Sefer Yetzirah
[2] Conversely, Judah Halevi asserts that the main objective of the book, with its various examples, is to give to man the means by which he is able to understand the unity and omnipotence of God, which appear multiform on one side and, yet, are uniform.
[3] The famous opening words of the book are as follows: By thirty-two mysterious paths of wisdom Yah has engraved [all things], [who is] the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, the living God, the Almighty God, He that is uplifted and exalted, He that Dwells forever, and whose Name is holy; having created His world by three [derivatives] of [the Hebrew root-word] sefar : namely, sefer (a book), sefor (a count) and sippur (a story), along with ten calibrations of empty space, twenty-two letters [of the Hebrew alphabet], [of which] three are principal [letters] (i.e. א מ ש), seven are double-sounding [consonants] (i.e. בג"ד כפר"ת) and twelve are ordinary [letters] (i.e. ה ו ז ח ט י ל נ ס ע צ ק).
[9] According to Christopher P. Benton, the Hebrew grammatical form places its origin closer to the period of the Mishnah,[10] around the 2nd century CE.
was annotated by Dunash ibn Tamim or by Jacob ben Nissim, while Saadia Gaon and Shabbethai Donnolo wrote commentaries on the longer recension (Mantua II.).
The longer recension, on the other hand, was little known, the form given in the editio princeps of the Sefer Yetzirah being probably a copy of the text found in Donnolo's commentary.
[8] As regards the relation of the two recensions, it may be said that the longer form contains entire paragraphs which are not found in the shorter, while the divergent arrangement of the material often modifies the meaning essentially.
[16] In the middle of the 16th century, the leader of the school of Safed kabbalists, Moses Cordovero, established a working text based on ten separate manuscripts.
This book seems to be a mystic work on the six days of creation, and corresponded in part to the small midrash, Seder Rabbah deBereshit.
The Sefer Yetzirah describes how the universe was created by the "God of Israel" (a list of all of God's Hebrew names appears in the first sentence of the book) through "32 wondrous ways of wisdom": The book describes the method for using the ten sefirot and the 22 Hebrew letters to gain Divine Insight/Secret using Abraham's tongue.
The twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet are classified both with reference to the position of the vocal organs in producing the sounds, and with regard to sonant intensity.
[8] The linguistic theories of the author of the Sefer Yetzirah are an integral component of its philosophy, its other parts being astrological and Gnostic cosmogony.
[8] The cosmos consists of three parts, the world, the year (or time), and man, which are combined in such a way that the three primordial elements are contained in each of the three categories.
Again, as the seven double letters vary, being pronounced either hard or soft, so the seven visible planets are in continuous movement, approaching or receding from the earth.
The latter are those organs which perform functions in the body independent of the outside world, being the hands, feet, kidneys, gall, intestines, stomach, liver, pancreas, and spleen; and they are, accordingly, subject to the twelve signs of the Zodiac.
[8] Their name is possibly derived from the fact that as numbers express only the relations of two objects to each other, so the ten sefirot are only abstractions and not realities.
[8] Besides these abstract ten sefirot, which are conceived only ideally, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet produced the material world, for they are real, and are the formative powers of all existence and development.
[8] In addition to the doctrine of the Sefirot and the letters, the theory of contrasts in nature, or of the syzygies ("pairs"), as they are called by the Gnostics, occupies a prominent place in the Sefer Yetzirah.
This doctrine is based on the assumption that the physical as well as the spiritual world consist of pairs mutually at war, but equalized by the unity, God.
[8] Both systems attach great importance to the power of the combinations and permutations of the letters in explaining the genesis and development of diversity from unity.
As in the latter, God is not only the beginning but also the end of all things, so in the former He is the arche (Koinē Greek: ἀρχή, Hebrew: ראשית) and telos (τέλος, תכלית) of all that exists; and the Clementine writings furthermore teach that the spirit of God is transformed into pneuma (πνεῦμα, רוח), and this into water, which becomes fire and rocks, thus agreeing with the Sefer Yetzirah, where the pneuma, air, water, and fire are the first four Sefirot.
[8] The "theli" (תלי teli, perhaps meaning "curled one" as a coiled serpent) which plays such a vital part in the astrology of the book, is probably an ancient Semitic figure; at all events its name is an Akkadian loan-word.
In discussing the number of words that can be formed from the Hebrew alphabet,[20] Sefer Yetzirah includes one for the earliest known descriptions of the mathematical function factorial, enumerating its first seven values and emphasizing its rapid growth.
[21] In 2002, American mathematician Robert P. C. de Marrais named the pathions, or the 32-dimensional hypercomplex numbers, after the 32 paths of wisdom in the Sefer Yetzirah.
