The Zohar

← Encyclopedia

The Zohar — the “Book of Radiance” — is the central text of theosophical Kabbalah: a sprawling Aramaic commentary on the Torah that reads the five books of Moses as a coded account of the inner life of God. It is less a single book than a library, gathering homilies, narrative frames, and dense esoteric tracts under one name; the printed editions that fixed its shape run to several volumes, and large portions circulated separately before they were collected.

The text presents itself as the teaching of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, a second-century Galilean sage, delivered to a circle of disciples who wander the land of Israel expounding scripture as they walk. That setting is the book’s own claim about itself. Modern scholarship dates the work very differently: Gershom Scholem’s analysis of its idiosyncratic Aramaic, its anachronisms, and its debts to medieval thought placed the bulk of it in late-thirteenth-century Castile, and identified its principal author as Moses de León, a kabbalist who circulated the writings as an ancient discovery. The attribution to bar Yochai is thus pseudepigraphic — a recognized and, in its milieu, almost expected mode of authority, locating new doctrine in a revered past. Later scholars have complicated the single-author picture, arguing for a body of writers or a period of composition rather than one pen, but the medieval Spanish setting is not in dispute.

At the heart of the book is its picture of the divine. Beyond all attributes stands Ein Sof, the Infinite, of which nothing can be said; from it unfold ten sefirot, stages or vessels through which the hidden God becomes knowable and the world is sustained. The Torah’s words, its very letters, are read as a surface beneath which the relations among these powers are inscribed — so that exegesis becomes a way of tracing the structure of the godhead itself, including its male and female aspects and the exile and reunion of the divine presence, the Shekhinah. To study the text rightly, in this understanding, is to take part in repairing a fracture within the divine.

The Zohar’s afterlife outran its origins. Embraced across much of the Jewish world, it was treated by many communities as nearly canonical, third in standing after the Bible and the Talmud, and it became the indispensable source for the later Kabbalah of Safed and for Hasidism. Its emanation scheme has long drawn comparison with Neoplatonist and Gnostic descents of being; the resemblances are real and were noticed early, though the book speaks in its own idiom and toward its own ends. When Christian and occult writers reached for “the Kabbalah,” it was very often the Zohar, at one or two removes, that they were reaching for. The early English versions available to those readers were partial and selective, carrying a fraction of a work whose full extent few of them had seen.

→ In the library: The Zohar (de Manhar, partial English — 1914) · Mathers — The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887)

→ Related: Hermetic Qabalah · Emanation · Ketuvim · Neoplatonism