Philological observations on the Apocalypse of Abraham.

The aim of the present paper is to clarify some passages in the apocryphal Apocalypse of Abraham (a biblical apocryphon which has survived only in Russian Slavonic manuscripts), especially the fragments connected with the theology of the Divine Name. The author of the paper also tries to reconstruct original Semitic forms which are reflected in the names of God in the Slavonic translation of the apocryphon. Finally he wants to demonstrate that the Slavonic translation circulated in a Russian Jewish milieu in the Middle ages and was subject to revision and amendment. Some Semitisms in the text appear as later additions, which seem to have been introduced by medieval Jewish writers.