Mirror of His Beauty: Feminine Images of God from the Bible to the Early Kabbalah (review)

At the center of the Peter Schäfer's innovative study stands the Bahir, the earliest kabbalistic tractate, which appeared in Provence at the end of the twelfth century. For the first time in the history of Judaism, the Bahir unfolds the complex notion of God as both one and possessed of a rich inner life. Although the text does not use the term sefirot for God's inner divine potencies, Schäfer explains that all of the essential characteristics of later kabbalistic systems are in place within it: "the total of ten; the clear separation between the three upper sefirot and the seven lower ones; the tension between God's love and his punishing judgment in the fourth and fifth sefirah, which is balanced out in the sixth; and finally the tenth sefirah, the Shekhinah, which is defined as an explicitly female principle" (p. 120). Schäfer is most interested in the final of feature of the Bahir—its emphasis on God's femininity. In Mirror of His Beauty, he explores the sources of the Bahir's claims for a feminine aspect of the divine, even as he questions traditional arguments about origins and influences.

When the Bahir appeared at the end of the twelfth century it was attributed to a second-century Jewish mystic, a fiction intended "to guarantee its age and thus its 'orthodoxy'" (p. 119). Schäfer works "to place the Bahir's concept of God in historical perspective and to demonstrate that its authors were right to claim that all they did and intended to do was reaffirm the 'old,' to reestablish the 'Torah which was given to Moses on Mount Sinai'" (p. 6). But as Schäfer argues, "the problem is what they conceived as 'old.' Most likely not what we today, after centuries of critical biblical research, have come to understand" (p. 6). The Bahir, then, does not encapsulate ancient Israelite religion as it is understood by modern historical scholarship but instead revives "polytheistic countertendencies in the monotheistic program of the Hebrew Bible, a new breaking up of an encrusted monotheism that had become all too secure of its superiority over 'pagan' polytheism and, worst, had neglected or suppressed some of the basic needs of human beings" (p. 6).

Schäfer demonstrates both the existence of a tradition of the feminine divine within ancient Jewish texts and the concealment of that tradition by the rabbis and by medieval Jewish philosophers. The continuities and breaks in the tradition of the feminine divine mean both that the Bahir must be read in the context of ancient sources, particularly the Wisdom tradition, and that these ancient sources are inadequate to explain the emergence of the feminine divine in the Bahir itself. Schäfer thus turns to an argument for possible Christian influences on the twelfth-century re-emergence of the feminine divine within Judaism, a point which I will take up in more detail below.

The first half of the book might easily stand on its own as a survey of God's femininity from the Hebrew Bible to the Bahir. Schäfer provides detailed textual readings of the figure of Wisdom as she appears in canonical (Job and Proverbs) and noncanonical (Jesus Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon) Jewish texts. God's companion and even helper during creation, sometimes called God's daughter and God's spouse, Wisdom in these biblical and extrabiblical texts is complex, multifaceted and, with the exception of the book of Job, is always explicitly identified as female (chapter 1). Schäfer then turns to the first century C.E. Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, arguing that Philo brings together the biblical and extracanonical Wisdom traditions with Greek philosophy. Schäfer argues against those who claim that Philo allows the male Logos to efface feminine Wisdom. Instead, Schäfer demonstrates that for Philo the Logos and Wisdom co-exist and at...