Sepher Yetzirah

Westcott’s translation of and notes on this famed opaque short mystical book was first published in 1887. The book was originally written in Hebrew and some scholars (especially those who want to give the book an antiquity which adds to its religiosity) suppose that this was done during the beginning of the common era (however the historian Graetz assigns a third or fourth century date and the scholar Zunz as late as 700 or 800 CE). The title means “The Book of Formation,” and refers to what its author or authors supposed was how the unknowable God formed the world. (This, of course, makes no sense, for if God is unknowable, how could the mystics know how the deity functioned.)The author(s) bases much of his thoughts (I say “his” because it is unlikely that a woman would have composed this esoteric book when it was written; but it should be noted that some scholars contend that it was composed by more than a single individual, each adding to what he found) on the numerical value of the letter of the Hebrew alphabet (the first letter equals 1, the letters after 10 are multiples of 10, and those over 100 are multiples of 100, with the last letter equaling 400.) It is also based on the idea that one is allowed to substitute one letter for another (in essence forcing a verse to say what one wants it to say).The book describes the doctrine of the Sephirot, the ten “ineffable” emanations from God which produced the world, an idea still accepted by many Jewish mystics today. It is a short book made up of six chapters comprising in total only 33 paragraphs. The book is very obscure and the many commentaries on it are nothing but a medley of arbitrary and imaginative suppositions of what the author(s) intended. All that can be ascertained from the book is his/their belief that there is only a single deity who created or formed the world. While the book speaks of the ten Sephirot (the Hebrew word is also spelt in other English books as sefirot), the author’s description of them does not resemble how mystics understand them today.