Letter speculations were prevalent in Gnostic sources and were rejected by Christian and Neoplatonic thinkers, but there is nothing Gnostic in these speculations and nothing anti-Christian or anti-Neoplatonic in them. My main argument in this chapter was that although letter speculations were rejected by many Christian writers, they continued to be developed in more marginal Christian circles. In the next two chapters, I will try to demonstrate why it is more reasonable to assume that Sefer Yeṣirah was influenced by such an environment.
Although the discussion about alphabetical letters in Sefer Yeṣirah—bringing together grammatical arguments and the symbolism of the letters referring to the planets or the organs of the human body—does not have equivalents in rabbinic literature, it was already known about in the first centuries CE in non-Jewish circles. It seems that these views, which were not adopted by mainstream Jewish sources, continued to be developed in other channels and eventually found their way to the core of Sefer Yeṣirah.
Debate about the hierarchy of groups of letters, that is, the question of whether the vowels stand highest or lowest among the letters, will be reflected in the difference between the two main traditions of the creation of the world from letters. While the creation of the world from the letters of the ineffable name, as I will show in Chapter 2, is a product of the tradition about the creation of the world from the name of God and the importance of the vowels in Greek and Coptic sources, the creation of the world from twenty-two letters relies on a different hierarchy that does not give symbolic priority to the vowels.
Chapter 2
The Creation of the World from the Letters of the Ineffable Name
Introduction
An extensive survey of the traditions of late antiquity concerning the creation of the world from alphabetical letters suggests that they can be divided into at least two main currents: the first describes the creation of the world from twenty-two letters and can be found in Sefer Yeṣirah and, as we shall see, in The Mysteries of the Greek Letters; the second concerns the creation of the world from the letters of the ineffable name. This latter tradition, culled from rabbinic sources and the Hekhalot literature, depicts the creation of the world from the letters he, yod, and, in certain sources, waw. Contrary to the definite distinction between the traditions that emerges from the reading of the above-mentioned sources, in Samaritan sources we find the two traditions side by side. To date, most scholars who have discussed the creation of the world from letters have tended to unite the different narratives of the creation of the world from letters without distinguishing between them.1 The only exception in this matter is Peter Hayman, who does, albeit briefly, address these differences.2 In this chapter, I will discuss in detail the tradition of the creation of the world from the letters of the ineffable name; in Chapter 3, I will discuss the second tradition, about the creation of the world from twenty-two letters, while trying to demonstrate its Syriac roots. My main argument in these two chapters is that distinguishing between the traditions about the creation of the world from letters will enable us to see that Sefer Yeṣirah is not a part of rabbinic literature; it will also enable us to trace the origins of the specific tradition at the heart of Sefer Yeṣirah: the creation of the world from twenty-two letters.
As I suggested in Chapter 1, there is a reason behind the differences between the two traditions about the creation of the world from letters. The description of creation from the letters of the ineffable name looks like the result of the confluence of two different, unrelated commitments: the high status of the ineffable name in Jewish sources from the Bible onward;3 and the hierarchy in Greek and Coptic sources structuring the relationship between vowels and consonants. Although these two issues developed separately and their roots are distinct, the connection between them is natural and requested. It seems that not later than the first century CE, Greek-speaking Jews began to describe the ineffable name as a sequence of four Hebrew vowels (matres lectionis). In this vein, Josephus describes the name of God as holy and “consist[ing] of four vowels.”4 It would not be far from the truth to assume that the Greek description of the name of God as a name of four letters, the tetragrammaton, stems from the very same reason.
The development of a belief in the creation of the world from the letters of the ineffable name occurred in the same way. In the first stage, during the last centuries BCE, among other beliefs about how the world was created, there was a tradition about the creation of the world from the ineffable name. Later on, in the second stage, probably from the first or the second century onward, that belief changes its form and instead of the creation of the world from the name of God, one can find depictions of the creation of the world from its letters. Scrutiny of the tradition of creation from the letters of the ineffable name has demonstrated that, in the first place, it has very little, if anything, in common with the second tradition, which depicts the creation of the world from twenty-two letters. It is only an anachronistic point of view that induces medieval Jewish writers as well as modern scholars to discuss these two traditions together, simply because both of them associate the creation of the world with alphabetical letters. To put it slightly differently, I would say that from the Middle Ages onward, the rabbinic midrashim were read through the lenses of Sefer Yeṣirah, although there exists a great gap between the two traditions: the first tradition elevates both the name of God and the vowels; the second gives no preference to either.
Mention should be made about the meaning of the creation of the world from the name of God or its letters. In many Jewish sources in late antiquity, from the Apocrypha literature to the rabbinic and Hekhalot literature, as well as in Samaritan sources, there is no real distinction between the narratives of the creation of the world from the name of God or its letters and depictions of the sealing of the abyss with the name of God. There is a reason that sources do not distinguish between the creation of the world and sealing the abyss: the difference between creation and the sealing of the abyss is, for the most part, significant only on the assumption that the creation of the world is ex nihilo.5 Assuming that there was a primeval matter, the role of the creator was to form it and to overcome its chaotic nature. Therefore, from a more mythical point of view, it is reasonable to say that creation of the world actually means that the cosmos overcame primeval chaos, and hence that there is no real difference between the creation of the world from the letters of the ineffable name and the sealing of the abyss with them.
The Early Roots: The Creation of the World from the Name of God
As mentioned above, the tradition that the world was created with the letters of God’s name has early roots:6 in Jubilees 36, Isaac is leaving his two sons, Jacob and Esau, instructing them to keep to the way of God, by whose name heaven and earth were created:
And in the sixth year of this week, Isaac called his two sons, Esau and Jacob. And they came to him and he said to them: “My sons, I am going in the way of my fathers to the eternal home where my fathers are…. Remember, my sons, the Lord the God of Abraham, your father, and (that) I subsequently worshiped and served him in righteousness and joy so that he might multiply you and increase your seed like the stars of heaven with regard to numbers and (so that) he will plant you on the earth as a righteous planting that will not be uprooted for all the eternal generations. And now I will make you swear by the great oath—because there is not an oath that is greater than it, by the glorious and honored and great and splendid and amazing and mighty name that created heavens and earth and everything together—that you will fear him and worship him.”7
Another source in which God’s name is