In the present and following chapters I would like to address two different forms of Jewish exegesis, to be distinguished by whether they anchor themselves in the semantic or the parasemantic aspects of the interpreted text. The former is represented substantially by the midrashic writings, the halakhic treatises, most of the theosophical-theurgical Kabbalistic literature, and Jewish philosophical allegoresis. The parasemantic aspects of the interpreted texts, on the other hand, are put into relief by the Heikhalot literature, some late midrashim (like Midrash Konen), Hasidei Ashkenaz esoteric corpora, and some advanced stages of the exegetical enterprise of the ecstatic Kabbalah. Although both approaches strive to extract forms of meaning from the canonical texts, the difference between them is to be sought in the difference between the elements of the texts that are exploited more in the course of the interpretive moves. And though any attempt to distinguish too sharply between the two approaches, as if they occurred in totally distinct literary corpora, will inevitably become a futile exercise in abstract categorization, it is necessary to understand the different exegetical strategies that correspond to the different aspects of the interpreted material.
The biblical corpus, a literature that attracted the attention of persons concerned with ways of thinking, believing, or behaving much more than with questions of rhetoric, aesthetics, metaphysics, or history, was commonly approached as conveying major messages whose importance had to be anchored in as many parts of the canonical texts as possible. This attitude is associated with the creation of conceptual schemes that had to be imposed by means of various forms of ingenuous “translation” of an archaic language and worldview into new terms. Such an approach adopted basically semantic strategies for interpretation, to be defined as engaging the meaning of the separate linguistic unit, the word, or the sentence as the crucial object of interpretation. By doing so, one semantic entity is transposed onto another way of discourse that wishes to push forward a particular message.
By parasemantic hermeneutics I understand the interpreter’s recourse to the assumption that even those elements of the text that are not commonly thought to convey a message in its original ancient context did so in a hidden manner. The size of letters, the graphics of the Torah scroll, the spaces between letters, are all interrogated in order to elicit even more recondite secrets.
The structured nature of the message to be conveyed via the biblical interpretation inherent in the semantic approach is public for at least two reasons. It may have some sources in speculative systems that are independent of the biblical text and so are available to an audience that does not depend on the interpreter who adopts it. A famous case is Maimonides’ adoption of substantial Aristotelian concepts and some Neoplatonic views for his interpretation of the Bible. Again, to stay with this example, the interpreter may be concerned not only with the elucidation of an important ancient text but much more with shaping a certain religious worldview, and as such he turns consciously to the wider public. Strong semantic interpreters, namely those who adopt articulated conceptual frameworks, will only rarely insert in their writings discussions on parasemantic aspects of the text.
Parasemantic aspects seem to be much more idiosyncratic. They resort to textual elements which, though significant in the interpretive discourse, are not accepted as such by the ancient context and presumably by many of the interpreters’ contemporaries. The semantic inchoateness of the interpreted material is therefore much greater. The choices made by the interpreter are fairly random and, more crucially, it is the syntactic structures of the text that vanish. In fact, in many cases even the structure of one word disintegrates because of the emphasis put on its separate components. As we saw in Chapter 2, even the white aspects of a text may become the starting point for speculation. Even more dramatically than in postmodern theories of hyper-textuality, the order of the narrative has been severely attenuated in many Kabbalistic forms of interpretation, thereby allowing connections that are more nominal than syntactic. Emerging from a deep immersion in the biblical text, the numerous affinities established between different components of the Bible, conceived of as a hypertext, do not obliterate the ordinary sequence of letters, although the sequence is often ignored during the interpretive process. Neither did the widespread custom of creating literary collages by appropriating verses from different parts of the Bible (especially Psalms) for the daily Jewish liturgy involve any problematic attitude toward the biblical text.1
In this chapter I would like to deal with early examples of semantic interpretations that will later culminate in much stronger hermeneutical systems articulated in medieval Kabbalah. Parasemantic exegesis will be addressed much more extensively in the next chapter.
If postbiblical Jewish literature is a vast complex of different forms of commentary, the most influential mode of interpretation is referred to as midrashic. Like any generic term, it covers a vague category, a fact that does not free a survey of Jewish hermeneutics from having to confront the characteristics of this genre. Earnest and worthy attempts to do so are too numerous to list here, let alone to cover thoroughly,2 but I would like to highlight some of the most salient features for the further development of hermeneutics in Jewish mystical literature. Let me start with the theological presuppositions of the genre.
Midrashic literature was informed by few theologoumena, which have never been presented fully explicated. Nevertheless, it can be generally envisioned as a literary corpus dominated by a personalistic view of God as deeply concerned with human affairs, a changing entity endowed with power and able to interfere in the course of history. Though similar to the major trends in biblical theology, the talmudic-midrashic one evolved under the hard circumstances of a people in exile, and the main theological trait not emphasized in the Bible is the identification of God with the vicissitudes of Jewish history. No longer is God a deity who rules history, as He does in the Bible, but rather one who willingly accepts the tragic fate of his elected people.
As distinct from the main line of the Heikhalot literature, and even more sharply from Sefer Yetzirah, Shimmushei Torah, and Shimmushei Tehilim, God in the rabbinic literature identifies Himself with the fate of Israel but separates himself from Israel’s attempts to involve him in their efforts to examine the Torah.3 The assumption (described in Chapter 4) that supernal powers will be involved in the process of learning and deciding the meaning of a religious text is quite alien to midrashic literature.
In the classical midrashim, the identification of the Torah with the divine is marginal; the major assumption is that after revelation the authoritative text is an independent entity, to be encountered as a sacred text, which can be interrogated in order to obtain answers to crucial religious questions. The separation between God and Torah notwithstanding, it seems that the nature of the rabbinic hermeneutical enterprise reflects the dynamic nature of God. In lieu of one frozen type of information that can be extracted from a biblical verse concerning, for example, the unchanging dimension of the divine body of Heikhalot theology,4 in rabbinic literature the biblical text remains open to novel interpretations. This semantic openness can be explained in more than one way. From our vantage point it is the absence of an explicit and systematic theology that enabled a freer, hermeneutical attitude toward the text in the Talmud and Midrash.5 I do not assume that these literary corpora are totally free of theological presuppositions; this would be too strong a claim. However, the absence of treatises dealing with theological matters in the strict sense is not an accident. I assume that the midrashists avoided such a theological move on purpose, for the strong theological bias of the Heikhalot literature and Sefer Yetzirah, which must have been known to at least some of the rabbinic masters, is evident. On the other hand, they avoided focusing on the parasemantic facets of the texts, such as gematria,6 shapes of the letters, attributions of huge dimensions to the biblical text, or identification of the Torah with supernal entities. It is the non-metaphysical approach to the text that enabled the midrashists to maintain its relative openness, a move that is reminiscent of the more modern approaches. We may fairly apply Roland Barthes’s description of the affinity between the langage classique and nature to the attitude of midrashic interpreters toward the Bible: “Que signifie en effet l’économie rationelle du langage classique sinon que la Nature est pleine, possédable, sans fuite et sans ombre, tout entière soumises aux rets de la parole?”7 Midrashic language may well be viewed as a langage classique, whereas the Kabbalistic language accords in principle with Barthes’s description of langage poètique.
For a midrashic interpreter, the canonical text has to stand by itself; it has to open itself to the reader, who, on his part, is not supposed to be deeply indoctrinated in any particular theology. The fateful correlation between a particular theology and predictable interpretations of specific texts was circumvented by the midrashists. They sacrificed, so to speak, the mysterious and magical attainment of their contemporaries in order to remain with the open text, which can be addressed to a larger community. By remaining faithful to the syntactic and semantic components of the text, the masters of the Midrash were able to communicate messages that could be adapted to the changing historical circumstances,8 whereas the parasemantic elements generated meanings that remained beyond the scope of history and change. Whereas the Midrash is naturally related to the oral, fluid aspects of communication, the mystical and magical views of the Torah in the early Middle Ages were concerned much more with the unique, unchangeable messages to be extracted by means of eccentric hermeneutics precisely from the written form of the Torah.
To put it another way, infrastructural and hyper structural readings of the text, found in the mystical-magical literatures, lose contact with the common people, with average consciousness and regular practice. The Torah as a huge hieroglyph can be contemplated as if through a telescope; the concern with the special significance of the separate letters can be compared to the reading of the Torah by means of a microscope. In both cases the specific texture of the text vanishes, especially its semantic parts. Dominated by their belief in the unique nature of the elements of language, the Jewish mystics could retreat into more formal, schematic, sometimes atomistic readings very different from midrashic semantics. The midrashists were reading the Torah with regular glasses, which may still distort the meaning of the text, but without exploding its inner syntax. Just as the regular fabric of life is disorganized by contemplative immersion and a too detailed penetration into the infrastructure of the regular objects, or by indulgence in cosmic speculation, so too is the case in the domain of the study of the texts. Special types of consciousness seem to be involved in mystical and magical interpretations of the Torah: transcendence of the mundane zone in the case of those who ascend to the Merkavah, or revelations stemming from the Prince of the Torah according to another text, or magical rites related to the use of the divine names extracted from the various biblical verses. These were not practices to be preached to the multitude, but attainments of the elite.9
Moreover, according to warnings found in rabbinic literature, the best known being the legend of the four sages who entered the Pardes, it is dangerous even for the elite to indulge in mystical and cosmogonic speculation. Midrash is a horizontal hermeneutics par excellence; hence the ethical focus of this literature. The basic situation of the Torah in this literature is that of a sacred scripture which stems from the supernal world but, according to the vast majority of texts, is descended and now found here below. When dealing with nature, Midrash envisions an encounter with it, not an explanation of its emergence from the higher world. However, the magical, the mystical, and the philosophical hermeneutics integrated substantial vertical elements. They bridged the gap between the supernal and the mundane either by creating an ontological nexus—emanation schemes, for example—or by elaborating on the theory of symbol as organically related to the supernal world, or by describing how to elevate the soul to its source, or by exploring the possibility of influencing the divine realm through magical or theurgical techniques. These are important and characteristic forms of Kabbalistic hermeneutics, as we have already seen in previous chapters.
One of the best-known theologoumena in midrashic literature assumes the existence of two measures, middot, understood in many texts as two divine attributes, mercy and justice (or judgment). Though historically predating the earliest midrashic compositions, as we learn from Philo’s recurrent resort to two divine attributes, and from other ancient material insightfully analyzed by Shlomo Naeh,10 it may be that already the biblical material represents some distinction between the divine names as pointing to different theological approaches, as has been suggested by Israel Knohl.11
The midrashic interest in the various meanings of the divine names constitutes the incipient stages, already evident in Philo’s many discussions on the topic, in a direction that will be fully exploited by the vast majority of Kabbalists. So, for example, we read in an influential midrashic text, Pesiqta’ de-Rabbi Kahana’, about a passage from R. Meir, an important tannaitic author:12 “ ‘The Tetragrammaton comes out of its place.’13 It comes out from one attribute to another attribute, from the attribute of judgment to the attribute of mercy over Israel.”14 The gist of the passage is that despite the correspondence between the Tetragrammaton and the attribute of judgment, which is indeed a very rare identification, the Tetragrammaton is changing its regular activity and acts as an attribute of mercy. Thus, a distinction between the different passages in the Bible where the divine names occur is established; different divine powers are conceived of as operating in different passages that are related to divine actions. Though the “attributal” reading in the midrash does not bring together several biblical passages in order to define the Tetragrammaton as an attribute of mercy, this theologoumenon is accepted as a given fact and is put into relief without providing a more dense reading of the pertinent passages. Thus, it is an implicit constellation that works in the rabbinic perception of the meaning of the divine names.
Another formulation of the same dynamics appears in several midrashic sources as an interpretation of Ecclesiastes 8:1: “Who is like the wise man? and who knows the interpretation of a thing? a man’s wisdom makes his face to shine, and the boldness of his face is changed.” In Leviticus Rabba ’this verse is interpreted as pointing to God, who is described as wise and as revealing the Torah to Moses. As to the last part of the verse, it is said in the same vein that it is a description of God: “He is changing from the attribute of judgment to the attribute of mercy over Israel.”15 Apparently the shining face is the attribute of mercy, while the boldness of face stands for that of judgment.
These midrashic traditions constitute, in my opinion, attempts to translate the changes in divine will in terms that are more understandable. By resorting to the theology of divine attributes, a more “stable” system had been created, a system described at least once as somehow independent of God’s will.16 It should be mentioned that the rabbinic sources, like Philo in passages to be addressed below, assigned the role of governing to the divine attributes because by means of those attributes the world had been created. Some forms of ontological relations between the imagined attributes and the manner in which reality has been constituted and is ruled prepared the more detailed and consistent theosophical hermeneutics to be analyzed in Chapter 10.
These midrashic views are very modest indications of a process of gradual and more complex constellation of the biblical discourse, which will become paramount for the hermeneutical approach of theosophical Kabbalah. The “constellated” hermeneutics of some Jewish medieval literatures differs from the “disastered” approach of the Midrash and modern Jewish thinkers like Benjamin, Levinas, and Derrida, and comes closer to the concept of “systematics,” to resort to Barthes’s term.17 According to a late midrash, Midrash Tadsche’, which was committed to writing sometime in the eleventh century, “the two cherubim on the ark of testimony correspond to the two holy names: the Tetragrammaton and ‘Elohim.”18
One of the earliest Kabbalistic documents, a passage attributed (correctly, in my opinion) to R. Abraham ben David of Posquieres, combined the dichotomy of the two attributes with a more complicated theosophical scheme. At the end of an interesting passage dealing with the operations related to two attributes, he writes:
Since they were created dupartzujin, their actions are performed in cooperation and equality and in a total union,19 without any separation. Furthermore, unless they would be created du-partzufin, no union would emerge from them and the attribute of judgment would not converge with [that of] mercy, nor would the attribute of mercy converge with [that of] judgment. But now, since they were created du-partzufin, each of them may approach his partner and unite with him, and his desire is to willingly unite with his partner, so “that the Tabernacle may be one.”20 A proof of this [view] is found in the [divine] names, which refer to each other, since Yod He21 refers to the attribute of judgment and ’Elohim to the attribute of mercy, as in “Then the Tetragrammaton rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah.”22 “The Tetragrammaton rained” [means] “He passed from one attribute to another attribute.”23
This early Kabbalist resorts to the midrashic view of this specific type of relationship between the two attributes as a proof text for his view (analyzed elsewhere in some detail) concerning the emergence of the two distinct divine attributes from an androgynous unit and their possibility of cooperating because of it.24 Presumably, the emanation of the sefirot Hesed and Gevurah from Binah—which is presumed to be the two-faced divine power, the du-partzufin—is the theosophical process that is described in ben David’s text. As we shall see, a very similar stand is found in Philo of Alexandria. But unlike the Philonic view, which speaks solely of cooperation between the attributes, the midrashic proof text speaks of the possibility of transformations of one attribute into another, this being the illustration of the ideal of cooperation. In fact, the two processes, though similar, do not coincide.
R. Abraham ben David’s grandson, R. Asher ben David, elaborates in his Commentary of Thirteen Attributes on the view of R. Abraham, though he takes the position one step further: provided that every sefirah somehow includes the other sefirot, the Tetragrammaton may refer to all the sefirot, as each divine power can be transformed into another. This is the case even where two diametrically opposed sefirot are concerned, since they too are united to each other.25 Although the differentiation between the attributes was part of an attempt to account for the different types of divine activity, the exegetical difficulties and the dynamic vision of God conspired to attenuate the differences between them. By addressing the two Kabbalists’ discussions, I have intended to point out both the continuity and the difference between the midrashic and the Kabbalistic understanding of the two attributes. Needless to say, discussions of the change from one attribute to another are quite widespread in Kabbalah, and I have not attempted to exhaust its later developments.26
The interest in the dynamic vision of the two divine attributes as changing into each other is found also in Sefer ha-Hokhmah of R. Eleazar of Worms, an Ashkenazi master who was, roughly speaking, a contemporary of R. Asher ben David.27 In another writing he contends that “the Tetragrammaton is inscribed on the Seat of Judgment, and likewise on the Seat of Mercy and on the foreheads of the Cherubim, as it is written:28 ‘whose name is called by the name of the Lord of hosts who dwells upon the Cherubim,’ and corresponding to it are the two [divine] names.”29 The fact that the Tetragrammaton is conceived of as inscribed on the two seats, presumably representing the two attributes, may be related to the transition from one attribute to another.
Let me attempt to describe the affinities between the vague pre-rabbinic and rabbinic theologoumena related to the divine attributes and the Kabbalistic and Ashkenazi passages adduced above. One way to address the quandary of the relationship between them is to claim arguments of continuity or discontinuity or, in more academic nomenclature, of coincidence of meanings philologically demonstrated or the resort of the Kabbalists to midrashic texts as mere proof texts. The other way would be to look to the affinities in terms of continuing an earlier vector, which assumes both exposure to the earlier text as religiously meaningful and at the same time relating the exegete’s spiritual universe to components of the interpreted proof text. Thus we may assume that “mere” proof text may be sometimes better understood as a springboard.
Especially important for the later developments of the hermeneutics of the theosophical-theurgical Kabbalah is the dynamization of other aspects in the rabbinic understanding of the Bible. A fine example of what I would describe as a dynamic perception of a biblical event appears in Mekhilta’ de-Rabbi Ishma’el, where Exodus 12:51, “Even that selfsame day it came to pass that all the hosts of the Lord went out from the Land of Egypt,” is discussed as follows: “Whenever Israel is enslaved, the Shekhinah, as it were, is enslaved with them, as it is said, ‘And they saw the God of Israel, and under His feet there was,’ etc. But after they were redeemed, what does it say? ‘And the likeness of the very heaven for clearness.’”30
The full biblical verse from Exodus 24:10 goes as follows: “ (a) And they saw the God of Israel (b) and under His feet there was a kind of paved work of sapphire stone (c) and it was as the likeness of the very heaven for clearness.” Part (c) expands and explains the content of (b), the subject of both phrases being the same, “a kind of paved work”; (c) merely complements the description of the “work” as “sapphire stone” by adding the attribute of clearness. The Midrash, however, perceives parts (b) and (c) as relating to two opposite situations: (b) is conceived of as describing the vision of Moses and the elders of Israel while still enslaved, a reading seemingly substantiated by an intertextual understanding of livnat ha-sappir, “paved work of sapphire,” which the ancient exegete regarded as an allusion to levenim, “bricks,”31 seen as a symbol of Jewish slavery in Egypt.32 This pun allows one to attribute the state of slavery to God Himself: He, like the children of Israel, had bricks beneath His feet.33 Especially pertinent is the tradition adduced in the name of Midrash‘Avkkir by the thirteenth-century Ashkenazi master R. Eleazar ha-Darshan: “a kind of paved work of sapphire stone: it reflects the status of Israel, when they were treading the mortar with their feet; as though one could conceive it was above: In all their affliction He was afflicted.”34
Once they had been redeemed, however, the vision changed: part (c) of the verse describes the new state of God when His feet were apparently “clear.” The link between the two motifs is assured by the recurrence of the noun’etzem both in connection with the exodus from Egypt and in the context of the vision of God as clear.35 An entire myth of the passage of Israel from slavery to freedom is here attributed analogically to God Himself, described in highly anthropomorphic terms. We witness an explicit case of participation mystique of the divine in the human experience of slavery and liberation; in the words of the sequence in the Mekhilta’, “in all their afflictions He was afflicted.”36
However, this changing perception of history and of the divine attributes can be more adequately qualified. In the same midrash we learn that God revealed Himself under two main attributes: mercy and judgment.37 When the midrash wishes to exemplify the appearance of the attribute of mercy, it quotes part (c) of our verse. On the basis of this view, I would conjecture that the attribute of judgment is thought to be hinted at by the name ’Elohei Yisrael, the name ’Elohim usually being the common term for this attribute. Thus, our verse was regarded as pointing to a double revelation: of judgment and of mercy.38 Moreover, even if this assumption proves to be incorrect, we still encounter a “dynamization” of the biblical verse: according to the Mekhilta’, it refers to an entire process that occurs simultaneously on the historical and the divine planes. This intimate affinity between the two spheres of existence and their dynamics is forced on the verse, using current devices of midrashic hermeneutics. What distinguishes this particular interpretation from the more common midrashic ones is the correlation achieved between two processes—not states—which, while ontologically remote, are part of a higher dynamic structure. Here we are at the edge of myth, but a very specific type of myth. As R. ‘Aqivah went on to say there, “Were it not expressly written in scripture, one could not say it. Israel said to God: ‘Thou hast redeemed Thyself—as though one could conceive of such a thing.” The redemption of the Shekhinah depends, therefore, on the prior salvation of Israel.
Roughly speaking, medieval hermeneutics as represented by the most important practices adopted by philosophical, Kabbalistic, and Ashkenazi Hasidic literatures drastically deviated from midrashic, semantically oriented hermeneutics. The reason for such a bold departure seems to be related to the installment of strong theologies, which were not characteristic of midrashic literature and thought. All the above-mentioned types of thought were profoundly influenced by relatively elaborate theologies, which impinged on their peculiar manner of interpreting canonical texts. The midrashic approach is deeply exegetical, as it struggled with the semantic aspects of the text, only rarely allowing the impact of rigid extra-textual systems of thought. Although there cannot be any doubt that Midrash departs from some of the biblical ways of thought, it still remained immersed in the same domain of problems that preoccupied biblical thinking: the myth of exile and redemption, the myth of election, the deep concern with ritual and ethics. This is not so much the case in the medieval literatures mentioned above. More theologically inclined than hermeneutical, they incessantly struggled with the problem of how to import their respective metaphysical systems into the older texts, much more than attempting to embark on a sustained effort to interrogate these texts in order to discover solutions for their theological quandaries. This approach will be discussed in the next chapter under the name of intercorporality.
If the midrashic discourse is a large-scale enterprise in exhausting the possible implications of the “dark,” namely ambiguous, parts of the canon, the super-imposition of elaborate theologies—Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, or theosophic—is characteristic of most medieval hermeneutics. By so doing, the speculative interpreters of the Middle Ages infused their theologies in the midrashic interpretation of the Bible as well. To a great extent, the speculative interpretations were concerned with a comprehensive approach to Jewish religion as much as with a verse-centered approach. In their search for and emphasis on the hidden meaning of the various religious texts, some medieval writers helped to establish the idea of the plain sense of the scriptures, the peshat, a notion marginal to midrashic and talmudic thought. Midrash, on the other side, is not only a verse-centered exegesis but also an interversal hermeneutics,39 which explores the significance of an obscure, controversial text with the help of another obscure, though perhaps less obscure, text. Interesting literary achievements of the midrashic discourse emerge peculiarly from the interval created by ambiguities inherent in some aspects of various biblical verses.
In the greater intellectual systems of the Middle Ages the major effort is inter-cultural. Aristotle, Plato, the Muslim kalam, and some other forms of systematic thought were employed by Jewish thinkers in order to illuminate the obscurities of the Jewish tradition, biblical and talmudic-midrashic. It seems that only in a few cases in medieval Jewish literature can we detect a relatively faithful approach to midrashic interpretation, namely in some forms of Kabbalah. The more arresting achievements of midrashic interpretation stem from the unexpected results produced through purely linguistic interpretive techniques; on the other hand, the speculative interpretations were based on the introduction of novel types of interpretation, allegorical or symbolic, or of older Jewish techniques that were marginal in the midrashic literature, in order to achieve expected results. The speculative approach was intended to clarify, as much as possible, the religious mechanism that governs not only perfect human behavior but also divine behavior, by penetrating into the secrets of the higher worlds; in fact, both Kabbalah and Jewish medieval philosophy constitute different forms of demystification of the divine realm by comprehensive explanations.
Midrashic interpretation is interested in keeping the higher world a mystery of the divine will. Ironically, it is the midrashic approach that prevents any metaphysical discussion of the problem of unde malum, the origin of evil, in answer to the question of what the reason is for the terrible death of a righteous person like R. ‘Aqivah: “Be silent, this what ascended into the [divine] thought.”40 The inventiveness of the midrashist is deeply rooted in his ability to manipulate the text as a literary work rather than a theological artifact, whereas the speculative attitudes envisioned their canon essentially as a fountainhead of theological truth and only secondarily as a literary creation. Freer from systematic theological constraints than the medieval Jewish thinkers were, the midrashists were able to respond to the same verse in different ways. A theology inclined to emphasize the divine will, namely an ever-changing power that cannot easily be formulated in itself but can only be glimpsed through its manifestation in a written document, informed a much more open attitude toward the text, one Handelman described as more metonymic. While a similar attitude may be found in some Kabbalistic schools, others, like their philosophical contemporaries, were concerned with exposing the one precise esoteric meaning of the canonical texts. This openness of Midrash to different though quite loose theological stands allowed a more creative hermeneutics. This is why modern research was able to propose relatively comprehensive descriptions of the theologies of the medieval speculative Jewish literatures, while the study of midrashic thought still awaits reconstructions of the different trends of thought in the midrashic and talmudic texts.
In the following I shall try to substantiate my skeptical attitude toward the view that Kabbalistic hermeneutics in general is more faithful than other medieval literatures to the midrashic approach. There is no doubt that several Kabbalistic schools are as distant from the midrashic approach as the medieval philosophers were. Among examples are the Provençal Kabbalah and its Geronese repercussions; it would be very difficult to find midrashic approaches in the writings of R. Isaac Sagi-Nahor, one of the paragons of early Kabbalah. The dry, monosemic, theosophical symbols and discussions may perhaps reflect earlier esoteric traditions, extracted by R. Isaac’s predecessors from traditional texts that preceded him by decades, but his own hermeneutical approach is very technical. He relates the various elements of the canonical text, the words of the daily liturgy or the sentences of Sefer Yetzirah, to the theosophical termini technici without any substantial effort to explain the semantic relationship between them. A bit more hermeneutical is the approach of his student, R. Ezra of Gerona, but his follower, R. Azriel of Gerona, seems to return partially to the way of R. Isaac the Blind, even intensifying the technical use of philosophical terminology. The ’Iyyun literature, whose affinities to R. Azriel of Gerona were already acknowledged by scholars, rarely bothers with interpreting substantial parts of the canonical texts. Somewhat similar to them are the writings of the ha-Kohen brothers, two important Kabbalists flourishing in the mid-thirteenth century. They commented on a series of topics, such as the letters of the alphabet and the biblical cantillation sign but, with one exception, not on the canonical texts. Abraham Abulafia’s writings are deeply concerned with the mystical and philosophical issues, but his interest in the midrashic approach is rather scanty.41
What remained of the major Kabbalistic schools of the thirteenth century are the book of Bahir, the Kabbalistic school of Nahmanides, and the book of the Zohar. Though in radically different ways, it seems that only in these three cases is there a strong awareness of Midrash as a powerful source of creativity. The Bahir, sometimes referred to as the Midrash of R. Nehunya ben ha-Qanah, indeed uses some midrashic strategies.42 This awareness is evident in R. Yehudah ben Yaqar’s Commentary of the Prayer and, to a lesser extent, in Nahmanides’ writings.43 It gradually disappeared in the writings of the followers of Nahmanides, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In later Kabbalah, as represented by the Lurianic literature, the midrashic approach is even smaller, as the use of the termini technici prevail in an unprecedented manner. The more the symbolic approach was attenuated by its absorption into a comprehensive and detailed myth, the less can we expect a resort to a midrashic attitude toward the interpreted texts.44 It seems, therefore, that only the Zohar has consciously intended to accept the literary genre of Midrash, as even some of his titles demonstrate: Midrash ha-Ne’elam, Midrasho shel Rashbi, Midrash Va-Yehi ‘Or. Much more significant, however, is the actual structure of the Zoharic discourse, which reflects a deep affinity with rhetorical strategies of Midrash.45 The absence of technical terms, the presence of rhetorical locutions, and the implicit theology that emerges out of the interrelated biblical verses pervade important segments of the Zohar, transforming them into part of a medieval Midrash. What seems to be characteristic of the Zoharic theology, and to a certain extent some important segments of other theosophical-theurgical kinds of Kabbalah, is the fusion between the static and the anthropomorphic theology typical of the Heikhalot literature, on the one hand, and the more dynamic, powerful, and personalistic attitude of midrashic-talmudic thought, on the other. The static shape of the divine shiur qomah was “activated,” at least on some levels, by the biblical and midrashic views of God as will and power that can augment or diminish.46
The reintroduction into Jewish theology, toward the end of the twelfth century, of the dynamism found in mystical literature had a deep impact on Kabbalistic hermeneutics. The ongoing processes taking place between the various divine attributes, which are more than the metamorphoses of the divine limbs, allowed a much more creative and dynamic reading of the Bible as reflecting the supernal processes into the decoded polysemic texts.47 To the extent that the formal elements remained important in Kabbalistic theosophy, they can also be detected in the peculiar emphasis on the shapes of the Hebrew letters, which became a real fascination of the theosophical Kabbalists.48 This correlation is obvious in Sefer ha-Temunah, which surmises that the alphabet is the real countenance of the divine configuration, referred to as shi’ur qomah.49
The strong presence of more articulated theologies among the Jews is therefore the major factor in preventing the development of midrashic discourse in the Middle Ages. When the focus of the literary discourse is divided between the inner tensions of the semantics of the text and the strong intellectual superstructure that in most cases emerged outside the tradition that produced the text, the midrashic approach is radically weakened. Some Kabbalistic writings, particularly the Zohar, remained close to the midrashic discourse only when they were able to disguise the existence of an elaborate theosophy, which was commonly expressed by other Kabbalistic writings in complex, novel nomenclature. Whether the diametrically opposite Kabbalistic and philosophical approaches to the canonical texts are the result of a deep spiritual crisis,50 or more variegated explanations for the emergence of the new modes of interpreting the texts are more pertinent, it is obvious that the medieval thinkers distanced themselves from the non-constellated thought of Talmud and Midrash.
The attenuation of the role of Kabbalistic theosophical terminology, sometimes by its psychological interpretation, enabled Polish Hasidism to regain some of the charm of the midrashic discourse. Yet even in the cases of those Hasidic masters who did not use Kabbalistic terminology, it is rather difficult to find a classical midrashic treatment of the texts. The reappearance of orality in the Hasidic groups, in the form of sermons delivered by Hasidic leaders, was a watershed, which contributed to a certain transcending of the medieval ideological superstructures in favor of simpler and more fluid theologies informing a simpler and more flexible hermeneutics. It seems that simpler theologies invite a simpler hermeneutical and exegetical approach, whereas the more comprehensive and systematic theologies support more complex and eccentric exegesis and hermeneutics. (This issue is addressed in some detail in Appendix 3.) Indubitably, Martin Buber was right when he considered Hasidism an attempt to deschematize the mystery, namely religion, which became more schematic and mechanical in Lurianic Kabbalah.51
I would like now to offer an explanation of the emergence of those types of symbolism characteristic of theosophical-theurgical Kabbalah. My main claim is that the ascent of new theologies that strive to validate themselves attracted material from the sacred scriptures in order to use them as proof texts and thus retrojected themselves into the earlier sacrosanct texts. This move is even more conspicuous when it takes place within a polemic ambiance. Here I shall deal only with a few examples, which seem to me to be the earliest late-antiquity appearances; the later and more widespread resort to symbolism in medieval Kabbalah will be dealt with in a separate chapter. I would like to emphasize that I make no claim to have found a beginning or the precise historical origins of a certain type of symbolism. Rather, I am concerned with the types of cultural and religious situations that invite a different form of metaphorical expression.
A survey of the developments related to Jewish mystical exegesis cannot overlook the fundamental fact that the first extensive commentaries on many parts of the Bible were produced by Philo of Alexandria before the articulation of rabbinic literature in written form. Written in Greek in a center of Hellenistic culture, Philo’s commentaries were destined to have a lasting impact on the emerging Christianity, which was responsible for the preservation of his manuscripts. Though transferred to Caesarea, a center of patristic and rabbinic scholarship on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, those manuscripts did not attract the attention of Jewish masters, and the name of Philo and his commentaries was destined to disappear from the horizons of Jewish thought and exegesis for a millennium and a half. If he had any influence on medieval Jews, a supposition which in my opinion remains to be proved, it is a matter of mediated transmission, perhaps by Christian thought, rather than of direct acquaintance with his writings in the original or in translation. This rejection of the Alexandrian exegete by all the rabbis is part of a cultural decision, which preferred other forms of thought and writing.52 For our purposes, however, the emergence of articulated allegorical and symbolic approaches to the Bible in antiquity should be seriously taken in consideration from both the phenomenological and historical points of view—even more so when the exegete is seen by many leading scholars to be a mystic.53
Phenomenologically speaking, the emergence of commentaries that are concerned with extracting from the sacred scriptures a set of ideas that were influenced by various Greek philosophies in their terminology and concepts was described as a radical move. Philo is indubitably such an interpreter and has been described by Gerald Bruns as a radical interpreter.54 Philo’s oeuvre represents a dramatic development whose specific characteristics shaped the form of Western religious thought for many generations. His thought has been seen by Erwin Goodenough as part of a more widespread phenomenon, a Jewish mystical stream that was antirabbinic in nature and resorted to symbols. Were Goodenough’s theory accepted, it could provide material for a strong and influential form of ancient Judaism that would constitute a parallel to medieval Kabbalistic symbology and invite historical reflections about possible affinities between ancient and medieval Jewish forms of symbolically inclined mysticism. However, the material Goodenough presented in his numerous volumes on Jewish symbols, as well as in his By Light, Light, did not support his claim of a widespread and uniform mystical trend in Judaism.55 Yet this critique does not invalidate Philo’s mystical inclinations or his resort to symbolism in his vast oeuvre. His mystical leanings and exegetical stands, unlike Goodenough’s argument for an ancient stream of mystical Judaism developing alongside Philo, are not a scholarly reconstruction.
Historically speaking, the hermeneutical phenomena embodied in Philo’s books might have remained isolated events with no repercussions in Judaism. The claim of the impact of Philo’s exegesis on a layer of Zoharic literature was advanced by Samuel Belkin but rejected firmly by Scholem’s school.56 This rejection of a specific claim does not, however, negate the possibility that phenomenological affinities should be pointed out, and this indeed is what Scholem did on a number of occasions, when he called attention to fascinating resemblances between the Alexandrian exegete and Kabbalistic hermeneutics.57 Moreover, the historical nexus between Philo and medieval Jewish mysticism should not be totally rejected. I would suggest keeping an open mind to various possibilities that would explain parallels or even influences. As I have attempted to show elsewhere, there is at least one striking instance when the similarity between a passage from R. Abraham ben David, one of the first Kabbalists, and a view expressed in Philo.58 Furthermore, an interesting parallel can be drawn between a passage from Rabad’s son, R. Isaac the Blind, dealing with eschatology, and a passage from Philo.59 Here, however, it is not the possibility of historical linkages that concerns me but the phenomenon represented by Philo’s symbolic exegesis. Needless to say, the following observations do not attempt to offer an overall survey of Philo’s exegesis,60 nor even a comprehensive analysis of his resort to the term symbol. The goal of the present discussion is to put into relief the existence of a special type of symbolism that relates biblical material to divine powers and events, in a manner reminiscent of the later theosophical-theurgical Kabbalah. Let me start with Philo’s discussion of the biblical cherubim as symbols of the two divine attributes. The three texts adduced below have often been quoted together, though I could not find any sustained discussion that addressed their hermeneutic implications and their relevance for later Kabbalistic symbolism. In De Cherubim we read:
With the one God who truly Is are two all-high and primary powers, Goodness and Sovereignty. Through his Goodness he engendered all that is, through his Sovereignty he rules what he has engendered, but a third uniting both is intermediating Logos, for it is through Logos that God is both ruler and good. Of these two powers, Sovereignty and Goodness, the cherubim are symbols, but of Logos, the flaming sword is the symbol.61
Elsewhere, again when discussing the nature of the cherubim, he claims:
For it is necessary that the Powers, the Creative and Royal, should look toward each other in contemplation of each other’s beauty, and at the same time in conspiracy for the benefit of things that have come into existence. In the second place, since God, who is One, is both the Creator and King, naturally the Powers, though divided, are again united. For it was advantageous that they be divided in order that the one might function as creator, the other as ruler. For the functions differ. And the Powers were brought together in another way by the eternal juxtaposition of the names62 in order that the Creative Power might share in the Royal and the Royal in the Creative. Both incline toward the Mercy Seat. For if God had not been merciful to the things which now exist, nothing would have been created through the Creative Power nor be given legal regimentation by the Royal Power.63
For the history of the emergence of the symbolic mode of interpretation in theosophical-theurgical Kabbalah, it is important to point out the organization of two crucial issues in the biblical text according to the ontology that informs Philo’s thought based on the activity of two divine attributes: the Creative and the Royal. These attributes are symbolized by the two cherubim and the two divine names.64 More consequential from our point of view, however, is the relationship between the two cherubim: they are not conceived of as statically pointing to the two divine powers but rather embody in their status a principle that informs their emergence: just as their substance is identical to that of the seat of mercy—according to the biblical description—and inclines toward it, so too the attributes emerged from the divine substance and cooperate with each other. Thus, both the structure and the processes related to the divine powers are thought to be inherent in the structure and position of the cherubim. The two divine attributes and their manner of activity inform many of Philo’s discussions. Of special importance for understanding the nexus between exegesis and mysticism is Philo’s confession regarding the topic of cherubim. He indicates that “it [the interpretation] comes from a voice in my own soul, which oftentimes is god-possessed and divines where it does not know. This thought I will record in words if I can. The voice told me that while God is indeed one, His highest and chiefest powers are two, even goodness and sovereignty … For this is a divine mystery and its lesson is for the initiated who are worthy to receive the holiest secret.”65 The mysterious interpretation of the cherubim therefore resorts to symbolism that is nourished by an inner voice or a divine revelation, which creates the nexus between the theological scheme and its biblical counterpart.
Let me compare Philo’s symbolism and allegory with the main stream of Jewish medieval allegoresis. The latter is concerned more with psychological, political, and natural (physical and metaphysical) topics than it is with relations and processes taking place in the divine realm. Inspired by a negative theology adopted by Maimonides, Jewish allegorists were not particularly concerned with transforming the linguistic units of the biblical text to signs dealing with the divine realm. Philo, however, was much more open to envisioning the sacred scriptures as conductive to a positive knowledge of the divine realm.66
Yet although these are examples of symbolic interpretations that elevate some of the biblical accounts to the status of narratives that reflect events on high, related to the divine realm, Philo did not resort to symbolic interpretations of this kind very often. More commonly he regarded the biblical words as pointing symbolically to inner processes, an exegetical matter close to medieval psychological allegoresis.67 Nevertheless, Philo testifies that a more comprehensive symbolic approach is to be found among some persons he knew: “I heard … from inspired men who take most of the contents of the Law to be visible symbols of things invisible, expressing the inexpressible.”68 It is quite interesting that already Philo presents the nexus between inspiration and symbolic interpretation. Apparently, the secret or symbolic cargos of the sacred scriptures are not discovered by an analytical approach to the text but depend on a divine revelation. According to another text, Philo seems to have had access to much more symbolically inclined trends of biblical exegesis: “There are some who, taking the laws in their literal sense as symbols of intelligible realities, are over precise in their investigation of the symbol, while frivolously neglecting the letter.”69 Therefore, we may distinguish between Philo’s own symbolic interpretations, which are apparently more limited and moderate insofar as the biblical text is conceived of as pointing to the divine realm, and a more comprehensive arcanization that took the form of symbolic decoding of substantial parts of the biblical text, a trend toward which Philo adopted a reserved attitude.
For the history of the emergence of the symbols that point to divine attributes and events, it is important to mention the symbolic exegesis of Valentinus, who explained the Greek Bible as a symbol for a celestial history for which Jesus’ life is a lower replica.70 This form of exemplarism was also adopted by Origen.71
Let me turn to another early form of symbolism, one that is more static than the standard Kabbalist symbolisms. In a presumably late-first-century Gnostic text by Monoimos the Arab, as quoted by Hippolytus of Rome, we read about an anthropomorphic entity that is both a monad and a decad, a tittle of the letter iota:
The monad, [that is] the one tittle, is therefore, he says, also a decad. For by the actual power of this one tittle are produced duad, and triad, and tetrad, and pentad, and hexad, and heptad, and duad, and ennead, up to ten. For these numbers, he says, are capable of many divisions, and they reside in that simple and uncompounded single tittle of the iota. And this is what has been declared:72 “It pleased [God] that all fullness should dwell in the son of man bodily.”73
What interests me in this passage are the strongly speculative aspects of the tittle of the iota, which is described by referring to mathematical assumptions, characteristic of the short passages that survived in Monoimos’ name. The monad generates all the numbers, which are all comprised in it, and the theological aspect, the identification of the monad/decad with the Christ. There is nothing symbolic involved in this passage, hence it does not organize any literary discourse in terms of an entity found on another level; the verse from the Greek Bible refers to an entity that is also referred in Monoimos’ text. In another passage, however, the type of discourse changes dramatically. The tittle of the iota attracts plenty of literary description:
That one indivisible tittle is … one tittle of the iota,74 with many faces,75 and innumerable eyes,76 and countless names, and this [tittle] … an image of that perfect invisible man … constitutes a perfect son of a perfect man. When, therefore, he [Monoimos] says, Moses mentions that the rod was changeably brandished for the [introduction of the] plagues throughout Egypt—now the plagues, he says, are allegorically expressed symbols of creation—he did not [as a symbol] for more plagues than ten shape the rod. Now, this [rod] constitutes one tittle of the iota, and is [both] twofold [and] various. This succession of ten plagues is, he says, the mundane creation … With that one tittle, the law constitutes the series of ten commandments, which expresses allegorically the divine mysteries of [those] precepts. For, he says, all knowledge of the universe is contained in what relates to the succession of the ten plagues and the series of ten commandments.77
Let me start with the simple observation that the organizing entity is a linguistic sign: the tittle of a small letter. Its tenfold nature—I assume because iota/yod is the tenth letter in the Greek and Hebrew alphabets—allows such a resort to it as a suitable symbol. Thus, both tenfold and anthropomorphic, it brings together other types of decads: the ten plagues, the ten commandments, and perhaps some version of ten creative speeches, reminiscent of the divine logoi, ma’amarot, in rabbinic literature. However, organizing the various decads may be a simple creation of affinities based on a formal criterion that operates on a strictly horizontal level, bringing together material found in the text, and may be strictly mundane, as they point to events taking place here below. Yet this is evidently not the case in this passage, for there is a conspicuously and decisively vertical dimension to the decads mentioned in the Bible: the reference to a metaphysical decad, the anthropomorphic “son of man,” who is likewise intimated by the tittle of an iota. In my opinion, the emergence of these affinities is facilitated by the ascent of the centrality of metaphysical thinking over textual thinking and the power of the ontic structures to organize textual ones. In short, the above text represents an impulse that is crucial, though not exclusive, in Philo, in Gnosticism, and in some ancient Christian theologies, to validate ontic schemes by attracting earlier texts into a web of relationship that would present the schemes as central. Since ontic schemes and hermeneutical grids were new, the discrepancy between the new organizing schemes and the “attracted” material was a matter of necessity, and it created ambiguities that contributed to the mysteriousness of the supernal structures and invited a more symbolic approach to the scriptures. Or, to capitalize on Bruns’s suggestion that in Christianity the Old Testament has become a secret book pointing to events related only in the New Testament, with the Christ as performing a midrashic exegesis by reading himself in the Hebrew Bible as the secret of the Bible,78 we may say that a similar logic occurs in Judaism insofar as other theological innovations seeking to be anchored in scripture are concerned. More dramatically, we can see in the last two major chapters in the history of Jewish mysticism the attraction of biblical material to the hermeneutical grid constituted by the new ideals. In Sabbateanism the canonical writings become a vast domain for discovering references to Sabbatai Tzevi, just as in Hasidism the nature and role of the tzaddiq permeate the interpretive projects of this literature.
Before addressing the issue of symbolism in the last passage, let me turn to an additional text. When describing a certain epoch, a representative Gnostic text contends that “the eon of the truth, being a unity and multiplicity, is honored with little and great names according to the power of each to grasp it—by way of analogy, like a spring which is what it is yet flows into rivers and lakes and canals and branches, or like a root which extends into trees with branches and fruit, or like a human body which is partitioned in an indivisible way into members of members, primary members and secondary [ones], great [and] small.”79 As in the case of Monoimos, unity and multiplicity coexist in the same entity, which is again described, perhaps this time metaphorically, as a human organism. More interesting, however, and quite representative of the Gnostic discourse, is the emphasis on the many names by which the same entity is designated, as the tittle of iota is described as possessing innumerable names. Those names do not have to be biblical, but in Monoimos’ texts it is biblical material that is attracted by the supernal entity as part of an effort to aggrandize the status of the described entity. Or, to put it sharply: Philo as well as Christian and Gnostic texts emerging in religious polemical contexts, either in relation to Judaism or among themselves, strove to reorganize the Hebrew Bible, and sometimes also the Greek one, around hypostases, whose existence and status in a particular spiritual environment could be demonstrated by resort to the scriptures.
Let me adduce another Gnostic example: “God, the ruler of the eons, and the powers,80 separated us wrathfully. Then we became two eons, and the glory in our hearts deserted us, me and your mother, Eve.”81 The emergence of the hypostases of Adam and Eve is quite important in itself. But I am interested here more in the new, apparently Platonic, reading of the first chapter of the Bible. The biblical God, described in benevolent terms when separating woman from man, becomes here, like Zeus in Plato’s Symposium, a wrathful ruler. This is the well-known Gnostic inverse reading of the Bible. The Hebrew Bible is converted, or inverted, to tell a story that is fundamentally taking place elsewhere, on another plane. The surge of hypostatic thinking may well be part of an ancient Jewish trend that nourished some parts of the Christian and Gnostic hypostatic discourses. So, for example, there is the assumption of the pair of entities existing before the Creation in Pseudo-Philo, Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum 60:2, which is considered to be a syzygy of powers which, historically speaking, preceded and probably influenced their Gnostic counterparts.82 Also, the numerous early Jewish speculations about the Hokhmah contributed to Gnostic and some later Jewish conceptualizations of hypostatic discourses.83 Moreover, the history of major theological terms in rabbinic literature like Shekhinah and knesset yisra’el, not to speak of the divine attributes and the Torah, point in this direction.
The passages adduced from Monoimos include expressions of mysteriousness and symbolism which seem to me to be significant for a history of the much later Kabbalistic symbolism. First and foremost, a nexus has been made between the ten commandments and the plagues, which are textual topics informing ritual and sacred history with cosmic powers, namely creative actions, and a complex supracosmic power, the son of man. The biblical material is described as symbolic and allegorical, although the content of these symbols and allegories is not specified. One may imagine that a more specific correlation between the various decads might have been established by Monoimos but accidentally not quoted by Hippolytus, or that Monoimos never offered a greater correspondence, yet neither of these contentions can be corroborated from the extant material.
An aspect that attracted our attention earlier appears here in an interesting version: the cosmic, comprehensive, and absorbing understandings of the biblical text. According to Monoimos, the ten commandments contain all the knowledge of the universe. Moreover, they reflect the decad within the son of man, who in turn reflects the higher entity that is the supreme divinity. A certain hierarchy seems inherent in Monoimos’ passages: the highest level, the perfect man, apparently a term for God; then the son of God, who comprises in himself both the monadic and the decadic natures. I assume that the ontic move from the father to the son of man means the transition from a noncreative monad to a creative one, as the son is also the decad. The decad within the son constitutes the mysteries reflected in the Decalogue and, by parallel, in the ten plagues, which in turn reflect the process and the knowledge related to creation. All these decads are reflected also by two symbols: the tittle of the iota and Moses’ rod. We may assume that both the other parts of the Bible (aside from the Decalogue)84 and the universe represent the greater plurality which is thought to emanate from the decad, in a manner reminiscent of the rabbinic view of the ten creative ma’amarot. If this analysis is pertinent, we may advance one more suggestion for understanding Monoimos: the son of man reflects the father but also comprises the lower decads, and the ten commandments and ten plagues reflect the higher decad of the son but also comprise, respectively, the entire law and the multiplicity of created beings. Indeed, the comprising of the multiplicity within the decad is expressly pointed out in the discussion of the monad as generating the ten figures. Such a reading assumes an implicit theory of emanation, reminiscent of the later Neoplatonic emanative theory, but this issue cannot be dealt with here.85 Thus, there emerges a theory of participation, which would attribute to the lower aspects of the hierarchy a certain sharing of essence with the higher one. This hypothesis would assume that the literary decads, those represented by the biblical discussions dealing with the plagues, namely the rod and the creative logoi, share something in common with the son of man, in addition to their numerical identity.
Thus, by knowing or reflecting on mundane entities like the graphical forms of the tittle of an iota and the rod, and by understanding their connection to the biblical decadic accounts, one is able to ascend to the higher decad, that found in the son of man. Let me point out that, according to what I conceive to be a plausible interpretation of tittles of letters in a rabbinic text, they point to divine secrets, as the tittle does in Monoimos.86
The sources of those hypostases, decadic or not, that are related to the biblical text are a matter of speculation. Perhaps the hypostases reflect some form of spiritual experience.87 Yet even if this is the case, our main concern here is not to explain the emergence of hypostatic thought but to point to the importance of the semiotic process of “attraction” or translation of the biblical material to these hypostases because of a belief in the correspondence between them, which will culminate in a symbolic thinking.
Let us adduce one more ancient text, a passage written by Justin the Martyr:
I shall give you another testimony, my friends … from the scriptures, that God begat before all creatures a beginning, [who was] a certain rational power [proceeding] from Himself, who is called by the Holy Spirit, now the Glory of the Lord, now the Son, again Wisdom, again Angel, then God, and then Lord and Logos; and on another occasion He calls Himself Captain, when he appeared in human form to Joshua, son of Nun. For He can be called by all those names, since He ministers to the Father’s will, and since he was begotten of the Father by an act of will; just as we see happening among ourselves; for when we give out some word, we beget the word; yet not by abscission, so as to lessen the word [which remains] in us, when we give it out; just as we see also happening in the case of a fire, which is not lessened when it has kindled [another] but remains the same; and that which has been kindled by it likewise appears to exist by itself, not diminishing that from which it was kindled.88
This passage should be seen in the context of the sort of Christology that was expounded in several parts of Justin’s Dialogue,89 where the assumption is that Jesus Christ issued from the Father in a manner that does not create a division between the two entities.90 Here the details of theological discussions are less important, and we shall concentrate on the semiotic aspects of the passage: the divine that has been emanated from the Father is described by resorting to many names stemming from the various biblical passages. One entity, at least superficially different from God, is understood to be the reference of various parts of the Bible that resort to various names.
The schematic correspondences based on decads in the quasi-Gnostic passages adduced above are reminiscent of statements found in rabbinic literature in general, although I am especially interested in parallelisms between ten ma’amarot and the Decalogue.91 In a late midrashic text, Midrash Tadsche’, it is asserted that “when the Holy One, blessed be He, spoke and delivered the ten commandments, He started with the first letter of the alphabet in order to talk with them, as it is said, ’anokhiy. The first letter of the commandment92 is aleph and the last is yod. From one He started until ten, the entire numeration, so that they shall know that the Holy One, blessed be He, fills the entire world, and He is the first and the last.”93 The anonymous Jewish author of the late midrash is mentioning the mathematical speculation of the first and the last figure, one and ten, in order to describe the divine presence is the world, in a manner which seems quite reminiscent of the passage above where Monoimos resorted to quoting from the Epistle to the Corinthians. Later in this midrash the correspondences between the plagues and the commandments are explicitly expounded: “The world is maintained by the merit of those who study [the Torah] and perform the Decalogue; and the world was created by ten logoi [ma’amarot], and its sefirot are [also] ten … The world is maintained by the ten sefirot of Belimah.”94
What is interesting for a history of hypostatic thinking in Judaism is the convergence of rabbinic ideals, like the study of the Torah and the performance of the commandments, with hypostatic entities: ten sefirot and ten ma’amarot. I assume that at least the sefirot are to be seen as ontological entities, which correspond to the metaphysical structure of the son of God, conceived of in Monoimos’ passage as comprising a decad. Here too it would be difficult to find a precise correspondence between the specific contents of the three decads. If we compare the perceptions of the decads in the quasi-Gnostic text and those in Midrash Tadsche’, two of the major differences, from the point of view of our discussion, are the absence of the mysteries and the strong accent put on performance and its impact on the external world: the maintenance of the world. If the Gnostic-Christian text of Monoimos attempts to move the son of God to the center and his decadic nature expresses perfection as well as correspondences to authoritative verses, in the rabbinic ambiance the centrality is given to offering a cosmic stand for the religious performance. The performative aspect of the ritual and its relation to hypostases on high, as found in Midrash Tadsche’ and its parallels, invite the assumption that a more dynamic approach to the meaning of correlations between the lower entities (the horizontal material in biblical texts) and the higher entities is already adumbrated in the late midrashic material, though it may reflect much earlier developments. As we know, the late midrashic treatises sometimes reflect much older material from the ancient pseudepigraphic literature, rather than the earlier and more classical Midrashim.95 Indeed, it seems that in eleventh-century material preserved in the circle of R. Shlomo Yitzhaqi (Rashi) it was claimed that the correspondence between the ten creative logoi and the ten ordeals of Abraham explains why the world is maintained. There is no doubt a very interesting pun: to withstand a certain ordeal is expressed by the root ’MD, which is precisely the root that is used to point to the act of maintaining the world.96
Let me address now a later view that expresses the concept that the entire Torah is contained within the ten commandments, as are all the creatures. In the Zohar we read:
R. Eleazar taught that in these ten words all the commandments of the Torah were inscribed,97 all the decrees and punishments, all laws concerning purity and impurity, all the branches and roots, all the trees and plants, heaven and earth, seas and abysses. Behold, the Torah is the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, and just as the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, is inscribed in the Decalogue, so too the Torah is inscribed in the Decalogue, and these ten words are the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, and the Torah in its entirety is one name, the Holy Name of the Holy One, blessed be He, indeed.98
Let me start with the difficulty in finding a precise translation for the term ‘amarin, which has been translated above as “words.” It stands for the ten words of the Decalogue, according to the passage that precedes this one. Yet ‘amarin also has a cosmic overtone, just like the term ma’amarot, because creatures are mentioned together with the Torah. The question is, How may we understand the details of the text? Does it speak about a series of identifications, which equate the divine name, the Decalogue qua ma’amarot, the Torah and all the creatures, or may we suggest a more hierarchical reading? I would favor the latter option and suggest that we may distinguish between God, represented in the text as “the Holy One, blessed be He,” His name, then the Decalogue qua ma’amarot, and then the Torah and the creatures. The Torah is identified with three different entities in this hierarchy: the name, the Decalogue, and the laws. If the suggested pyramidal hierarchy indeed represents the stand of the Zoharic text, we have an interesting parallel to Monoimos’ views. If so, the divine name plays a role similar to that of Jesus in Monoimos. In any case, it is obvious that the ten ’amarin organize both the Torah and creation according to ten categories. Moreover, if we assume that the ten ‘amarin stand for the ten sefirot, a view that is found in many medieval Kabbalistic sources,99 and that the latter constitute an anthropomorphic structure, then the similarity to Monoimos’ view is even greater.
Indeed, a similar explication of the unfolding of plurality from unity, reminiscent of Neoplatonic theories of emanation,100 is found in quite Neoplatonic language in an important nineteenth-century Hasidic master, R. Yehudah Arieh Leib of Gur:
First there was only the Decalogue and afterwards when they101 descended from their rank the entire Torah was added to them and then they descended even more … and the oral Torah has been promulgated … as it is written in Sefer ha-Yashar by R. Tam102 and according to the cleaving to the Creator, blessed be He, plurality is diminished and they come to the unity … and this is also the case of the Torah whose basis is the twenty-two letters, and in a particular manner the four letters of the name of God, blessed be He, who is the principle of everything. However, the plurality stems from the various combinations of letters. But when someone merits he comes close to the unity.103
The mystical approach to God coming near to him parallels the reduction of the plurality of the canonical texts. Thus the reduction of the texts implies the attainment of the highest textual configuration: the Tetragrammaton. Ontology and textology, according to the Hasidic master, reflect each other. This approach exemplifies the exploitation of the theological and textual hierarchies in order to illustrate mystical attainments. Plurality on the ontic level is conceived of as paralleled by the literal complication of some letters that are described as combined. The combinations of letters do not serve, in this and many other Hasidic texts, as techniques to reach the divine, as is the case in Abraham Abulafia’s system, but they reflect the descent of unity in plurality and thus the distancing from the divine. Indeed, ecstatic Kabbalah was less concerned with portraying the different parts of the biblical texts as allegories of different ontic levels. It is obvious, however, that the transition from the combinations of letters in general to the combinations of the letters of the divine name in particular was viewed as an advance in the techniques at the disposition of the Kabbalists.104 In other Hasidic texts, combinations of letters were regarded in a much more magical manner, as acts by means of which the perfecti are able to create worlds.105
From the point of view of the emergence of Kabbalistic theosophical symbolism, structured as it is around the ten sefirot, the possible (though, in my opinion, not plausible) contributions of Gnostic speculations, the statements in Sefer Yetzirah, and the rabbinic materials represent only rudimentary elements that informed a dramatic development that marks the difference between the pre-Kabbalistic and the Kabbalistic material. The components of the decads that where related to biblical material were distinguished from each other by both names and properties, which are able to attract specific aspects of the biblical lexicography to a certain supernal power. Only the systematic differentiation between the ten powers, which allowed some forms of dynamics and the impression of the literary material with the valences found in the supernal system, created the specificity of the main trend in Kabbalistic theosophical symbolism.
The question should be asked as to whether the variety of decads found in Jewish pre-Kabbalistic material did not include one dealing with the ten divine names. Such a view would narrow the gap between the simpler constellations of the midrashic authors, based on two divine names, and the much more complex one found in Kabbalistic literature. In a passage preserved by Origen, whose importance for understanding this aspect of Jewish tradition is paramount, it is said that “the names Sabaoth and Adonai, and all the other names that have been handed down by the Hebrews with great reverence, are not concerned with ordinary created things, but with a certain mysterious divine science106 that is related to the creator of the universe.”107
Two important details for better understanding the history of Jewish magic and mysticism are found in this passage: that divine names not only are powerful, which is the gist of the whole passage, but also are part of a divine, secret science concerning God. Speaking in the plural, this leaves us with the impression that if Origen’s testimony is correct, it was a matter not only of magic but also of a much more elaborate form of mysterious lore that we are told was found among the Jews. Just before the passage quoted above, Origen mentions that the above tradition “is a consistent system, which has principles known to very few.” The detailed nature of this system, unfortunately, is not indicated by Origen. However, as John Dillon has proposed, there may be an affinity between the two Hebrew names in Origen’s book and the occurrence of precisely these names in some Gnostic texts, where they point to hypostatic potencies.108 Especially important in this context is the occurrence of these two divine names, which point to but a sample of a more complex secret doctrine, in On the Origin of the World as part of a group of seven androgynous beings. As I have attempted to show elsewhere, in this Gnostic source there is a passage, immediately before this discussion, which testifies to the impact of Jewish mythical traditions paralleled later in Kabbalistic writings.109 It should be emphasized that Origen’s testimony concerning these two divine names is at least partially corroborated by earlier traditions related to Moses and extant in the magical papyri.110 However, I assume that Origen hints at much more than we already know from Philonic and midrashic sources. He claims that the numerous divine names constitute a part, or perhaps even the whole, of a secret lore dealing with the nature of the creator. It seems that the assumption, for the time being hypothetical, that different divine names reflect different divine attributes or aspects is not too far fetched.
This preoccupation with the various divine names as part of a secret tradition concerning the nature of the divine realm is strikingly reminiscent of some forms of Kabbalah, more precisely that of R. Joseph Gikatilla’s Sha’arei ‘Orah. More salient for our discussion, however, is the very mentioning of a tradition that has been “handed down with great reverence.” This phrase plausibly points to a ritualistic transmission, which included some details in addition to the very pronunciation of the divine names. Reverence seems to be especially important in this context. It should be mentioned that the passage from Origen does not deal with the Tetragrammaton or with the name of forty-two letters, but with two other names, a fact that shows that the talmudic discussion in Qiddushin, dealing with the transmission of divine names, tells us but part of the story regarding the secret transmission of divine names.111 If the midrashic pattern that dominates some of the discussions of the divine names as reflecting divine attributes had been expanded to additional divine names in ancient secret doctrines, such a hypothetical development could have prepared the floruit of a much more complex theosophy related to the divine names. Such a hierarchic vision of the biblical material as composed of more secret, powerful, and sacred material that is related to divine attributes, and the other part of the Bible which is apparently less concerned with theology, does not recur in rabbinic thought, which emphasized the un-hierarchical structure of the canonical texts, but flourished in circles that prevailed in nascent Kabbalah.112 I surmise that the gradual emergence of a code constituted by ten divine names could be related to a standardization of the lists of divine names found in the opening sentences of Sefer Yetzirah,113 or in lists of divine names that should not be erased,114 and contributed to the establishment of a decadic code that culminated in the different schemes of ten sefirot as themselves divine or as divine instruments.115 In any case, such a decadic structure of ten sefirot was already active in organizing the exegesis of the Song of Songs, as we learn from an important introductory passage by R. Ezra of Gerona. This early Kabbalist contends that he received traditions that connect some key words of the Song of Songs as if pointing to sefirot.116
Finally, other decads emerged that strengthened the importance of decads of divine names. For example, the existence of lists of ten vowels, which were conceived of as fitting the special target of resorting to the Tetragrammaton, or ten different colors, to be used as part of a process of visualizing the letters of the ten Tetragrammata, emerged in a theosophical system that regarded the ten sefirot as too sublime to be used as a hermeneutical code.117