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Mosaic Background of Abraham’s Priestly Initiations and the Day of Atonement

Chapters 9-12 describe the beginning of Abraham’s priestly initiation, during which Yahoel teaches the young hero of the faith how to prepare sacrifices in order to enter the presence of the Deity. Scholars have previously observed that some details of this initiation recall the story of another remarkable visionary of the Jewish tradition – the son of Amram, the seer who was privileged to receive a very special revelation on Mount Sinai.

As was already mentioned, the liturgical setting of Abraham’s priestly initiation might be related to the Festival of Weeks - Shavuot or Pentecost.  This feast celebrates Moses’ reception of  revelation at Mount Sinai and is also known in Jewish tradition as the Festival of the Giving of Our Torah.
Indeed, as many scholars have already noted, some motifs found in the Apocalypse of Abraham appear to reflect the peculiar details surrounding the reception of the Torah on Sinai by the great Israelite prophet. One of the distinctive hints here for establishing the connection with the Mosaic traditions is the theme of Abraham’s forty-day fast.
This motif is first introduced in Apoc. Ab. 9:7, where God orders Abraham to hold a strict fast for forty days.  It is noteworthy that, as in the Mosaic traditions, so in the Slavonic apocalypse this fast coincides with the promise of a divine revelation on a high mountain:
But for forty days abstain from every food which issues from fire, and from the drinking of wine, and from anointing [yourself] with oil. And then you shall set out for me the sacrifice which I have commanded you, in the place which I shall show you on a high mountain.

The theme of the forty day fast on the mountain receives an even more distinctly “Mosaic” shape in chapter 12, where it coincides with another cluster of Mosaic traditions, including the reference to Horeb (a name for Sinai in some biblical passages) and information about the nourishment of a seer through the vision of a celestial being:
And we went, the two of us alone together, forty days and nights. And I ate no bread and drank no water, because [my] food was to see the angel who was with me, and his speech with me was my drink. And we came to the glorious God’s mountains—Horeb.

Scholars often see in this passage an allusion to Exodus 34:28,  which reports that Moses was with God forty days and forty nights on Mount Sinai without eating bread or drinking water.   The reference to alternative nourishment through the vision of a celestial being again evokes the cluster of interpretive traditions associated in Second Temple  and rabbinic literature  with the figure of Moses.
Although the biblical accounts of Moses’ and Elijah’s theophanic experiences  often “mirror” each other by sharing similar imagery,  David Halperin argues that in the Apocalypse of Abraham Mosaic traditions have greater formative value than traditions about Elijah. He notes that
… when the angel tells Abraham that he will see God “come straight towards us” (chapter 16), this reminds us that God “passes by” both Moses and Elijah (Exodus 33:22; 34:6; 1 Kings 19:11-12). But it is only Moses who is told in this connection that “you cannot see my face” and “my face shall not be seen” (33:20, 23), just as the angel goes on to tell Abraham that God “Himself thou shalt not see.” Moses, not Elijah, “bowed down upon the earth and prostrated himself” when God passed (34:8) – which explains Abraham’s frustrated urge to do the same thing (chapter 17). 

Previous studies have convincingly demonstrated the importance of Mosaic typology for the authors of the Apocalypse of Abraham, who decided to transfer several important Mosaic motifs into Abraham’s story. Yet, despite scholars’ thorough attention to the Mosaic background of the story, one portentous detail appears to have escaped their notice: Moses’ forty-day fast occurred immediately after his fight with idolatry and his destruction of the Golden Calf, when he returned to Sinai again to receive a second set of tablets from the deity.
It is intriguing that in the Apocalypse of Abraham, as in the Exodus account, the forty-day fast follows the hero’s fight with idolatry. One can see a certain parallelism between the stories of the two visionaries. Like Moses who burns the Golden Calf (Exodus 32) and then fasts (Exodus 34), Abraham too is described earlier in the text as burning the idol of his father, a figurine bearing the name Bar-Eshath.   It is important that in both cases the transition to the initiatory purifying fast occurs immediately after the accounts dealing with idolatry and the demotion of idols.
The tradition of the hero’s fast that occurs after his fight with an idolatrous statue betrays distinctly priestly concerns and appears important for discerning the sacerdotal background of Abraham’s story and its possible connections with Day of Atonement traditions. Yet, the main question remains open: how can a Yom Kippur setting be reconciled with the Mosaic details of Abraham’s initiation, given that these details point unambiguously to the cluster of motifs associated with the Shavuot festival which celebrates Moses’ reception of the Tablets of the Law?
It is intriguing that later rabbinic writers identify the day on which Moses received the tablets of the law for a second time with another Jewish festival, the Day of Atonement. Thus, b. Baba Bathra 121a records the following tradition:
…One well understands why the Day of Atonement [should be such a festive occasion for it is] a day of pardon and forgiveness. [and it is also] a day on which the second Tables were given …

An almost identical tradition is found in b. Taanith 30b:
…R. Simeon b. Gamaliel said: There never were in Israel greater days of joy than the fifteenth of Ab and the Day of Atonement. I can understand the Day of Atonement, because it is a day of forgiveness and pardon and on it the second Tables of the Law were given….

It appears that this cluster of traditions about the “day of pardon and forgiveness” draws on biblical traditions similar to the one found in Exodus 32:30, where, after the idolatry of the Golden Calf, Moses tells the people that he will go to the Lord asking for atonement of their sin.
 Several midrashic passages make even more explicit this connection between the repentance of the Israelites after the idolatry of the Golden Calf in Exodus 33 and the establishment of Yom Kippur. In these materials the Israelites’ repentance serves as the formative starting point for observance of the Day of Atonement.  Thus, Eliyyahu Rabbah 17 reads:
When Israel were in the wilderness, they befouled themselves with their misdeeds, but then they bestirred themselves and repented in privacy, as is said, Whenever Moses went out to the Tent, all the people would rise and stand, each at the entrance of his tent, and gaze after Moses. And when Moses entered the tent, the pillar of cloud would descend and stand at the entrance of the Tent … When all the people saw the pillar of cloud poised at the entrance of the Tent, all the people would rise and bow low, each at the entrance of his tent (Exod. 33:8, 9, 10), thus intimating that they repented, each one in the privacy of his tent. Therefore His compassion flooded up and He gave to them, to their children, and to their children’s children to the end of all generations the Day of Atonement as a means of securing His pardon. 

It is noteworthy that this passage from Eliyyahu Rabbah invokes the memory of the familiar events found in Ex 33 which occurred immediately after the Golden Calf episode.  The midrashic evidence indicates that the rabbinic tradition attempts repeatedly to place the institution of Yom Kippur’s atoning rites into the framework of the traditions surrounding Moses’ reception of the second set of the Tablets of the Law.
Thus, a passage found in Pirke de R. Eliezer 46 unveils the tradition connecting Moses’ vision of the Glory of God in Exodus 33 with the Day of Atonement:
Moses said: On the Day of Atonement I will behold the glory of the Holy One, blessed be He, and I will make atonement for the iniquities of Israel. Moses spake before the Holy One, blessed be He: Sovereign of all the universe! “Shew me, I pray thee, thy glory” (Ex. xxxiii, 18). The Holy One, blessed be He, said to him: Moses! Thou art not able to see My glory lest thou die, as it is said, “For men shall not see me and live” (ibid, 20)…

This tradition of Moses’ quest to behold the Kavod, now placed in the liturgical setting of the Day of Atonement, anticipates the vision of the concealed Glory of God in the Holy of Holies by the high priest on Yom Kippur.
It is even more important for our study, in view of the Mosaic traditions found in the Slavonic apocalypse, that several midrashic passages link Moses’ forty-day ordeal on Sinai with the institution of the Day of Atonement. Thus, the passage found in Pirke de R. Eliezer 46 preserves the following tradition:
The Son of Bethera said: Moses spent forty days on the mount, expounding the meaning of the words of the Torah, and examining its letters. After forty days he took the Torah, and descended on the tenth of the month, on the Day of Atonement, and gave it as an everlasting inheritance to the children of Israel, as it is said, “And this shall be unto you an everlasting statute” (Lev. xvi. 34).

It is also intriguing that the passage from Pirke de R. Eliezer links the revelation given to the son of Amram with the instructions about Yom Kippur in Leviticus 16. Another passage, Eliyyahu Zuta 4, goes even further by connecting the forty-day fast that preceded Moses’ reception of the tablets for a second time with the establishment of the practice of self-denial on Yom Kippur:
During the last forty days when Moses went up a second time to Mount Sinai to fetch the Torah, Israel decreed for themselves that the day be set aside for fasting and self-affliction. The last day of the entire period, the last of the forty, they again decreed self-affliction and spent the night also in such self-affliction as would not allow the Inclination to evil to have any power over them. In the morning they rose early and went up before Mount Sinai. They were weeping as they met Moses, and Moses was weeping as he met them, and at length that weeping rose up on high. At once the compassion of the Holy One welled up in their behalf, and the holy spirit gave them good tidings and great consolation, as He said to them: My children, I swear by My great name that this weeping will be a joyful weeping for you because this day will be a day of pardon, atonement, and forgiveness for you – for you, for your children, and for your children’s children until the end of all generations.  

All this evidence from the rabbinic literature indicates that in later Jewish interpretation Moses’ fight with idolatry, his forty-day fast, his vision of the deity, and his reception of the portentous revelation on Sinai were understood as a chain of formative events linked to the establishment of the Yom Kippur ceremony. Moreover, some of these traditions envisioned Moses’ ordeal as the cosmic prototype of the symbolic actions that, while the Temple still stood, were re-enacted annually by the high priest in the Holy of Holies.   
Now it is time to return to the Slavonic apocalypse, where a very similar constellation of motifs is found. It is possible that by evoking this particular cluster of Mosaic traditions the authors of the apocalypse were attempting to connect the patriarch’s sacrificial practices on Mount Horeb with Moses’ receiving the tablets of the law for the second time, the event which later rabbinic traditions interpreted as the inauguration of the Yom Kippur holiday.
It is intriguing that in the Apocalypse of Abraham, as in the aforementioned rabbinic accounts, the self-afflicting practice of the forty-day fast which follows the sin of idolatry is then connected to Day of Atonement imagery. It is possible that in the Slavonic apocalypse, as in rabbinic accounts, a very similar combination of Mosaic motifs is permeated with Yom Kippur symbolism. 
While several scholars have previously pointed to the existence of Yom Kippur imagery in the Slavonic apocalypse,  no sufficient explanation was offered for why this cluster of traditions surrounding the scapegoat Azazel and the two lots suddenly appears in the Abrahamic pseudepigraphon. In this respect it is noteworthy that other Abrahamic pseudepigrapha (for example, the Testament of Abraham), while sharing some other common conceptual tenets with the Apocalypse of Abraham,  do not show any interest in appropriating Day of Atonement symbolism. Such imagery is also absent from other early extra-biblical elaborations of the patriarch’s story found in the Book of Jubilees, Josephus, and Philo as well as in the later rabbinic materials (Genesis Rabbah, Tanna debe Eliahu, Seder Eliahu Rabba).  There too one fails to find any references to Azazel or the imagery of the two lots, the very themes that play such a significant theological role in the Slavonic apocalypse. The aforementioned Abrahamic materials also contain no references to the peculiar cluster of Mosaic traditions found in our text.
Yet the uniqueness of this cluster of motifs opens up the possibility that in the Slavonic apocalypse the story of the patriarch might be patterned not according to biblical Mosaic typology but according to a later version, found also in the aforementioned rabbinic accounts, which now connects the hero’s fight with idolatry and his practice of self-denial with the establishment of the observance of the Yom Kippur festival. In this respect the highly “developed” shape of certain Mosaic themes found in the apocalypse--such as, for example, the motif of the unusual nourishment of a seer during his forty-day fast--points to apparent departures from the early biblical blueprint.