"Sefer Yesirah" and Its Contexts. Tzahi Weiss
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the Tumaia, which fulfill their work to the high priest, who seeketh instruction by them before the Lord; because in them is engraved and expressed the Great and Holy Name by which were created the 310 worlds and which was engraved and expressed in the foundation stone wherewith the Lord of the world sealed up the mouth of the great deep at the beginning. Whosoever remembereth that holy name in the hour of necessity shall be delivered.”25 This midrash makes a link between the four elements: the foundation stone, the sealing of the abyss, the ineffable name, and the creation of the world. As such, it shows how different cosmogonic myths became consolidated and how they were understood by certain sages.
The creation of the world from letters was understood by most rabbinic sources as referring to the letters of the ineffable name. A number of midrashim hint at traditions concerning the creation of the world from other letters or from all twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. It would be, of course, impossible to give an unequivocal clarification to those midrashim, and it could be that along with the main tradition about the creation of the world from the letters of the ineffable name there were, at the margins of the rabbinic literature other attitudes. Nevertheless, a meticulous scrutiny of those midrashim does not support an interpretation of them as referring to letters other than those of the ineffable name, and it suggests that such an interpretation is based on an anachronistic assumption, at odds with the contextual knowledge we actually have.
I will open with a well-known example of such a midrash from b. Berakhot about the magical abilities of Bezalel, the builder of the tabernacle: “R. Judah said in the name of Rav: Bezalel knew to combine letters by which heaven and earth were created.”26 This declaration, which has a few equivalents in the Hekhalot literature, does not evince the specific letters that Bezalel combined,27 so that we have no indication as to which letters the midrash refers to. Reading the midrash reveals that Rav’s main purpose is to stress that Bezalel possessed high magical knowledge and knew how to combine letters by which the world was created. In this respect, Rav compares the created cosmos and the tabernacle as a microcosmos. Rav is not interested in the myth about the creation of the world from letters but rather uses it to underline the role of Bezalel and the symbolic meaning of the tabernacle. The absence in rabbinic literature of any significant assertion that the world was created from all twenty-two letters of the alphabet, as well as the existence of a variety of midrashim regarding the creation of the world from the ineffable name, leads to the reasonable conclusion that, according to this midrash, the world was created by the letters of the ineffable name and not the whole alphabet. Were we not cognizant of the tradition that the world was created from the twenty-two letters of the alphabet described in Sefer Yeṣrah and were solely aware of rabbinic sources referring to creation from letters, we would have no doubt that the expression “letters from which heaven and earth were created” refers to the letters he and yod. Gershom Scholem interpreted Rav in this way: “Bezalel, who built the Tabernacle, ‘knew the combinations of letters with which heaven and earth were made’—so we read in the name of a Babylonian scholar of the early third century, the most prominent representative of the esoteric tradition in his generation [Rav T. W.]. The letters in question were unquestionably those of the name of God.”28
Another midrash connecting the creation of the world from letters other than those of the ineffable name is the famous midrash telling how the world was created from the letter bet. The midrash appears in a few places in rabbinic literature29 as well as in later midrashim that deal extensively with the alphabetic letters: the first appearance, Letters of R. Akiva, version A, is a composition of eclectic traditions, most of which are based on the Hekhalot literature;30 the second, Letters of R. Akiva, version B, is based on rabbinic tradition and was probably edited between the sixth and ninth centuries. The midrash focuses on why the world was created from the letter bet in particular; so we know that such a tradition existed.31 However, an examination of this midrash in all its versions reveals that it does not deal with the creation of the world from or by this letter but rather with the word that inaugurates the biblical description of creation: bereishit. In this midrash, as in its Samaritan parallel, bet signifies the boundary between the chaos that existed before creation, a chaos that is not to be interpreted, and the created cosmos.32 In this vein, we should also read the version of the midrash from a section of midrash Tanḥuma found in the Cairo Geniza, published by Ephraim E. Urbach: “Bereishit: Why did He begin the creation of the world with bet and not with alef, as alef is the head of all the letters of the Torah?”33 There is a parallel to this midrash as it appears in Letters of R. Akiva, version A: “Why did the Holy One, blessed be He, create His world with bet in Bereishit bara (In the beginning [God] created [Gen. 1:1]) and end the Torah with lamed (leyney kol Israel, in the sight of all Israel [Deut. 34:12])? When you join them, it becomes BL, and when you reverse them, they become LB (heart).”34 In this midrash, too, we observe that creation with the letter bet refers to something essentially other than creation from or by letters: the main question is, why did the account of creation begin with this specific letter? The midrash consequently compares the word bereishit, with which the Torah begins, with the word Israel, with which it ends, such that the role of the letter bet in this context is similar to that of the concluding letter lamed.
In rabbinic literature, only one source is known to me of a midrash that discloses a definite acquaintance with the tradition about the creation of the world from twenty-two letters. That singular source appears in the same sections of Tanḥuma published by Urbach, and in it, it is written that the Torah that lit up the darkness of the primordial chaos for God also put at his disposal the twenty-two letters: “While He was creating the world, the Torah was, as it were, shedding light before Him, for the world was without form and void, as it is said: ‘For the commandment is a lamp and the Torah—light’ (כי נר מצוה ותורה אור) (Prov. 6:23). The Holy One, blessed be He, said: I shall ask for laborers. The Torah said to Him: I shall put forth for you twenty-two workers. And these are the twenty-two letters of the Torah.”35
This midrash, which seems to be expressing a notion similar to the process of creation from the twenty-two letters envisioned in Sefer Yeṣirah, belongs to the later strata of rabbinic literature and has, to the best of my knowledge, no parallels. It is reasonable to assume that, at the time of this midrash, a new approach to the creation of the world from letters penetrated the margins of the rabbinic literature. Since this tradition was alien to the rabbinic ones, it was adapted by the midrash according to a more familiar tradition about the creation of the world from the Torah. The claim of the midrash is that the letters from which the world was created were given to God by the Torah, and it is therefore the Torah that is the origin of the alphabetic letters and the world. The midrash mainly focuses on the dialogue between God and the Torah and on the crucial role that the Torah had in the process of creation and does not address the role of the alphabet in creation as an issue of interest. Similarly, yet as a mirror image, as we shall see, Sefer Yeṣirah operates in the same manner with regard to the tradition about the creation of the world from the letters of the ineffable name.36 Throughout Sefer Yeṣirah, from its second chapter forward, the ineffable name of God and its letters have no role in the creation of the world and the letters of the ineffable name: yod, he, and waw are neither defined as a distinct group of letters nor do they have any symbolic meaning that connects them to the name of God. In the only instance that Sefer Yeṣirah does mention the letters of the ineffable name in relation to the creation of the world, those letters are defined as three letters from the group of the twelve simple letters. In this case, Sefer Yeṣirah appropriates the tradition of the creation of the world from the ineffable name and adapts it to its core tradition about the creation of the world from twenty-two letters. It is exactly this manner of adaptation rather than adoption that stresses what can be considered a core percept, as opposed to an appended one in both the rabbinic literature and in Sefer Yeṣirah and thereby accentuates the essential disparity between them.
Hekhalot Literature
The dominant attitude toward the creation of the world from letters in the Hekhalot literature, as in the aforementioned rabbinic sources, favors the letters