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Abraham Saw Ten Final Plagues and a Trumpet

Lifted above the earth in vision, Abraham asks how long suffering will last and watches the age unwind in plagues, measures, and a heavenly trumpet.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Oldest Question
  2. Twelve Measures of an Age
  3. Ten Plagues at the Age's Passing
  4. The Trumpet and the Gathering

Abraham came back from the height of the vision and stood on the earth and found he no longer understood what he had seen. He had been shown too much at once. He needed the angel to explain it piece by piece.

The Apocalypse of Abraham gave him an answer, but the answer began with a question the patriarch already knew: how long?

The Oldest Question

In Apocalypse of Abraham XXVIII, a Jewish apocalyptic text usually dated to the early centuries CE, Abraham stands before God after watching a vision of Israel's suffering across generations. He is the patriarch, beloved of God, called from his father's house, given covenant, given land, given descendants. None of that dissolves the grief he feels for what he has seen.

He cries out: O Mighty, Eternal One, hallowed by Your power, be favorable to my petition. As you have brought me up to your height, make known to me as much as I ask. Will what I have seen happen to them for long?

The question is not curiosity. It is pain seeking a boundary. Abraham has been shown enough of history to know that exile can stretch past what human beings are built to endure without losing hope. He wants a measure. Not because a measure removes the suffering, but because a suffering with a known end is different from a suffering that appears endless. The covenant can hold his protest. God does not rebuke him for asking.

Twelve Measures of an Age

Apocalypse of Abraham XXIX answers with numbered time. God says: twelve years have I ordained of this ungodly age to rule among the nations and in your seed. The present age is the age of wickedness. Azazel holds a share of what would otherwise belong to God. But the age is bounded. It has a fixed duration measured in divine hours. Each hour of the divine age corresponds to a substantial period of human history, but the hours can be counted. The end is calculable, even if the calculation is not accessible to ordinary human arithmetic.

Apocalyptic numbering can seem obscure, but its emotional purpose is precise. Abraham is not given a calendar date. He is given a structure. The age has a shape with a beginning and an end. Wickedness is not the natural state of the world but a temporary governance that will expire. The measure given to Abraham is not comfort that bypasses grief but a frame that makes grief survivable. If it ends, then enduring it is worth something.

Ten Plagues at the Age's Passing

While God was still speaking, Abraham found himself back on the earth. The transition from vision to ground was abrupt, and what his soul longed to understand in his heart he no longer understood. He said so. He told God plainly: I am no longer in the glory in which I was while on high, and what my soul longed to understand I do not understand.

God answered: what is desired in your heart I will tell you. And God described ten plagues prepared for the nations at the passing of the twelfth hour of the earth. The ten plagues are the final convulsions of the dying age, mirror and amplification of Egypt's plagues, the same divine intervention that liberated Israel from one empire applied now to the end of all empire. The nations who ruled through wickedness would face what Pharaoh faced, at a scale appropriate to the culmination of history.

Abraham was permitted to know this not as spectator but as covenant partner. He had stood at the place of the covenant. He had been shown the future of his descendants. He was now being shown the limit of that future's darkness. After the ten plagues, something else begins.

The Trumpet and the Gathering

Apocalypse of Abraham XXXI reveals what comes after the plagues. God speaks: then I will sound the trumpet out of the air and will send my Elect One, having in him all my power, one measure. The Elect One carries a single measure of all the divine attributes. He is a human being in whom the qualities of God are concentrated into one measure, a figure who reflects in miniature what cannot be held in full by any creature.

The trumpet is the signal. What it gathers is Israel: the scattered people, those who have kept the covenant through the age of wickedness, assembled from wherever exile carried them. The gathering is not a reward for survival. It is the completion of what the covenant promised. Abraham was told his descendants would be as the stars. The gathering after the trumpet is the stars assembling.

Abraham, standing on the earth after his vision, holding knowledge he could not fully hold, became the ancestor of a people who would carry his question forward through every generation that asked: how long? And the text he was given as an answer was: long, but measured. Dark, but ending. The trumpet will sound.

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The texts this telling draws on, in full. Open a card to read inline, or expand it for a wider, quieter read.

Apocalypse of Abraham XXVIIIApocalypse of Abraham

Abraham could no longer contain himself. "O Mighty, Eternal One, hallowed by Your power! Be favorable to my petition. As you have brought me up to your height, so make known to me, your beloved one, as much as I ask. Will what I have seen happen to them for long?"

How long would the suffering last? The oldest question of the oppressed, echoing through every generation that watched empires rise and crush the faithful beneath their weight.

God showed Abraham a multitude of His people and said: "On their account, through four periods of subjugation as you have seen, I shall be provoked by them, and in these my retribution for their deeds shall be accomplished."

The four periods corresponded to the four world-empires: Babylon, Media, Greece, and Rome. Each one a century of dominion over Abraham's descendants, punishment for straying from the covenant.

"But in the fourth outgoing of a hundred years and one hour of the age, the same being a hundred years, it shall be in misfortune among the heathen."

The math was apocalyptic. The entire present age was reckoned as twelve hours, each hour equaling a hundred years, a single cosmic day of 1,200 years. The writer, standing in the aftermath of Rome's destruction of the Temple, believed he was at the edge of the final hour. The suffering was not permanent. It was measured. Counted. Known to God down to the last year.

Abraham had asked: how long? The answer was: there is an end. The age of ungodliness has a fixed duration. When the twelfth hour passes, everything changes.

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Apocalypse of Abraham XXIXApocalypse of Abraham

Abraham asked again: "How long a time is an hour of the Age?"

God answered: "Twelve years have I ordained of this ungodly age to rule among the heathen and in your seed. Until the end of the times it shall be as you have seen. Reckon and understand and look into the picture."

The present age was the age of ungodliness, where the organized forces of evil were dominant, a world where Azazel held a share of God's heritage. But it had a fixed duration, measured in divine hours, and each hour was ticking toward a conclusion.

Before the age of the righteous could begin to grow, God declared, His judgment would come upon the lawless heathen through the agency of Abraham's own descendants.

"In those days I will bring upon all creatures of the earth ten plagues, through misfortune and disease and the sighing grief of their souls. This much will I bring upon the generations of men on account of the provocation and corruption of creation, whereby they provoke me."

Ten plagues mirroring Egypt but cast on a cosmic scale. Not liberation of one people from one empire, but the final reckoning of all creation before the dawn of the new age.

"And then shall righteous men of your seed be left, in the number which is kept secret by me, hastening in the glory of my Name to the place prepared beforehand for them, which you saw devastated in the picture."

The place was Jerusalem. Devastated in the vision of the Temple's destruction, but prepared for restoration. A remnant of the righteous would survive the plagues and gather there. Their number was fixed in advance, known only to God.

"They shall live and be established through sacrifices and gifts of righteousness and truth in the age of the righteous, and shall rejoice in me continually. They shall destroy those who destroyed them, and shall insult those who insulted them, and shall spit in the face of those who scorned them."

Then God spoke the final words of the cosmic vision directly to Abraham:

See, Abraham, what you have seen,
And hear what you have heard,
And take full knowledge of what you have come to know.
Go to your heritage.
And I am with you forever.

Full source
Apocalypse of Abraham XXXApocalypse of Abraham

While God was still speaking, Abraham suddenly found himself back upon the earth.

"O Eternal, Mighty One," he said, "I am no longer in the glory in which I was while on high, and what my soul longed to understand in my heart I do not understand."

God answered: "What is desired in your heart I will tell you, because you have sought to see the ten plagues which I have prepared for the heathen, prepared beforehand at the passing of the twelfth hour of the earth. Hear what I reveal to you, so shall it come to pass."

Then God listed the ten plagues, the final convulsions of the present age before the dawn of redemption:

The first: pain of great distress and sickness.

The second: conflagration of many cities, fire consuming the works of civilization.

The third: destruction and pestilence among the animals.

The fourth: hunger of the whole world and all its people.

The fifth: destruction among the rulers by earthquake and the sword.

The sixth: multiplication of hail and snow.

The seventh: wild beasts shall be their grave, the animals of the field turning upon humanity.

The eighth: hunger and pestilence alternating with destruction.

The ninth: punishment by the sword and flight in distress.

The tenth: thunder and voices and destructive earthquake.

Ten plagues mirroring Egypt but magnified to encompass the entire earth. The apocalyptic tradition taught that a time of great calamity and suffering, the birth-pangs of the messianic age, would immediately precede the coming of redemption. The Talmud divides this period into seven years of escalating disaster. The Book of Daniel saw four empires rising and falling. Here in the Apocalypse of Abraham, the catastrophe comes in ten waves, and each one strips another layer of the old world away to make room for the new.

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Apocalypse of Abraham XXXIApocalypse of Abraham

After the ten plagues, after the final convulsions of the dying age, God revealed to Abraham the moment everything would change.

"Then I will sound the trumpet out of the air and will send my Elect One, having in him all my power, one measure."

The Elect One. The Messiah. A title drawn from the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 42:1), used throughout the visions of 1 Enoch, and here given its most concentrated description. "One measure" of all the divine attributes, a human being who reflected in miniature the totality of God's character. Not a supernatural angelic being like Metatron, but a divinely endowed man, full of the power of the Holy Spirit (Isaiah 11:1), sent by God at the appointed time.

"This one shall summon my despised people from the nations."

The ingathering of the exiles. The same hope expressed in the daily liturgy: "Sound the great horn for our freedom; lift up the ensign to gather our exiles, and gather us from the four corners of the earth."

"And I will burn with fire those who have insulted them and who have ruled over them in this age. I will give those who covered me with mockery to the scorn of the coming age. I have prepared them to be food for the fire of the underworld and for ceaseless flight through the air beneath the earth."

The punishment of the wicked was twofold: fire below and restless wandering above. Their bodies consumed by the worm of Azazel. Their spirits finding no rest until the judgment.

"For they shall decay in the body of the evil worm Azazel, and be burned with the fire of Azazel's tongue. For I had hoped that they would come to me, and not have loved and praised a strange god, and not have adhered to one for whom they were not allotted. But instead they forsook the mighty Lord."

Even in judgment, the note of grief. God had hoped. He had waited. They had chosen otherwise.

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