The Greatest Mirror

<p><b>A wide-ranging analysis of heavenly twin imagery in early Jewish extrabiblical texts.</b></p><p>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. In <i>The Greatest Mirror</i>, 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, including <i>Animal Apocalypse</i>, <i>Book of the Watchers</i>, <i>2 Enoch</i>, <i>Ladder of Jacob</i>, and <i>Joseph and Aseneth</i>, some of which are preserved solely in the Slavonic language.</p>