Author: Andrei A. Orlov
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2017-09-19
Total Pages: 320
ISBN-13: 1438466919
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A wide-ranging analysis of heavenly twin imagery in early Jewish extrabiblical texts. The idea of a heavenly doublean angelic twin of an earthbound humancan be found in Christian, Manichaean, Islamic, and Kabbalistic traditions. Scholars have long traced the lineage of these ideas to Greco-Roman and Iranian sources. In The Greatest Mirror, Andrei A. Orlov shows that heavenly twin imagery drew in large part from early Jewish writings. The Jewish pseudepigraphabooks from the Second Temple period that were attributed to biblical figures but excluded from the Hebrew Biblecontain accounts of heavenly twins in the form of spirits, images, faces, children, mirrors, and angels of the Presence. Orlov provides a comprehensive analysis of these traditions in their full historical and interpretive complexity. He focuses on heavenly alter egos of Enoch, Moses, Jacob, Joseph, and Aseneth in often neglected books, including Animal Apocalypse, Book of the Watchers, 2 Enoch, Ladder of Jacob, and Joseph and Aseneth, some of which are preserved solely in the Slavonic language. This book is the first complete effort to show how some pseudepigraphical works develop several unique traditions about heavenly counterparts. It is particularly important for many scholars who do not have control of the Slavonic originals of the Ladder of Jacob and 2 Enoch. Orlov also draws on a broad range of unfamiliar sources, including Manichaean and Mandaean materials, which were often neglected by experts who previously investigated the heavenly counterpart imagery. Alexander Kulik, coauthor of Biblical Pseudepigrapha in Slavonic Tradition