The Sefer Yetzirah: creation through twenty-two letters

The Sefer Yetzirah, the “Book of Formation”, is one of the shortest and most enigmatic texts of the Jewish tradition: a few pages, in some recensions fewer than two thousand words. It states that God created the world through thirty-two wondrous paths of wisdom, namely the ten sefirot and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. For centuries it was considered the foundation of the mysticism of letters and one of the most commented texts of medieval Jewish thought.

A text without a date

No one knows for certain when the book was written. Scholarly proposals range from the first centuries of the common era to the Islamic period, around the ninth century, and the text exists in several recensions, a short one and a long one, as well as the one adopted and commented on by Saadia Gaon. Tradition attributes it to the patriarch Abraham, and some editions call it the Letters of Abraham our Father, but the attribution is legendary.

The first dated commentary is that of Saadia Gaon, written in 931. Other commentators followed in the tenth century, among them Dunash ibn Tamim in Kairouan and the physician Shabbetai Donnolo, born in Oria, in Apulia, author of the commentary entitled Sefer Hakhmoni. Guillaume Postel published a Latin translation in Paris in 1552, and the first printed Hebrew edition appeared in Mantua in 1562, with several commentaries.

Mothers, doubles and simples

The heart of the text is a classification of the letters. Three are called “mothers”: aleph, mem and shin, linked to air, water and fire. Seven are “doubles”, because in antiquity some of them had two pronunciations: bet, gimel, dalet, kaf, pe, resh and tav, related to the seven planets, the days of the week and the seven openings of the face. The twelve “simples” correspond to the signs of the zodiac, the months of the year and the main limbs of the human body.

In this way the alphabet becomes a map linking three levels of reality: the cosmos, time and the human being, which the text calls world, year and soul respectively. Each letter occupies a precise place in each of the three levels, and the correspondence between them expresses the idea that the universe is built according to a single linguistic design.

Letters as stones

The text also describes the letters as stones with which houses are built: two stones build two houses, three build six, four twenty-four, and so on, in one of the earliest reflections on permutations in Jewish culture. The combinations of two letters are called “gates”, and their number, two hundred and thirty-one, expresses the variety of the world created from a few elements.

Medieval Kabbalah reinterpreted the ten sefirot of the Sefer Yetzirah in a different sense, as divine emanations, and made the book one of its principal sources. The Talmud, in the tractate Sanhedrin, tells of two masters who, studying the laws of creation, fashioned a calf to eat on every Sabbath eve: an episode later connected with this text and with the legend of the golem, the clay figure brought to life through letters.

The Sefer Yetzirah presents the alphabet not as a tool invented by human beings but as the very structure of reality. This idea, expressed with almost mathematical concision, influenced Jewish mysticism, the Christian Kabbalah of the Renaissance and modern reflection on language, making a small book one of the fundamental texts for anyone studying the history of sacred scripts.