Texts in Conversation
Genesis Rabbah compares God’s creation to a builder working from plans and identifies the plan with the Torah. The Apocalypse of Abraham echoes creation from a prior design in the picture Abraham sees, extending the plan to the course of human history.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Apocalypse of Abraham 22:2
Pseudepigrapha, Apocalypses
2 And He said to me: "This is my will with regard to those who exist in the (divine) world-counsel and it seemed well-pleasing before my sight, and then afterwards I gave commandment to them through my Word. And it came to pass whatever I had determined to be, was already planned beforehand in this (picture), and it stood before me before it was created, as you have seen." 3 And I said: "O Lord, mighty and eternal! Who are the people in this picture on this side and on that?" 4 And He said to me: "These which are on the left side are the multitude of the peoples which have formerly been in existence and which are after you destined some for judgement and restoration, and others for vengeance and destruction at the end of the world.
Genesis Rabbah 1:1
Aggadah
Rabbinic
The Torah is saying: ‘I was the tool of craft of the Holy One blessed be He.’ The way of the world is that when a flesh-and-blood king builds a palace he does not build it based on his own knowledge, but rather based on the knowledge of an artisan. And the artisan does not build it based on his own knowledge, but rather, he has [plans on] sheets and tablets by which to ascertain how he should build its rooms, how he should build its doors. So too, the Holy One blessed be He looked in the Torah and created the world.
Date: 500 C.E. (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
Box, G. H., with J. I. Landsman
The Apocalypse of Abraham
(pp. PDF 43-44) Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1918
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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