Abraham Watched Azazel Hand Eve the Fruit in a Cosmic Picture

Most people remember the serpent in Eden as a snake on the ground. Low. Cunning. Legless by the end of the third chapter of Genesis. The Torah is satisfied with that picture. The early Jewish apocalyptic tradition was not. It wanted to know what was really standing behind the tree the moment Eve reached out for the fruit, and it wanted Abraham to be the witness.

In the twenty-third chapter of the Apocalypse of Abraham, a Jewish apocalyptic work composed in Hebrew or Aramaic in the late first or early second century CE, God turns to Abraham and points to a picture. Now look again in the picture. See who it is that seduced Eve and what is the fruit of the tree. You will know what shall be and how it shall be for your seed among the people at the end of the days of the age.

Abraham looks.

He sees a man of vast height and terrifying breadth, incomparable in appearance. This is Adam. The Bereshit Rabbah, compiled in fifth-century Palestine, preserves a parallel tradition that the first human was cosmically tall when God shaped him, reaching from one end of the world to the other, and only shrank to ordinary human size after the transgression in the garden. The Apocalypse of Abraham, several centuries older in its earliest layers, already sees him at his original height. Beside him is a woman, Eve, equal to him in form and aspect. They are embracing. They are standing together beneath a tree of the Garden, and the fruit of that tree looks, in the picture Abraham is viewing, like a cluster of grapes on a vine.

And behind the tree, there is something else.

The text calls it a serpent, but the description shatters the word as soon as it uses it. This serpent has hands and feet like a man's. It has wings on its shoulders, six on the right side and six on the left. Twelve wings, which is the mathematics of a seraph (Isaiah 6:2 gives seraphim six wings each). This is not a garden snake. This is a throne-creature standing upright on human limbs, holding a cluster of grapes in its hands, extending the fruit down to the first man and the first woman.

The Apocalypse names the figure. This is Azazel.

The same fallen angel who had just tried to scare Abraham off the mountain by landing on the sacrificial carcasses (Genesis 15:11). The same name the Torah gives to the wilderness destination of the Yom Kippur scapegoat (Leviticus 16). The same angel the Book of Enoch, compiled in several stages between the third century BCE and the first century CE, identifies as one of the Watchers who descended to earth and taught humans forbidden crafts. The Apocalypse of Abraham places him not on Mount Hermon, where Enoch puts his descent, but behind the tree in Eden. Same angel. Earlier crime.

The author notes in passing that Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, the eighth-century midrash that also tells this story, assigns the same role to a figure called Samael, who descends onto the back of the serpent in Eden and uses the snake as a mount. Two traditions, two names, one theological claim. The seduction in Eden was not the idea of a clever reptile. It was a senior angel riding an animal, and using the animal the way a cavalryman uses a horse.

Abraham asks the obvious questions. Who are these two embracing. Who is the figure between them. What is the fruit they are eating. God answers all three. This is the human world. This is Adam, and this is his desire upon the earth. This is Eve. He who is between them represents ungodliness, the beginning of their path to perdition. He is Azazel.

And then Abraham pushes where almost no one in the Hebrew Bible ever pushes. He asks God the hardest question in the universe. Not how the transgression happened, but why it was allowed. Why have You given him power to destroy the generation of men in their works upon the earth?

God's answer in the Apocalypse of Abraham is terrifying in its precision. Those who will to do evil, and how much I hated it in those who do it, over them I gave him power, and they came to love him. Azazel does not have authority over everyone. He has authority over those who chose him. The permission was not a gift. It was a consequence. The first man and the first woman opened a door, and after that, other human beings walked through it on their own feet. God did not push them. But God did not slam the door shut either.

Abraham is not finished. He asks the next question, and this is the question that moves the Apocalypse of Abraham into the same theological territory as the Book of Job. Why have You willed that evil should be desired in the hearts of men, since You are angered over the very thing You Yourself permitted?

That is theodicy, asked in the throne room, in the presence of a picture that has everything laid out from the beginning. The question is the oldest one in Jewish thought and the one the tradition has never stopped working at. Bavli Sanhedrin, the tractate of the Babylonian Talmud compiled between the third and sixth centuries CE, asks it in its own way by wondering why God created the yetzer hara, the evil inclination, at all. The Zohar, which began circulating in late-thirteenth-century Castile, answers by saying that evil is necessary for the exercise of free will. The Apocalypse of Abraham, centuries before either of them, answers by pointing back at the picture. God does not give Abraham a sentence he can hold in one hand. God gives him a view.

The picture keeps widening. Abraham will keep looking. And behind the tree, the twelve-winged figure keeps handing down the grapes.