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Abraham Sees the Elect One at the End of Days

God lifts the curtain on the last age for Abraham showing ten plagues, a trumpet blast, and one figure descending with all the divine power in a single measure.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. A Prophet at the Mountain of God
  2. What Azazel Could Not Take
  3. The Last Hour
  4. The One Who Comes

A Prophet at the Mountain of God

Abraham had done everything the angel commanded. He had slaughtered the animals, divided them, arranged them. He waited for the evening sacrifice, the moment when the vision would arrive. Then an unclean bird swooped down on the carcasses, and Abraham drove it away, and the bird spoke to him.

It told him to leave. It told him there was no food for mortals in this place, that the beings beside him would consume everything with fire and burn him up with it. It told him his name was a lie and that he should return to earth. Abraham refused. He did not know who was speaking but he knew enough not to obey a voice that told him to flee from the presence of God.

The angel Iaoel appeared and drove the bird off. Then the vision began.

What Azazel Could Not Take

The Apocalypse of Abraham, composed in Hebrew in the decades after Rome destroyed Jerusalem, takes the covenant ceremony of Genesis 15 as its setting and pushes it far beyond what the plain text contains. Abraham is lifted into the seventh heaven on the wings of a dove, taken beyond the firmament, shown the arrangement of the stars and the movements of time.

Azazel appeared and tried again to drive Abraham away. This was the same figure whose name the Day of Atonement scapegoat carried out into the wilderness, the prince of the accusers, the one who held a portion of God's heritage for the duration of the present age. He told Abraham that the heavenly place he had reached was not for mortal flesh, that he should leave before the divine fire consumed him.

God told Abraham to answer him. "Tell him: you are the furnace of the earth. You are the disgrace of the universe. Your descent will be into darkness." God had allotted Azazel his domain over the ungodly, but it was a temporary grant, not a permanent inheritance. The present age had a duration. Abraham saw its shape from above.

The Last Hour

God showed Abraham the history of his descendants, from the covenant to the exile to the catastrophe still unfolding in the author's own time. Then he showed him further: the divine hour that governed the present age, twelve years long in some measurements, the period during which the forces of ungodliness would be dominant.

At the end of that hour, ten plagues. The Apocalypse lists them: sorrow and disease and unrest and the sword and famine and earthquake and fire and hailstorms and the stripping of the soil and its return to desert. Ten blows against the world that had organized itself around the wrong things. And after the ten plagues:

A trumpet blast out of the air.

The One Who Comes

"Then I will send my Elect One," God says. "Having in him all my power, one measure."

One measure of all the divine attributes, gathered into a single human being. Not an angel, not an abstract force, but a person who carried in miniature what the divine held at full scale. The trumpet sounds and this figure comes, and with him come the dispersed of Israel from the four quarters of the earth, gathered from every place they had been scattered.

Abraham saw it from above: the full arc from covenant to catastrophe to restoration, the present age and its ruler and the ruler's expiration date, the gap between the world as it was and what it would become when the Elect One arrived with his one measure of divine power.

He saw it once and descended. He was still in the plain of Moreh, still in the body that the unclean bird had tried to send away. Everything he had seen was ahead of him, not yet arrived, requiring generations upon generations to unfold. He went down and told no one, because there were no words yet for what he had been shown.

MessiahEnd TimesRedemptionAbrahamJudgmentAzazel
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From the tradition

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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 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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Apocalypse of Abraham XIIIApocalypse of Abraham

Abraham did everything the angel commanded. He slaughtered the animals, divided them, and gave the portions to the angels who had appeared beside him. Iaoel took the birds. Abraham waited for the evening sacrifice.

Then an unclean bird swooped down upon the carcasses.

Abraham drove it away. But the bird spoke.

"What are you doing, Abraham, upon the holy Heights? No man eats or drinks here. There is no food for mortals in this place. These beings will consume everything with fire and burn you alive. Forsake the man who is with you and flee! If you ascend to the Heights, they will make an end of you."

Abraham turned to the angel. "What is this, my lord?"

"This is ungodliness," Iaoel said. "This is Azazel."

Then the angel addressed the fallen one directly, and his words were a sentence of cosmic judgment:

"Disgrace upon you, Azazel! Abraham's lot is in heaven, but yours is upon the earth. Because you chose and loved this world for the dwelling-place of your uncleanness, the Eternal Mighty Lord made you a dweller upon the earth. Through you comes every evil spirit of lies. Through you comes wrath and trials for the generations of ungodly men."

But God had drawn a line. "The Eternal Mighty One has not permitted the bodies of the righteous to be in your hand, so that the life of the righteous and the destruction of the unclean may be assured."

Iaoel's final words to Azazel were devastating: "Begone with shame from me. You cannot lead this man astray, because he is your enemy. The heavenly garment that was once yours has been set aside for him. And the mortality that was his has been transferred to you."

Azazel had traded his angelic glory for the earth. Abraham, the mortal idol-smasher, had inherited an angel's robe.

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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.

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