"Sefer Yesirah" and Its Contexts. Tzahi Weiss

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      Sefer Yeṣirah and Its Contexts

      DIVINATIONS: REREADING LATE ANCIENT RELIGION

      Series Editors: Daniel Boyarin, Virginia Burrus, Derek Krueger

      A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

      Sefer Yeṣirah and Its Contexts

      Other Jewish Voices

      Tzahi Weiss

      UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

      PHILADELPHIA

      Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press

      All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

      Published by

      University of Pennsylvania Press

      Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

       www.upenn.edu/pennpress

      Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

      1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Weiss, Tzahi, author.

      Title: Sefer Yeṣirah and its contexts : other Jewish voices / Tzahi Weiss.

      Other titles: Divinations.

      Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018] | Series: Divinations: rereading late ancient religion | Includes bibliographical references and index.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2017034900 | ISBN 9780812249903 (hardcover : alk. paper)

      Subjects: LCSH: Sefer Yezirah. | Cabala—Early works to 1800. | Jewish cosmology.

      Classification: LCC BM525.A419 W45 2018 | DDC 296.1/6—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034900

       To Judith, Miriam, Sarah, and Rachel“Who hew out great columns from intangible air”

      Contents

       A Note on Transliteration of the Hebrew Alphabet

       Introduction

       Chapter 1. Discussions About Alphabetical Letters in Non-Jewish Sources of Late Antiquity

       Chapter 2. The Creation of the World from the Letters of the Ineffable Name

       Chapter 3. The Creation of the World from Twenty-Two Letters and the Syriac Context of Sefer Yeṣirah

       Chapter 4. Sounds of Silence: Sefer Yeṣirah Before the Tenth Century

       Chapter 5. Reevaluating the Scientific Phase of Sefer Yeṣirah

       Epilogue

       Appendix 1. Sefer Yeṣirah and the Early Islamic Science of Letters

       Appendix 2. Sefer Yeṣirah’s Long Version, According to Ms. Vatican 299/4, 66a–71b, with the English Translations of Peter A. Hayman

       Appendix 3. The Midrash About Sefer Yeṣirah and Ben Sira, According to Ms. Vatican 299/4, 65a–66a

       Notes

       Bibliography

       Index

       Acknowledgments

      A Note on Transliteration of the Hebrew Alphabet

      Introduction

      Sefer Yeṣirah is one of the most enigmatic, yet influential, texts in the history of Jewish thought. The text is striking for its rhythmic phrasing and evocative language; it connects the essence of language with the foundations of the world. This short treatise has fascinated Jewish thinkers and kabbalists, as well as Western thinkers and writers, from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to Umberto Eco and Jorge Luis Borges.

      Because of its unique style as well as the fact that it does not explicitly refer to other Jewish sources and was not quoted by other Jewish sources in late antiquity, it is difficult, if not impossible, to contextualize. When I present Sefer Yeṣirah for the first time to my students, I joke that after about 150 years of scholarship on Sefer Yeṣirah, we know almost everything about this book except for four minor issues: Who wrote it? Where and when was it written? What does it mean? And what was its “original” version? Scholars disagree about the time and context of the book, proposing first-century CE Hellenism,1 the rabbinic sphere of the second to sixth centuries CE,2 Neoplatonism of the fourth or fifth centuries CE,3 fifth to the sixth century CE Palestine,4 the Syriac-Christian milieu of the sixth to seventh century,5 or the ninth-century Islamic world.6 This diversity reflects what seems to be an inherent and radical inability to contextualize Sefer Yeṣirah.

      Sefer Yeṣirah appeared in the Jewish world at the beginning of the tenth century. In this period, it was already interpreted as a canonical treatise by leading rabbinic figures living on three continents, and it had many different versions. The surprising appearance of Sefer Yeṣirah, as if out of the blue, is the result of its absence from the Jewish world before the tenth century, along with its immediate acceptance. Furthermore, Sefer Yeṣirah had a remarkable reception in Jewish milieus from the tenth century on. Joseph Dan describes the two main stages of its impact on the Jewish world—stages with little in common:7 in the first, between the tenth and the twelfth centuries, it was read by at least five commentators as a sort of philosophical or scientific text.8 In the second, from the end of the twelfth century on, it was interpreted by mystics and kabbalists as a mystical, mythical, and magical treatise. These facts about Sefer Yeṣirah’s reception raise essential questions: Where was Sefer Yeṣirah before its canonization in the tenth-century rabbinic world? Why was Sefer Yeṣirah initially understood as a philosophical and scientific treatise, and later viewed


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