... The multiplication of books in Revelation 20:12 troubled Augustine, who interpreted the book of life as the “commandments each man had kept or not kept. If we imagine this book to be a book in the literal sense, who could measure its size or length? How much time would it take to read a book in which the whole life of each man is written? Will there be as many angels as men at the last judgment, so that every man will hear his life recited by the angel assigned to him? In that case, therefore, there would not be one book for all lives, but one for each. However, the Scripture wishes us to take it as one book. It says, ‘another book was opened’. We must therefore understand this book to signify a certain divine power, by which it will be made possible for every man to recall to memory all his own works, both good and evil, and for the mind to review them all with miraculous speed, so that each man’s knowledge will accuse or excuse his conscience, and thus all and each will be judged simultaneously. And this divine power is no doubt called a ‘book’ because we shall as it were read in it all that it causes us to remember.” The City of God against the Pagans, 20:14 (translated by R. W. Dyson; Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 999. Augustine’s reflections on the sheer size required of a book of judgment are reminiscent of the enormous book in Testament of Abraham Recension A, while the way Augustine expresses books’ tight connections with memory brings to mind the function of the book of sins in Testament of Abraham Recension B. ...