The Sefer Yetzirah: letters, numbers and creation in Jewish thought

The Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation, is one of the shortest and most commented-upon texts of the Jewish tradition. In a few pages it describes how the world was created through thirty-two mysterious paths of wisdom: the ten primordial numbers, called sefirot, and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Tradition attributes it to the patriarch Abraham, but this attribution is legendary.

A work without a certain date

The dating of the Sefer Yetzirah is one of the most debated problems in Jewish studies. Proposals range from the second or third century AD to the ninth century. The text exists in several recensions, a short and a long one, with differences of order and content. Its concise, almost formulaic language makes it hard to place with certainty in a specific milieu.

The Babylonian Talmud, in the tractate Sanhedrin, tells of two rabbis who every Sabbath eve studied the Hilkhot Yetzirah, the «laws of formation», and created a calf to eat. It is not certain that the passage refers to the text we know, but the legend helped link the Sefer Yetzirah to the idea of a creative power of letters.

Sefirot and letters

In the Sefer Yetzirah the word sefirot does not yet have the meaning it would take on in medieval Kabbalah. It denotes the ten numbers or dimensions of the cosmos: the directions of space, good and evil, beginning and end, together with the divine spirit and the elements. The twenty-two letters are divided into three groups: three mothers, seven doubles and twelve simples.

To each group the text links elements of the universe, of time and of the human body. The three mothers correspond to air, water and fire; the seven doubles to the planets and the days of the week; the twelve simples to the signs of the zodiac and the months. The result is a linguistic cosmology, in which the world is built like a text and the combination of letters generates things.

The great commentators

From the tenth century the Sefer Yetzirah became the subject of philosophical commentaries. Saadia Gaon, head of the academy of Sura in Babylonia, wrote one in Arabic around 931. In southern Italy the physician and astronomer Shabbetai Donnolo, born in Oria, composed a commentary entitled Ḥakhmoni. In North Africa Dunash ibn Tamim also wrote on the text. These authors read it as a treatise of science and natural philosophy.

In the Kabbalah of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the book took on a central role. The ten sefirot were reinterpreted as divine emanations, and the Sefer Yetzirah became one of the reference texts of the kabbalists of Provence and Catalonia. Around it there also grew up the legends of the golem, the clay figure animated by letters, which the sources present as exemplary tales.

The first printed edition appeared in Mantua in 1562, while as early as 1552 Guillaume Postel had published a Latin translation in Paris. Since then the Sefer Yetzirah has never ceased to be read, translated and commented upon. It is a unique witness to how a religious tradition conceived the relationship between language, number and the creation of the world.