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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
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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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
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
Appendix 1. Sefer Yeṣirah and the Early Islamic Science of Letters
Appendix 3. The Midrash About Sefer Yeṣirah and Ben Sira, According to Ms. Vatican 299/4, 65a–66a
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
