Stephen T. Whitlock

In the image above, we see an industrious Noah diligently tending his vineyard, in striking contrast to a later depiction in the same chapter that describes him as being in an inebriated stupor. Scholars have noted the odd inconsistency between these two scenes. Can these two opposing pictures of Noah be reconciled?

In this Essay, we will discuss how Moses and Abraham speak with the Lord, and how both are given a vision of the Creation, the Garden of Eden, and the Fall from within the heavenly veil.

Having traversed the veil, Moses and Abraham experience a comprehensive vision of the earth and its mortal inhabitants through the ages. In both texts, this raises questions for the prophets, but the nature of the questions differs somewhat in Moses 1 than in the Apocalypse of Abraham (ApAb).

In light of our cultural and conceptual distance from the milieu of Moses 1, we are fortunate that imperfect documents from antiquity like the Apocalypse of Abraham (ApAb) may nevertheless provide keys for understanding that “mysterious other world,” even when existing manuscripts were written much later and, not infrequently, have come to us in a form that is riddled with the ridiculous.

In light of our cultural and conceptual distance from the milieu of Moses 1, we are fortunate that imperfect documents from antiquity like the Apocalypse of Abraham (ApAb) may nevertheless provide keys for understanding that “mysterious other world,” even when existing manuscripts were written much later and, not infrequently, have come to us in a form that is riddled with the ridiculous.

In this Essay, we compare the symbolism in the Apocalypse of Abraham (ApAb) description of the ascent of Abraham to the Book of Moses and other accounts in Latter-day Saint scripture.

In Moses 1:21 we read the dramatic culmination of Moses’ confrontation with Satan: “And Moses received strength, and called upon God, saying: In the name of the Only Begotten, depart hence, Satan.”

Though most readers will be much more familiar with the well-known masterpiece of Michelangelo showing Adam’s creation being effected by the fleetingly light touch of the index fingers of God and the reclining Adam, the version of the scene executed by Lorenzo Ghiberti, which includes a firm handclasp whereby the Lord can raise Adam up on his feet, is more faithful to ancient Jewish and Christian tradition.

In this Essay, we will describe the first part of the heavenly ascent of Moses 1 which, like the Apocalypse of Abraham 9:8, opens on “an exceedingly high mountain.”

In this Insight, we will describe how the heavenly ascent of Moses 1 provides a compelling prologue to the covenant-related themes of ritual ascent that can be found in the remaining chapters of the Book of Moses. Intriguingly, Moses 1 also provides a fitting introduction to the Book of Genesis. By calling this prologue “missing,” however, we are not claiming that it was ever an actual part of any early equivalent to Genesis.

Abstract: This article highlights the striking resemblances between Moses 1 and a corresponding account from the Apocalypse of Abraham (ApAb), one of the earliest and most important Jewish texts describing heavenly ascent. Careful comparative analysis demonstrates a sustained sequence of detailed affinities in narrative structure that go beyond what Joseph Smith could have created out of whole cloth […]