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.