Further Thoughts on the Origins of Sefer yeṣirah

Steven M. Wasserstrom Further Thoughts on the Origins of Sefer yesirah Sefer yesirah at the Time of its Emergence Despite the dozens of manuscripts, commentaries, translations, and studies devoted to it, the origins of Sefer yesirah (hereafter SY) remain intractably obscure.1 This seemingly impenetrable opacity stands in sharp contrast to its public impact, which has long tended to attract superlatives. Thus, with what came to be typical hyperbole, Louis Ginzberg asserted that "[SY] had a greater influence on the development of the Jewish mind than almost any other book after the completion of the Talmud."2 Scholem's claim for SY, too, was phrased in the 1 Most recently, Yehuda Liebes, Torat ha-yesirah sel Sefer yesirah 0erusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken, 2000). A comprehensive review of the literature lies beyond my scope here. See, for a status quaestionis, Joseph Dan, "Three Phases of the History of the Sefer Yezira," FrankfurterJudaistische Beiträge 21 (1994): 7-29. Louis Ginzberg, Jewish Encyclopedia 6: 603, cited in Peter Hayman, "Sefer Yetsira (The Book of Creation)," Shadow /The Newsletter of the Traditional Cosmological Society} 3(1) (1986): 20-38, on p. 20. A copy of this rare article is available in the Gershom Scholem Library, Jewish National Library, Jerusalem. Aleph 2 (2002)201 superlative: "[SY is the] earliest extant speculative text written in the Hebrew language." The present paper concerns only the origins of Sefer yesirah? I leave aside analysis of its contents per se. Since I published an earlier study on this subject, there have been a number of new articles and editions.5 However, in the first full-length monograph devoted to Sefer yesirah—certainly the most important study yet devoted to it—Yehuda Liebes has now undertaken such analysis on a grand scale. An essentially aesthetic reading of 5Y—Liebes asserts, for example, that the title should be rendered as "The Book of Creativity"—Torat ha-yesirah sel Sefer yesirah studies its cosmological poetics and the world-making potency of its symbols. Dating its origins to the late Second Temple period, Liebes find numerous affinities with its ars poetica in rabbinic texts, in Philo of Alexandria, and in other putatively contemporaneous Hellenistic writings. Liebes dismisses a magical reading of Sefer yesirah and instead accentuates the "mystical and contemplative" creativity of "Avraham Avinu."6 In other connections, too, the author seeks to refute interpretations that run, so he believes, "against the spirit" of the Second Temple text.7 By contrast, the trend if not consensus of recent introductions to Jewish mysticism is to date Sefer yesirah considerably later. Johann Maier locates it in the first Islamic century. Joseph Dan is more emphatic on this point. Why, Dan asks, is this fundamental work of cosmology never cited in any of the great piyyutim or midrashim of late antiquity, especially those that deal with creation? Dan observes that midrashim do not begin to cite Sefer yesirah until after the tenth century .9 His conclusion, like Maier's, is that the book itself must be postIslamic . I would add that other fundamental methodological challenges may be raised against dating SY to the Second Temple period. Most glaring is the question why, if the term sefirot was coined during the Second Temple period, its first appearance was delayed until the commentary on SY by Saadia Gaon almost a millennium later. 202 Steven M. Wasserstrom Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (3 revised edition, New York, 1971), p. 75. Here I am here extending observations that I published some years ago in "Sefer Yesira and Early Islam: A Reappraisal," Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 3 (1993): 1-30. Because I dealt with them in that article, here I will not review the methodological issues involved in dating Sefer yesirah. As surveyed there, these include the rise of grammar and especially phonology, the rise of encyclopedism, the use of the number 32, the appearance of the triad bok, the innovation of the concept of balance, and a generalized linguocentrism that identified the grammatical advances in cosmologica! terms. It seems clear that the first redactions of Sefer yesirah emerged only after such advances were achieved. I should add that the present paper seeks primarily to...