כי ונפש) (Lev. 5:1). This text is related: Never be rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be quick to utter a word before God (האלהים לפני דבר להוציא ימהר אל ולבך פיך על תבהל אל) (Eccles. 5:1). These [words refer to] human beings who vilify the name of the Holy One, blessed be He. Come and see: when the celestial beings were created, those below were created with half of the name, as stated: for with YH YHWH created worlds (עולמים צור יהוה ביה כי) (Isa. 26:4). But why were they not created with all of it? So that none of them would repeat the full name of the Holy One, blessed be He. Woe to those creatures who vilify the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, in vain.18
This midrash teaches the great importance of the ineffable name; both worlds were created from only two of its letters and not from all four. As a moral lesson, the midrash points to the transgression of invoking the full name of God to no use, the very name, only half of which was employed in the creation of the world.
In a paper dedicated to the sealing of the primeval abyss in texts dating from the first century CE forward, David Sperber points to accounts of this sealing by the engraving of the ineffable name. We learn about the existence of this tradition in an early period from the Prayer of Manasseh, quoted above,19 and similar elements emerge from a Syriac version of the Psalms of Solomon.20 Sperber adds to these some early Christian sources giving variants of the legend.21 The importance of sources is compounded by the light they shed on three rabbinic midrashim concerning the digging of the shittin (pits by the side of the altar)22 by David: the midrashim are in b. Sukkah and Makkot and y. Sanhedrin.23 According to the Babylonian version, it seems that after David dug the shittin, the abyss threatened to wash away the world, to bind it in place, Aḥitophel had to write the ineffable name and throw it inside. Taking into account other Jewish and Christian sources of late antiquity that allude to this matter, we might interpret this midrash as follows: in the process of digging the shittin, David struck the ineffable name, which was a seal on the abyss and therefore had to seal it anew with the name that Aḥitophel wrote.
According to the second version of the midrash, in y. Sanhedrin, in the process of digging, David moved a piece of earthenware that had been thrown into the abyss, an act that almost caused the destruction of the world: “When he removed the clay pot, the great deep surged upward to flood the world.”24 It can be assumed, in this case as well, that the presence of the dislodged rock on which the ineffable name had been engraved was a magical way to avert the eruption of the abyss. If this interpretation is correct, it would seem that there are narratives about the sealing of the abyss with the ineffable name in the rabbinic literature as well—and that the story of the digging of the shittin by David evokes that story.
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan explicitly connects the ineffable name and the foundation stone. Though this is a relatively late text, it is probable that it preserves early sources. Pseudo-Jonathan recounts that the ineffable name, from which the 310 worlds were created, was engraved on the foundation stone: “And thou shalt put upon the breastplate of judgment the Uraia, which illuminate their words, and manifest the hidden things of the house of Israel, and 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
