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Thursday, February 21, 2008

Sefer Yetzirah

Sefer Yetzirah (Hebrew, "Book of Creation", ספר יצירה) is the title of the earliest extant book on Jewish esotericism.

The Sefer Yetzirah is devoted to speculations concerning God's creation of the world. The ascription of its authorship to the biblical patriarch Abraham shows the high esteem which it enjoyed for centuries. It may even be said that this work had a greater influence on the development of the Jewish mind than almost any other book after the completion of the Talmud.
The following text came from the 1906 Public Domain Jewish Encyclopedia. This entry thus needs updating by people familiar with the subject.

Origin

A cryptic story in the Babylonian Talmud states that "On the eve of every Shabbat, Judah ha-Nasi's pupils, Rab Hanina and Rab Hoshaiah, who devoted themselves especially to cosmogony, used to create a three-year-old calf by means of the Sefer Yetzirah, and ate it on the Sabbath" (Sanhedrin 65b, 67b). All the miraculous creations attributed to other rabbis of the Talmudic era are ascribed by rabbinic commentators to the use of the same book.

A mishnah (vi. 15) declares that the Biblical patriarch Abraham was the recipient of the divine revelation of mystic lore; so that the rabbis of the classical rabbinic era, and philosophers as Saadia, Donnolo, and Judah ha-Levi never doubted that Abraham was the author of the book. In Pardes Rimon, Moses ben Jacob Cordovero (Ramak) mentions a minority opinion that Akiba authored it, and takes it to mean Avraham wrote it and Akiba redacted it to its current form.

According to modern historians, the origin of the text is unknown, and hotly debated. Some scholars emphasize its context among various Medieval kabbalistic texts arising after the 10th century CE, while other scholars emphasize the earlier traditions apparently referring to it and its earlier textual features. Some of the core ideas in the book seem to have a Babylonian origin. The idea of the creative power of the various sounds is possibly Egyptian. The division of the letters into the three classes of vowels, mutes, and sonants is Hellenic, although this classification necessarily underwent changes when applied to the Hebrew letters. The historical origin of the Sefer Yetzirah is accordingly placed by Reizenstein in the second century BCE. The Hebrew grammatical form places its origin closer to the period of the Mishna around the second century CE, by Benton.

In a manuscript (cite?) in the British Museum, the Sefer Yetzirah is called the Hilkot Yetzirah and declared to be esoteric lore not accessible to anyone but the pious, and only to be used for Kabbalistic purposes.

Manuscripts

The Sefer Yetzirah exists in multiple versions: 1) The Short Version, 2) The Long Version, 3) The Saadia Version, and 4) The Gra Version.[4] The differences among these versions tend to be minor.

1) and 2). The Short Version comprises about 1300 words while the Long Version about twice that. In the 13th century CE, Abraham Abulafia noted the existence of both of them.

3). In the 10th century, Saadia Gaon reorganized the Longer Version for his commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah, now called the Saadia Version.

4). In the 16th century, the Ari (Isaac Luria) redacted the text to harmonize it with the Zohar, and then in the 18th century, the Gra (Eliyahu the Gaon of Vilna) further redacted this, now called the Gra Version.

Influence

The Sefer Yetzirah is devoted to speculations concerning God and the angels. The ascription of its authorship to Abraham, shows the high esteem which it enjoyed for centuries. It may even be said that this work had a greater influence on the development of the Jewish mind than almost any other book after the completion of the Talmud.

The Sefer Yetzirah is exceedingly difficult to understand on account of its obscure style. The difficulty is rendered still greater by the lack of a critical edition, the present text being much interpolated and altered. Hence there is a wide divergence of opinion regarding the age, origin, contents, and value of the book, since it is variously regarded as pre-Temple era.