The Hebrew alphabet and the Sefer Yetzirah: letters that create the world

In Jewish tradition the letters of the alphabet are not mere tools for recording language. According to a saying reported in the Babylonian Talmud, in the tractate Berakhot, Bezalel, the craftsman of the Tabernacle, knew how to combine the letters with which heaven and earth were created. This idea, that creation itself is made of letters, runs through the centuries and finds its most famous expression in a small and mysterious book, the Sefer Yetzirah.

From Paleo-Hebrew to the square script

The ancient Israelites originally used a script derived from Phoenician, now called Paleo-Hebrew. Examples include the Gezer calendar, usually attributed to the tenth century BC, and the Siloam inscription, carved around 700 BC in the Jerusalem water tunnel associated with King Hezekiah. After the Babylonian exile, however, the square script of Aramaic origin prevailed, which the Talmud calls ketav ashuri.

It is the script of the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered from 1947 onwards in the caves of Qumran, in which the divine name nonetheless sometimes still appears in Paleo-Hebrew characters, a sign of respect for the ancient form. The alphabet has twenty-two consonantal letters; five of them, kaf, mem, nun, pe and tsade, have a special form at the end of a word. Vowels were marked later with dots and dashes, systematised by the Masoretes of Tiberias between the seventh and tenth centuries.

The Book of Formation

The Sefer Yetzirah, the «Book of Formation», is a short and dense text of very uncertain date: scholars' proposals range from the first centuries of the common era to the early Middle Ages. Tradition attributes it to the patriarch Abraham. The book states that God created the world by means of thirty-two wondrous paths of wisdom: the ten sefirot, understood here as numbers or dimensions, and the twenty-two letters.

The letters are divided into three groups. The three «mothers», aleph, mem and shin, are associated with air, water and fire. The seven «doubles», which anciently had two pronunciations, correspond to the seven visible planets and the seven days. The twelve «simple» letters are linked to the twelve signs of the zodiac and the twelve months. The universe, the year and the human body thus appear built on the same web of signs.

Numbers, names and interpretations

Every Hebrew letter also has a numerical value: aleph is one, bet two, up to tav, which is four hundred. On this basis gematria developed, an interpretive method that brings together words of equal value. The masters of the Talmud and Midrash used it with moderation; the medieval kabbalists turned it into a tool for reflecting on the hidden meanings of the Torah.

The Sefer Yetzirah was commented on as early as the tenth century by Saadia Gaon and by the physician Shabbetai Donnolo, born in Oria in Apulia, and it became a fundamental text for medieval Kabbalah in Provence and Spain. Later the Christian humanists of the Renaissance, such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, took an interest in Kabbalah precisely because of this vision of language as the key to the cosmos.

Whether or not one accepts its mystical perspective, the Sefer Yetzirah remains an extraordinary document for the history of thought. It bears witness to a way of seeing in which reading and writing are not profane activities, but participation in an order that, according to tradition, precedes the world itself and sustains it, and in which every letter of the alphabet guards a small part of the mystery of creation.