole text survives in six manuscripts usually gathered in two families: the main manuscript of the first family is referred to as S edited by Tixonravov in 1863, while the main manuscripts of the other family, which preserve the text integrated in other material of the Tolkovaja Paleja, are referred to as A, B and K.

The first English translation was produced by E.H. Anderson and R.T. Haag, and appeared in 1898 in the Latter-day Saint magazine Improvement Era, under the title The Book of the Revelation of Abraham. Another notable English translation was produced by G.H. Box and J.I. Landsman some twenty years later.

Speculations of the time this ancient work was written vary greatly. Whether the original book was completed during Abraham's lifetime, or compiled later from existing texts or tradition is unknown. Currently, only Old Slavonic language texts of the original have been discovered. So how far back in time the earlier Hebrew texts went is only conjectured.

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