eternal king, strong, mighty, very great, long-suffering. Blessed One, that fillest heaven and earth and the sea and the abyss and all æons with thy glory. Hear my song wherewith I have praised thee, and grant me my petition for which I pray to thee, and show me the interpretation of my dream. For thou art strong and mighty and glorious, a holy God, the Lord of me and of my fathers. (This rather resembles the prayer in the Apocalypse of Abraham, of which a translation is published in this series.)
3. And while I yet spake my prayer, there appeared a voice (!) before my face saying: Sarekl, prince of them that rejoice (or of the servants), thou that art over visions, go make Jacob to understand the interpretation of the dream which he saw, and show him all things whatsoever he saw: but first bless him. And he archangel Sarekl came to me, and I saw: it was a face (a line gone) terrible. But I did not fear before his look, for the face which I had seen in my dream . . . was more than this, and I feared not the face of an angel. And the angel said to me: What is thy name? and I said: Jacob. But I (read he said to me) Thy name shall not henceforth be called Jacob, but thy name shall be like my name, Israel. And when I came from Fandana (cf. Apocalypse of Abraham, 2) in Syria to meet my brother Esau, he came to me and blessed me, and called my name Israel, and told me not his name until I adjured him, and then he told me: Because thou wast . . . [There is confusion here, it seems, between the two incidents of the ladder and the wrestling. I have wondered whether a dim reflection of the 'Prayer of Joseph' is to be traced in this paragraph, but the text is evidently in a bad state. Rec. 2 has merely the statement that an angel came and said he was sent to interpret the vision.]
4. But this said he to me: The ladder which thou sawest, which had twelve steps having two human faces which changed their appearance—now this ladder is this age, and the twelve steps are the times of this age, and the twenty-four faces are the kings of
