`The Gods of My Father Terah': Abraham the Iconoclast and the Polemics with the Divine Body Traditions in the Apocalypse of Abraham

Abstract

The first eight chapters of the Apocalypse of Abraham recount the early years of the young hero of the faith who is depicted as a fighter against the idolatrous practices of his father Terah. The conceptual developments found in this section of the work, especially in the depictions of the idolatrous statues, seem to play an important role in the work's overall retraction of the anthropomorphic understanding of the deity. In the depictions of the idol Bar-Eshath (`the Son of Fire') and some other human-like figures, whose features are vividly reminiscent of the familiar attributes of the anthropomorphic portrayals of the deity in Ezekiel and some other biblical and pseudepigraphical accounts, one can detect subtle polemics with the divine body traditions. This article investigates these conceptual developments in the Apocalypse of Abraham and seeks to understand their place in the larger anti-corporeal ideology of the Slavonic pseudepigraphon.