Review of Orlov, Divine Scapegoats

H-JUDAIC REVIEW:

Andrei A. Orlov. Divine Scapegoats: Demonic Mimesis in Early Jewish Mysticism. New York: SUNY Press, 2015. 352 pp. $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4384-5583-9.

Reviewed by Vadim Putzu (Missouri State University)
Published on H-Judaic (November, 2015)
Commissioned by Matthew A. Kraus

The Missing (Slavonic) Link in the Chain of Kabbalah?

Serving as Professor of Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity at Marquette University, Andrei A. Orlov specializes in Jewish apocalypticism and early mysticism, Old Testament pseudepigrapha, and Second Temple literature in general. An impressively productive scholar, Orlov is widely regarded as one of the foremost experts in the so-called Slavonic pseudepigrapha, a group of Jewish apocalyptic texts from the Second Temple Period whose origins and transmission history is especially obscure. Divine Scapegoats: Demonic Mimesis in Early Jewish Mysticism demonstrates once more Orlov’s mastery of these texts, as it continues the investigation initiated in Dark Mirrors: Azazel and Satanael in Early Jewish Demonology (2011). While the previous volume explored the parallels between divine and demonic realities by focusing on two central antagonists (Azazel and Satanael) whose features and prerogatives—Orlov argues—mirror those of angels and the Deity, Divine Scapegoats concentrates on “sacerdotal, messianic, and creational aspects” (p. 3) of the heavenly/demonic symmetry found in the Apocalypse of Abraham and 2 Enoch. The choice to focus on these two specific texts within the corpus of Slavonic pseudepigrapha is central to Orlov’s argument that, inasmuch as they exhibit a unique language and a “highly developed mystical imagery” (p. 3), these two works bridge “the matrix of early Jewish apocalypticism as it was manifested in the early Enochic circle with the matrix of early Jewish mysticism as it became manifest in rabbinic Merkabah and Hekhalot materials.

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I noted the book here when it was published last spring.