The Greatest Mirror

The idea of a heavenly double—an angelic twin of an earthbound human—can be found in Christian, Manichaean, Islamic, and Kabbalistic traditions. Scholars have long traced the lineage of these ideas to Greco-Roman and Iranian sources. InThe Greatest Mirror, Andrei A. Orlov shows that heavenly twin imagery drew in large part from early Jewish writings. The Jewish pseudepigrapha—books from the Second Temple period that were attributed to biblical figures but excluded from the Hebrew Bible—contain accounts of heavenly twins in the form of spirits, images, faces, children, mirrors, and angels of the Presence. Orlov provides a comprehensive analysis of these traditions in their full historical and interpretive complexity. He focuses on heavenly alter egos of Enoch, Moses, Jacob, Joseph, and Aseneth in often neglected books, includingAnimal ApocalypseBook of the Watchers2 EnochLadder of Jacob, andJoseph and Aseneth, some of which are preserved solely in the Slavonic language.

Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction

1. The Heavenly Counterpart Traditions in the Enochic Pseudepigrapha

2. The Heavenly Counterpart Traditions in the Mosaic Pseudepigrapha

3. The Heavenly Counterpart Traditions in the Pseudepigrapha about Jacob

4. The Heavenly Counterpart Traditions inJoseph and Aseneth

Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index