The Apocalypse of Abraham is a Jewish apocalyptic work composed in the late first or early second century CE. It survives in full only in Old Church Slavonic, translated at some point from a Greek original that has not been preserved. The text divides into two roughly equal parts.
The first part (chapters 1–8) is a haggadic narrative of Abraham’s conversion. As the son of the idol-maker Terah, Abraham gradually reasons his way out of idolatry, observing that the idols his father makes cannot save themselves from fire and that the sun, moon, and stars are themselves created. He calls on the true God, who answers him with a voice from heaven.
The second part (chapters 9–32) is the apocalyptic vision proper. Abraham is taken up into the heavens, sees the divine throne, and is shown a vision of all of human history — past, present, and future — including the fall of Adam, the corruption of the nations, and the final judgment. Cosmological detail abounds: angels and chambers of heaven, ages of the world, the destinies of nations.
For Latter-day Saint readers, the Apocalypse intersects in striking ways with the material in Abraham 3↗, the chapter in the Pearl of Great Price that records Abraham’s vision of premortal existence, the cosmos, and the divine council before the creation. The Apocalypse carries a comparably expansive Abraham cosmology with overlapping themes — Abraham’s heavenly ascent, his vision of the ordering of creation, and his charge to teach what he has seen.
The chronology matters. The Apocalypse of Abraham was unknown in the English-speaking world for most of the 19th century; the first widely-circulated English translation (G. H. Box and J. I. Landsman) appeared in 1918, seventy-six years after Joseph Smith’s translation of the Book of Abraham was first published in 1842. The parallels between the two are an active area of Latter-day Saint scholarly engagement.