Sefer Yeṣirah, correspond to the seven planets: “Seven double letters: bet, gimel, dalet, kaf pe, resh, taw. He carved and hewed them, he combined them, weighed them and exchanged them, and he formed with them the planets in the universe.… These are the seven planets in the universe: Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars.”13
I contend that Sefer Yeṣirah did not adapt these ideas directly from Greek sources. Sefer Yeṣirah represents a case of a Hebrew treatise that took on this Greek tradition after it had been adapted to Semitic languages, as these ideas continued to develop throughout late antiquity and the early Middle Ages along various channels.
Discussion and Rejection of Letter Speculations in Late Antiquity
The use of hermeneutic methods based on letter discussions spawned debates in the writings of the church fathers as well as in Neoplatonic circles. The existence of such debates is of utmost relevance to our discussion, as it reflects on the extent of the concern with letters and the resistance it aroused.
Irenaeus of Lyon’s (second century CE) Against Heresies provides one of the most detailed testimonies to such a debate.14 Irenaeus attributes to Marcus, a disciple of Valentinus,15 a polemical description of the employment of letters as well as homilies on letters. The length, detail, and breadth of the Gnostic discussions about letters that Irenaeus quotes prohibit an all-inclusive and detailed description; I will therefore present only the more relevant ones. One such discussion is the description of the body of truth (άλήθεια) in terms of opposed pairs of letters, which look like the Hebrew A-T B-Š letter-exchange method.16 This source makes a strong connection between the process of creation and alphabetical letters. Truth, the foundation of human discourse, is composed of letters: “[T]he Tetrad explained these things to him as it said: ‘I also wish to show you Truth itself. I have brought her down from the dwellings on high that you might look on her unveiled and learn of her beauty and also hear her speak and admire her wisdom. See, then, alpha and omega are her head on high; beta and psi are her neck; gamma and chi are her shoulders with hands; her breast is delta and phi; epsilon and upsilon are her diaphragm; zeta and tau are her stomach; eta and sigma are her private parts; theta and rho are her thighs; iota and pi are her knees; kappa and omicron are her legs; lambda and xi are her ankles; mu and nu are her feet.’”17
The role that Marcus gives to the alphabetical letters in their connection to the organs of the body of “Truth” is similar to the role of the letters at the level of the human body (נפש), one of the three levels of the created world in Sefer Yeṣirah. At this level, as we saw in the Introduction, each letter represents or is responsible for a certain organ of the human body. Sefer Yeṣirah describes the three levels of the three immot letters A-M-Š: “He made alef rule over air [ruaḥ], and bound to it a crown, and combined them with each other, and formed with them air [awir] in the universe, and humidity in the year, and the chest in mankind male and female. He made mem rule over water, and bound to it a crown, and combined them with each other, and formed with it earth in the universe, cold in the year, and the belly in mankind male and female. He made shin rule over fire, and bound to it a crown, and combined them with each other, and formed with it heaven in the universe, heat in the year, and the head in mankind male and female.”18
Of special interest is Irenaeus’s account of the similarity in both structure and content of the emanation of the upper worlds from letters as presented by Marcus and the myth of creation widespread in Mandaean sources. In her book on the Mandaeans, Ethel Stefana Drower describes their particular approach to the alphabet and the role of letters in the creation of the world.19 A reading of Mandaean sources discloses the importance of letters in the divine realm20—for example, the use of letters to name various elements in the pleroma and the title given to the great mother in one of the Mandaean creation myths, “Mother of the Twenty-Four Letters of the Alphabet,”21 which recalls Marcus’s “Truth.” One can infer from Mandaean texts that, similar to the description of the body of the truth in the Valentinian myth, the body of Adam Kasia, the primordial man, is also composed of letters.22 The fact that similar depictions can be found in early Valentinian Gnosticism and in later Mandaean sources demonstrates that those beliefs were prevalent over an expanse of time and geographic location. This illustrates and justifies my claim that Sefer Yeṣirah, in around the seventh century, represents a variant of these diverse expressions.
Another point relevant to my argument follows from Marcus’s contention concerning the hierarchy between different groups of letters. According to him, the consonants are superior to the vowels and semivowels.23 Marcus believes that since the creator lacks voice or utterance, the vowels, being closer to vocalization, have a lower status: “Know, then, that these your twenty-four letters are symbolical emissions of the three powers which embrace the entire number of characters on high. You are to consider the nine mute letters as belonging to Father and Truth, because these are mute, that is, they are unspeakable and unutterable. The eight semivowels, as belonging to Word and Life, because they are, as it were, intermediate between the mutes and the vowels, they receive the emission from the Aeons above; but an ascent from those below. The vowels too are seven. They belong to Man and Church, because the voice that came forth through Man formed all things; for the sound of the voice clothed them with form. So Word and Life possess eight [of the letters]; Man and Church seven; Father and Truth, nine.”24
This text is unusual among those from late antiquity that I know of, in attesting to the superiority of the consonants over the vowels. The more prevalent attitude in late antiquity to the letters was opposite; the seven Greek vowels symbolized the seven planets or divine beings and were considered to be superior to the other letters. Long sequences of Greek vowels in many Greek and Coptic amulets testify to the uniqueness and high status of the vowels. Certain texts from the Nag-Hammadi library25 contain sequences of vowels in this vein, symbolizing the highest realm of human cognition. In a treatise called “The Discourse of the Eighth and the Ninth,” for example, combinations of vowels are used to praise God: “Grace! After these things, I give thanks by singing a hymn to you. For I have received life from you, when you made me wise I praise you. I call your name that is hidden with me: a ō ee ō ēēē ōōō iii ōōōō ooooo ōōōōō uuuuuu ōōōōōōōōōōōōōōōōōōōōōō.26 You are the one who exists with the spirit. I sing a hymn to you reverently.”27
The vowels, specifically because of their vocalization, are seen here as hidden and exalted and therefore are apt for the praise of God; as Patricia Cox-Miller puts it: “[T]he vowels of the alphabet designate that point at which the human and divine worlds intersect.… [T]o speak this language is not only to invoke the God; it is also to sound the depths of one’s own primal reality. These strings of vowels are hymnic recitations of praise to the God and to human Godlikeness.”28
Another well-known example of the symbolic meaning of the vowels can be gleaned from the Pythagorean Nicomachus of Gerasa’s (60–120 CE) treatise “Introduction to Arithmetic.” Nicomachus writes that the seven vowels are the sounds of the seven celestial spheres. Those sounds are ineffable but can be revealed through other means, such as arithmetic, geometry, and grammar. In terms of hierarchy, the vowels, according to Nicomachus, are like the soul of the material consonants that constitute the body: “For indeed the sounds of each sphere of the seven, each sphere naturally producing one certain kind of sound, are called ‘vowels.’ They are ineffable in and of themselves, but are recalled by the wise with respect to everything made up of them. Wherefore also here (i.e., on earth) this sound has power, which in arithmetic is a monad, in geometry a point, in grammar a letter (of the alphabet). And combined with the material letters, which are the consonants, as the soul to the body.”29
The elevation of the vowels over the consonants,
