The Book Yetsirah THE date and origin of this extraordinary book--the oldest philosophical work in the Hebrew language--are shrouded in obscurity. There is as yet no critical edition of it, although there are several translations of it, both of the whole and of parts, into Latin, German, and French; and the numerous commentaries written on it in Arabic and Hebrew (and the subsequent translations of these into Latin, German, etc.) show, not only the high position which it held in the estimation of Jewish thinkers from the 10th century onward, but also the great influence which it wielded on the general development of Jewish mystical speculation. The difficulties of fixing its date and origin are illustrated by the fact that whereas the voice of mediæval Jewish scholarship assigned its authorship to the patriarch Abraham (on the grounds of some supposed internal evidence), individual writers here and there credited the book to Rabbi ‘Akiba (50-130 A.D.)--‘Akiba having been an adept in the mystic lore of numbers; and the Book Yetsirah is pervaded with the mystical significances of numbers. Others, again, without touching the question of authorship, give it an origin in the late Talmudic epoch--about the 6th century A.D. This theory is the likeliest of all, because the 6th century marks the beginning of what is known in Jewish history as the Gaonic epoch, when several Rabbinic-mystical works, second in importance only to the Book Yetsirah, were composed. The latest theory is that of Reitzenstein (Poimandres, pp. 14, 56, 261, 291) who, arguing from the resemblances between the doctrines of letters and numbers in this book and the miraculous cosmic powers wielded by numbers and letters in the thaumaturgical books current among the Gnostics of the 2nd century B.C., concludes that it is a Hebrew production of the 2nd century B.C. The fatal objection to Reitzensteins theory, however, seems to lie in the fact that his argument holds good of only one aspect of the work, viz. the philological part. The other part--the philosophical--although vitally connected with the philological and deduced from it--contains elements of thought and modes of expression which are many centuries later than the pre-Christian Gnosticism. But Reitzensteins theory cuts very deeply and cannot be disposed of in a few words.
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 11:40:18 +0000
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