"Now look again in the picture," God said. "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 looked into the picture, and his eyes were drawn to the side of the Garden of Eden.
He saw a man, vast in height and terrifying in breadth, incomparable in appearance. This was Adam, whose stature, when first created, reached from one end of the world to the other. Beside him was a woman, Eve, equal to him in aspect and form. They were embracing, standing under a tree of the Garden, and the fruit of the tree looked like a cluster of grapes on a vine.
Behind the tree stood a figure in the form of a serpent, but this was no ordinary snake. It had hands and feet like a man's, and wings on its shoulders, six on the right side and six on the left. Twelve wings. This was Azazel himself, riding the serpent, using it as his instrument, the same role the tradition elsewhere assigns to Sammael (Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer 13).
The serpent-figure held the grapes of the tree in its hands, and both Adam and Eve were eating.
Abraham asked: "Who are these two embracing? Who is the one between them? What is the fruit they are eating?"
God answered: "This is the human world. This is Adam, and this is their desire upon the earth. This is Eve. But he who is between them represents ungodliness, the beginning of their path to perdition. He is Azazel."
"O Eternal, Mighty One! Why have you given him power to destroy the generation of men in their works upon the earth?"
God's answer was chilling 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."
Abraham pushed further, to the hardest question: "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?"
The question of theodicy, asked before the throne of heaven, in the presence of the divine picture where everything was laid out from the beginning.