The Greatest Mirror

A wide-ranging analysis of heavenly twin imagery in early Jewish extrabiblical texts. 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 The Greatest Mirror , Andrei A. Orlov shows that heavenly twin imagery drew in large part from early Jewish writings. The Jewish pseudepigrapha-books from the Second Temple peri