the world by speech, the holiness ascribed to the Hebrew language, the holiness of the name of God, or the holiness of the Bible, including the letters it is composed of.1 However, as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, Franz Dornseiff and other scholars in his wake have, as the result of detailed investigations, found evidence that discussion of alphabetical letters is not only to be found in rabbinic and other Jewish sources but can also be encountered in Greek, Gnostic, Neoplatonic, Neo-Pythagorean, Christian, and Samaritan texts.2 Examining late antique engagement with alphabetical letters from a wider perspective reveals that Jewish texts were neither more developed nor earlier than non-Jewish sources and that it would be untenable to single out a Judaic origin for this phenomenon. It would be more plausible to assume that Jewish discussions about alphabetical letters were adaptations of earlier non-Jewish ones. Any attempt to contextualize Sefer Yeṣirah must therefore not only take into account a wide range of possible sources but also recognize, penetrate, and understand the widespread preoccupation with letters, in order to trace the different channels of its development.
One must consider the disparate attitudes adopted toward letter discussions in late antiquity in order to decipher the genealogy of these discussions. In some contexts in late antiquity, discussions of letters were considered negatively; in other contexts, they were adopted without criticism. For example, some early church fathers and a few Neoplatonic thinkers rejected letter discussions, claiming that they were Gnostic, nonrational, and inappropriate; in the same period, they were considered legitimate in rabbinic sources. Although this can explain why letter discussions are more prevalent in Jewish sources than in Christian or Neoplatonic ones, it does not in any way indicate that the origins of this phenomenon are Jewish.
Even without deciding whether the main sources for the narrative of the creation of the world from letters in Sefer Yeṣirah derive from Jewish or non-Jewish traditions, I call attention at least to the possibility of letter discussions having non-Jewish origins and to study the development of these traditions, which continued to evolve in some non-Jewish milieus throughout the first millennium CE.
A prefatory response to the above question is offered by a reading of Sefer Yeṣirah. It would be difficult to assume much affiliation between it and other Jewish sources, since most discussions about the letters in Sefer Yeṣirah do not employ methods that were known in rabbinic sources and vice versa. For example, Sefer Yeṣirah contains neither midrashim on “defective” spelling and plene spelling nor gematria (calculating and comparing numerical value of letters), nor do we find mention of the graphic shape of the letters or the meanings of the final Hebrew letters k-m-n-p-ṣ. Sefer Yeṣirah is mainly concerned with the number twenty-two and with the secondary divisions of the letters into the numbers three, seven, and twelve, and pays scant attention to other methods of dealing with the letters of the alphabet, and thereby to a great extent differentiates itself from rabbinic sources.
My main goal in this chapter is to demonstrate that while many church fathers and a few Neoplatonic thinkers rejected letter discussions as Gnostic or irrational, such discussions were still developed in more marginal Christian contexts throughout the first millennium CE. Consequently, my argument in the following chapters is that the myth about the creation of the world from twenty-two letters was not discussed in rabbinic texts but was developed in some Christian circles, especially Syriac ones. Sefer Yeṣirah, as I will demonstrate, borrowed this and other motifs from those Christian origins.
Early Roots
There is evidence of extensive preoccupation with alphabetical letters as well as myths about their importance only from the first century CE, although the roots of these phenomena probably go back much further. Ancient wellsprings, such as sources from the ancient Near East,3 biblical literature,4 and ancient Greece5 are possible springboards. An important example of an ancient Greek notion that influenced discussions and myths about the alphabetical letters in late antiquity is the Greek word stoicheion (στοιχεῖον), which refers to, among other things, both an alphabetical letter and a physical element. It became a point of convergence for discussing the creation of the world from letters. An early source that can exemplify the double meaning of the word is a paragraph from Plato’s Timaeus, which explains the primal significance of the four physical elements. Here the letters are seen as similar to physical elements, and, unlike syllables, they constitute indivisible primary units: “But we speak of fire and the rest of them [water, air, and earth], whatever they mean, as though men knew their natures, and we maintain them to be the first principles and letters [στοιχεῖα] or elements of the whole, when they cannot reasonably be compared by a man of any sense even to syllables or first compounds.”6
In Plato, the alphabetical letters have an atomic character, as they cannot be divided into more basic components. It seems that the fact that letters and physical elements share a word and similar qualities, in conjunction with other biblical and Akkadian perceptions of written signs as independent units, will have a significant role in the crystallization of myths about the creation of the world from alphabetical letters. In this respect, it is worth noting that in Sefer Yeṣirah, one finds the interesting phrase otiot yesod (אותיות יסוד),7 which means, literally, “element letters.” As Gershom Scholem has noted, there is good reason to assume that otiot yesod in Sefer Yeṣirah is a Hebrew adaptation of the Greek stoicheion.8
Another well-known example of an ancient idea that influenced later discussions and speculation about letters is the discussion of the symbolic meaning of the seven Greek vowels. Aristotle’s Metaphysics is one of the earliest sources to refer to the association between the seven vowels and other collections of seven things. Aristotle takes a critical stand and argues that it is unreasonable to correlate different things in this way:
If all things must share in number, it must follow that many things are the same…. [T]hings that differed might fall under the same number. Therefore if the same number had belonged to certain things, these would have been the same as one another, since they would have had the same form of number; e.g., sun and moon would have been the same…. There are seven vowels, the scale has seven strings, the Pleiades are seven … and the champions who fought against Thebes were seven. Is it then because the number is what it is, that the champions were seven or the Pleias consist of seven stars? Surely the champions were seven because there were seven gates of for some other reason, and the Pleias we count as seven, as we count the Bear as twelve, while other people count more stars in both.9
Although Aristotle rejects comparisons between different objects associated with the same number, the example he gives suggests that at least some of the specific correspondences between the vowels and other matters composed of seven parts were well known.
A later example, which connects the seven vowels and the planets, can be found in Plutarch’s (ca. 46–125 CE) discussion of the letter E, a capital epsilon, which stood at the entrance to the temple of Delphi.10 Writing to his friend the poet Sarapion, Plutarch offers seven possible reasons for this letter being placed at the entrance to the temple. One rationale relates to the fact that epsilon is the second in the order of vowels in the Greek alphabet and designates the sun; it is fitting for it to stand at the gates of the temple of Apollo, the god of the sun. Thus the claim: “There are seven vowels in the alphabet and seven stars that have an independent and unconstrained motion; that E is the second in order of the vowels from the beginning, and the Sun the second planet after the moon, and that practically all the Greeks identify Apollo with the Sun.”11
This explanation in Plutarch refers to a specific issue related to the correspondence between the Greek vowels and the planets. It is important to stress that this correspondence was well known and, moreover, that the vowels symbolized planets. Such a correspondence found its way at a later period into Sefer Yeṣirah. Although it seems that Sefer Yeṣirah gives little attention to the Hebrew matres lectionis (vowels), A, H, W, Y,12
