The Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation

It is one of the shortest books in Jewish literature, a few pages long, and one of the strangest. It begins: "With thirty-two wondrous paths of wisdom Yah, the Lord of hosts, engraved and created his world." It then describes those paths: ten sefirot and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. God, in this book, makes the world the way a scribe makes a text, by carving, weighing and combining letters. The Sefer Yetzirah, the "Book of Formation" or "Book of Creation", is the oldest surviving work of Jewish speculation about language and cosmos, and the root of much later Kabbalah.

What it says

• Thirty-two paths. Ten sefirot belimah, "numbers (or spheres) of nothingness", and twenty-two letters. The sefirot here are not yet the divine attributes of later Kabbalah: they are ten dimensions, the depths of beginning and end, good and evil, above and below, east, west, north and south.
• Three mothers. The letters aleph, mem and shin (א מ ש) correspond to air, water and fire.
• Seven doubles. The seven letters that once had two pronunciations, bet, gimel, dalet, kaf, pe, resh, tav (ב ג ד כ פ ר ת), correspond to the seven planets, the seven days and seven openings of the head.
• Twelve simples. The other twelve letters correspond to the twelve signs of the zodiac, the twelve months and twelve organs or faculties.
• The 231 gates. Every letter is paired with every other, forming 231 gates (the number of pairs among twenty-two letters), and "all that is formed and all that is spoken" goes out through them.

When, and by whom?

Tradition attributes the book to the patriarch Abraham. Its date is one of the most disputed questions in Jewish studies: Gershom Scholem placed it in late antique Palestine (third to sixth centuries CE); others argue for a later origin in the early Islamic world, around the eighth or ninth century. It survives in three recensions, short, long and "Saadyan", and the first known commentaries are from the tenth century, by Saadia Gaon, Dunash ibn Tamim and Shabbetai Donnolo.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Letters as building blocks. The book's claim is that the Hebrew letters are not signs about things but the stuff things are made of, a view that made Hebrew a sacred technology in later Kabbalah, magic and the legends of the golem, whose makers were said to combine letters according to this book.

Number. 32 is written with the letters lamed-bet, לב, lev, "heart"; later readers noticed that the Torah begins with bet and ends with lamed. Ten, three, seven and twelve structure the whole text.

Correspondences. The book is an early example of a system linking letters, elements, planets, zodiac signs, months and parts of the body: the model of the "correspondences" of Western esotericism, including the Hermetic Tree of Life, whose 22 paths are the 22 letters.

Connections

Kabbalah (ch26), with Rabbinic Judaism (ch19) and Theosophy & the Occult Revival (ch37). Compare the Zohar (V79) for the Kabbalah it fed, and the Picatrix (V85) for another book of correspondences.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/sefer-yetzirah.html