The Sefer ha-Razim: a book of mysteries rebuilt from the Genizah

Until the middle of the twentieth century, the Sefer ha-Razim was merely a title cited in later sources. It was the Israeli scholar Mordecai Margalioth who brought it back to light: working on fragments from the Cairo Genizah and on later works that had preserved parts of it, he reconstructed the text and published it in 1966. Since then the Book of Mysteries has been regarded as one of the most important witnesses to late antique Jewish magic.

The Cairo Genizah and the reconstruction

The Genizah was the storeroom of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, old Cairo, where for centuries Hebrew texts no longer in use were deposited, because writings containing the name of God could not be destroyed. At the end of the nineteenth century the material was taken to Europe, above all to Cambridge, and proved to be an immense archive of letters, documents, poems and religious texts.

Among those leaves Margalioth identified several fragments of the Sefer ha-Razim and supplemented them with quotations in the Sefer Raziel and in medieval translations into Arabic and Latin. His reconstruction has been discussed and partly corrected by later scholars, but it restored a coherent work. Proposed datings cluster in late antiquity, roughly between the third and sixth centuries AD, and point to a Jewish milieu in Palestine or Egypt.

The structure of the seven firmaments

The prologue states that the book was revealed to Noah by the angel Raziel before the flood, and that it passed from him down the generations to Solomon. The body of the text is organised according to the seven firmaments, the stacked heavens of ancient Jewish cosmology. For each one, the angelic camps are described, with their leaders, their names and their functions.

The first six firmaments also contain ritual indications, which the text associates with the angels of each heaven. The seventh, by contrast, is a solemn description of the divine throne, surrounded by hosts of angels praising God. The contrast is deliberate: from the practical management of angelic powers one rises to the contemplation of glory, where every request gives way to praise.

A prayer to Helios in Hebrew letters

One of the most surprising passages in the book contains an invocation of the Sun, called Helios, written in Greek but transliterated into Hebrew characters. The text greets Helios as a horseman rising in the east. Its presence shows that the author was closely acquainted with the Greek religious culture of the age, and reveals strong affinities with the Greek Magical Papyri.

The similarities with the papyri also concern vocabulary, the structure of the prescriptions and the use of angelic names. Historians therefore see in the Sefer ha-Razim an example of how late antique Jewish circles took part in the shared magical culture of the eastern Mediterranean while keeping a monotheistic framework. It is no accident that synagogues of the period in Palestine, such as Hammat Tiberias and Beth Alpha, feature mosaics with the zodiac and the chariot of the Sun.

The Sefer ha-Razim is thus a book found twice: first by medieval compilers, who preserved passages of it in their collections, and then by modern scholars, who reassembled it from scattered fragments. Its history shows how philology can give voice back to a text believed lost and change our picture of an entire age.