χ, μ, λ and ι, when you have finished reading these characters. 2. I wrote to you so that you might understand the mysteries of the characters. Do not write ν above χ, θ and ηι; but rather write ζ above χ, and ν above η and θ.”46
A second example of this trend emerges in the writing of Barsanuphius of Gaza, who lived in the first half of the sixth century. As Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony and Arieh Kofsky have shown, we can learn from Barsanuphius’s correspondence about the use of isolated Greek letters as cryptographs, at times used in a mystical way, and about the interpretation of each letter of the alphabet as a theological instruction.47
A third example of the developed and intensive preoccupation with letters in a Christian environment emerges from a detailed treatise, The Mysteries of the Greek Letters,48 which includes many varied discussions on alphabetic letters.49 It was probably written in the circle of Saint Sabbas in the Judaean desert around the sixth century.50 It is clear, upon reading this treatise, that its letter speculations were influenced by Jewish and Syriac sources. Within this wide-ranging composition, we find a reference to the number of Greek letters being, according to the author, twenty-two—not twenty-four. From the number of letters, we learn about the creation of the world, composed of twenty-two elements, as well as other matters involving this number, such as the number of books in the Old Testament and the number of miracles performed by Jesus.51 The secondary division of letters into numbers such as seven,52 fifteen,53 and fourteen54 is extensively discussed, and various fundamental things are taken to have an identical sum in the physical world and in the Holy Scriptures. The interpretative methods employed in the treatise include comparison between the numerical value of the letters of different words (isopsephy/gematria),55 the shape of the letters,56 and the meanings of their names in Hebrew and Syriac.57 This composition is of utmost importance insofar as Sefer Yeṣirah is concerned because, as we will see in Chapter 3, the traditions that it describes dealing with letters are similar to those in Sefer Yeṣirah, and the author claims that their origins are Hebrew and mainly Syriac.58
Summary
The various discussions about the letters of the alphabet that took place in non-Jewish sources in late antiquity reveal the wide extent of this kind of usage. In this chapter, I have described the discussions most relevant to the claim for a later contextualization of Sefer Yeṣirah. It should be stressed that discussions about the letters of the alphabet can be found in other milieus: they had an important role, for example, in second-century CE Artemidorus’s book about the interpretation of dreams,59 they were extensively discussed in the Samaritan Memar Marqah (מרקה תיבת),60 and one can find discussions about them in such writings as those of the famous Egyptian alchemist Zosimos of Panopolis (end of third-beginning of fourth centuries).61
Letter speculations were prevalent in Gnostic sources and were rejected by Christian and Neoplatonic thinkers, but there is nothing Gnostic in these speculations and nothing anti-Christian or anti-Neoplatonic in them. My main argument in this chapter was that although letter speculations were rejected by many Christian writers, they continued to be developed in more marginal Christian circles. In the next two chapters, I will try to demonstrate why it is more reasonable to assume that Sefer Yeṣirah was influenced by such an environment.
Although the discussion about alphabetical letters in Sefer Yeṣirah—bringing together grammatical arguments and the symbolism of the letters referring to the planets or the organs of the human body—does not have equivalents in rabbinic literature, it was already known about in the first centuries CE in non-Jewish circles. It seems that these views, which were not adopted by mainstream Jewish sources, continued to be developed in other channels and eventually found their way to the core of Sefer Yeṣirah.
Debate about the hierarchy of groups of letters, that is, the question of whether the vowels stand highest or lowest among the letters, will be reflected in the difference between the two main traditions of the creation of the world from letters. While the creation of the world from the letters of the ineffable name, as I will show in Chapter 2, is a product of the tradition about the creation of the world from the name of God and the importance of the vowels in Greek and Coptic sources, the creation of the world from twenty-two letters relies on a different hierarchy that does not give symbolic priority to the vowels.
Chapter 2
The Creation of the World from the Letters of the Ineffable Name
Introduction
An extensive survey of the traditions of late antiquity concerning the creation of the world from alphabetical letters suggests that they can be divided into at least two main currents: the first describes the creation of the world from twenty-two letters and can be found in Sefer Yeṣirah and, as we shall see, in The Mysteries of the Greek Letters; the second concerns the creation of the world from the letters of the ineffable name. This latter tradition, culled from rabbinic sources and the Hekhalot literature, depicts the creation of the world from the letters he, yod, and, in certain sources, waw. Contrary to the definite distinction between the traditions that emerges from the reading of the above-mentioned sources, in Samaritan sources we find the two traditions side by side. To date, most scholars who have discussed the creation of the world from letters have tended to unite the different narratives of the creation of the world from letters without distinguishing between them.1 The only exception in this matter is Peter Hayman, who does, albeit briefly, address these differences.2 In this chapter, I will discuss in detail the tradition of the creation of the world from the letters of the ineffable name; in Chapter 3, I will discuss the second tradition, about the creation of the world from twenty-two letters, while trying to demonstrate its Syriac roots. My main argument in these two chapters is that distinguishing between the traditions about the creation of the world from letters will enable us to see that Sefer Yeṣirah is not a part of rabbinic literature; it will also enable us to trace the origins of the specific tradition at the heart of Sefer Yeṣirah: the creation of the world from twenty-two letters.
As I suggested in Chapter 1, there is a reason behind the differences between the two traditions about the creation of the world from letters. The description of creation from the letters of the ineffable name looks like the result of the confluence of two different, unrelated commitments: the high status of the ineffable name in Jewish sources from the Bible onward;3 and the hierarchy in Greek and Coptic sources structuring the relationship between vowels and consonants. Although these two issues developed separately and their roots are distinct, the connection between them is natural and requested. It seems that not later than the first century CE, Greek-speaking Jews began to describe the ineffable name as a sequence of four Hebrew vowels (matres lectionis). In this vein, Josephus describes the name of God as holy and “consist[ing] of four vowels.”4 It would not be far from the truth to assume that the Greek description of the name of God as a name of four letters, the tetragrammaton, stems from the very same reason.
The development of a belief in the creation of the world from the letters of the ineffable name occurred in the same way. In the first stage, during the last centuries BCE, among other beliefs about how the world was created, there was a tradition about the creation of the world from the ineffable name. Later on, in the second stage, probably from the first or the second century onward, that belief changes its form and instead of the creation of the world from the name of God, one can find depictions of the creation of the
