Sefer Yetzirah

Sefer Yetzirah is shorter than most of the commentaries that were written on it: about sixty paragraphs, six chapters, one thousand six hundred words in Hebrew, and on every one of those words lies a thousand and a half years of interpretation. This is the first Kabbalistic text we have, and the quarrel over its age has never been settled. Nor does it stand alone in that: the dating of the Bahir and the authorship of the Zohar divide scholars just as widely.

The riddle of origin

Authorship is ascribed to Abraham, which is a legend, of course, though the legend grows out of the text itself. The book describes how Abraham “understood, saw, examined, considered, and engraved”, and how “the Lord of the worlds was revealed to him” as a result. That ascription gives the book an authority of antiquity while it also answers a question the tradition had to answer somehow: where Abraham came by the knowledge of a single God.

The real dating remains a field of academic dispute. Scholars put the late boundaries at the 6th–9th centuries CE, because the first firm mention of the book comes from Saadia Gaon in the 10th century. The early boundaries run back to the 2nd–3rd century, since some researchers, Gershom Scholem among them in his early period, found parallels with the Gnostic and neo-Pythagorean literature of that time. Today the consensus settles on the 3rd–6th centuries. Palestine or Babylonia is the likeliest place, in an environment where Jewish mysticism intersected with Hellenistic numerology.

There are four recensions: the short (about 1300 words), the long (about 2500 words), the version of Saadia Gaon, and the version of the Vilna Gaon (18th century, systematized so that fewer contradictions remained). The difference between them has grown into a hermeneutics of its own, and the question of which Sefer Yetzirah is “the real one” has no single answer: all of them are, and none is.

Structure: six chapters, six strata

There are six mishnayot, that is six chapters, and each of them discloses one side of creation.

• Chapter 1 — definition of the thirty-two paths of wisdom. Introduction of the 10 Sephiroth belima. The principle of “the beginning is sealed with the end, the end with the beginning”.
• Chapter 2 — introduction of the 22 letters. Division into “three mothers”, “seven doubles”, and “twelve simples”.
• Chapter 3 — the three mothers (Aleph, Mem, Shin) and their correspondences to world, year, and human being.
• Chapter 4 — the seven double letters (bgd kprt) and the seven planets, seven days of the week, seven openings of the face.
• Chapter 5 — the twelve simple letters and the twelve signs of the Zodiac, the twelve months, the twelve “directors” in the human being.
• Chapter 6 — summary and conclusion. The mystery of creation is “sealed”.

The book holds no narrative and no liturgical context, and what lies in front of the reader is a table of correspondences in pure form. Nothing of the kind appears in Europe for a long while afterwards. Roughly a thousand years separate the late edge of the dating above from Paracelsus, and another three and a half centuries separate Paracelsus from Crowley.

The thirty-two paths of wisdom

— Thirty-two wondrous paths of wisdom —

This is the opening line of the book, and it holds an equation: Thirty-two = 10 Sephiroth + 22 letters. With that equation the whole Kabbalistic structure is given, because number and letter work as the two primary creative principles. Sephiroth without letters are empty vessels, letters without Sephiroth are sounds with no place to sound in, and only together do they yield a world.

Everything that follows grows out of this equation. The Zohar will read 32 as לב, “heart”, because the Torah begins with ב and ends with ל. Kircher (1652) will lay the letters along the paths of the Tree, Éliphas Lévi will bind them to the Major Arcana (1850s), and the Golden Dawn and Crowley will fix the table. The Tunnels of Set are these same 22 paths, seen from the other side.

Sephiroth belima

Here the word “Sephiroth” appears for the first time in history, though not yet in the later sense of “emanations”. The book calls them Sephiroth belima, “Sephiroth of nothing” or “Sephiroth of non-being”. Belimah itself is read two ways: as בלי מה, “without what” (Job 26:7), or from the root בלם, “to bridle”, “to restrain” (so Kaplan). They are places of restraint rather than things, and of them, as Scholem has it, nothing can be said positively.

The ten Sephiroth in Sefer Yetzirah are described through a dialectic of pairs:

• Their number is ten, not eleven; ten, not nine. Ponder with the intellect, investigate with the imagination.
• Their beginning is sealed with their end, and their end — with their beginning. Like the flame in the coals. The one Master in His place.
• Their depths run in pairs: beginning and end, good and evil, above and below, east and west, north and south. In the middle stands the Holy Palace (הֵיכַל הַקֹּדֶשׁ).

This is a meditative instruction and not a scheme. A few mishnayot later, the same chapter commands the mouth held still and the heart stopped: the limit it names is set not by a prohibition but by the plain impossibility of putting this into words.

The twenty-two letters: three, seven, twelve

The best-known part of Sefer Yetzirah is the teaching of the letters. God “carved, engraved, weighed, permuted, replaced” them and then “formed” everything out of them. The verb behind that “formed” is יָצַר, which gave the book the name “Yetzirah”.

The letters map three planes one onto another: the cosmos, the year and the human being. What comes out is a complete anthropocosmic system. To know the letters is to know the structure of everything at once.

“Carve, engrave, weigh”

The famous passage from chapter 2:

— Engraved, carved, permuted, weighed, replaced —

In the simple sense God does not “create” here. He works with the letters as a craftsman works with stone, engraving the form, carving out the opposite, permuting, weighing the harmony, replacing one with another. This is creation as combinatorics. And since the letters are Hebrew letters, whoever has mastered Hebrew holds the same instrument in principle.

From here comes the tradition of the Golem, because if the world is made of letters then a human being can be made out of letters too. A figure is formed of clay, the word אֶמֶת (“truth”) is written on its forehead, and it comes alive. Erase the aleph, and מֵת (“dead”) remains, and the figure dies back into clay. Prague of the 16th century, with Rabbi Loew and his Golem, is a direct application of Sefer Yetzirah.

Alongside this, Abraham Abulafia in the 13th century developed the technique of tziruf. It is the meditative permutation of the letters of the Name of God, and its aim was the prophetic state rather than a Golem. The logic is the same, only turned inward instead of outward.

Influence and reception

Of all the Kabbalistic texts this one waited longest for its reader. The first known commentary, written by Saadia Gaon in the 10th century, stands more than 400 years away from the conjectured date of composition. After him came Judah Halevi, Abraham ibn Ezra, Eleazar of Worms (13th century, the “Chassidei Ashkenaz”), and Abulafia.

Into Christian Kabbalah the book was carried by Pico della Mirandola (15th century) and Johannes Reuchlin (16th century). From them it passed into the Hermetic tradition, to Paracelsus and Agrippa of Nettesheim, and from there into the Golden Dawn and Crowley.

In 20th-century scholarship the book fell to Gershom Scholem, though the volume readers reach for first is the wrong place to look for it. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism carries only scattered references, while the sustained treatment sits in two other works, both of them listed in our bibliography. Pages 23–30 of Kabbalah (Keter, 1974) describe the book and synopsise its contents, then work through the problems of dating until they settle on the 3rd to 6th centuries; the commentaries are enumerated there as well, and the section closes with a survey of printed editions and translations.

The longest discussion Scholem gave it runs across pages 24–35 of Origins of the Kabbalah (Princeton University Press, 1987), where the dating is followed by a summary of the fundamental concepts and by observations on the term beli mah. He keeps returning to it later in the same volume: on its part in the formation of Kabbalah (pp. 46–48), on its influence among the German Hasidim (pp. 97–98), on its career as a manual for making a golem (pp. 102–103), and on its links with Merkabah mysticism (pp. 117–118). His conclusion: the book bridges late Hellenism and medieval Kabbalah, and it marks the point at which Jewish thought turns systematically, for the first time, to the question of the structure of creation.

Where to read

The best edition in English is Aryeh Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation In Theory and Practice (1990), which prints all four recensions in parallel and carries an extensive commentary, while in Hebrew there are dozens of editions and the critical synopsis of the recensions was assembled by Ithamar Gruenwald (1971).

It is the shortest Kabbalistic text and for that very reason it takes a long time to read, which is why the recommendation that circulates most widely is one mishnah a week, over the course of a year and a month.