Sefer Yetzirah 2

1Twenty-Two Letters of Foundation—Three Mothers, Seven Pairs, and Twelve Simple Letters. Three Mothers, Alef-Mem-Shin: Their foundation is the palm of innocence and the palm of guilt, and the tongue of edict decides between them.

2Twenty-Two Letters—He carved them, and hewed them, and weighed them, and exchanged them, and combined them, and formed with them the soul of every formed being and the soul of every being He has yet to form.

3Twenty-Two Letters of Foundation—Carved with voice, hewn with spirit, fixed in the mouth in five places: Alef-Heh-Chet-ʽAyin, Bet-Waw-Mem-Peh, Gimel-Yod-Kaf-Qof, Dalet-Tet-Lamed-Nun-Taw, Zayin-Samekh-Shin-Resh-Tzadi. ([In the Mantua printing, the following is added to the paragraph:] Bound to the tongue like a flame to coal—Alef-Chet-Heh-ʽAyin, serving behind the tongue in the house of swallowing. Bet-Waw-Mem-Peh, between the lips and in front of the tongue. Gimel-Yod-Kaf-Qof, being cut upon the third portion of the tongue. Dalet-Tet-Lamed-Nun-Taw, with the tip of the tongue, serving with voice. And Samekh-Tzadi-Resh-Shin, between the teeth and tongue, lain down and flattened. ‘to lie, lie down’, but שכובה looks like a passive participle, shekhuvah, while shakhav is normally an intransitive verb not amenable to being made passive. Nonetheless I have rendered it ‘lain down’. The second word, שטותה, cannot be made sense of without emendation. שְׁטוּתָה shetutah would appear to be passed on a root שָׁטָה shatah which means ‘to mock, ridicule’, found in words like שְׁטוּת shetut ‘stupidity’. This is certainly an editorial error, confusing a Chet for a Taw. What was intended was שְׁטוּחָה shetuchah, meaning ‘flat’. Thus the letters Samekh-Tzadi-Resh-Shin are pronounced thus with the tongue ‘lying down’ and ‘flat’. [On this stand the remarks of the Ramav.])

4Twenty-Two Letters of Foundation—Fixed in a wheel with 231 gates. ‘gates’, to connect every possible combination of 2 letters. In this way every word of the Hebrew language traces a path through the ‘gates’ from one letter to the next. Such diagrams are often arranged so that the letter א Alef is across from ל Lamed, spelling the name אֵל El, God. For an example of such a diagram, see: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/points-231-lines-The-231-lines-connecting-the-22-letters-are-the-231-Gates-from-Kaplan_fig2_236826988 (From Jerome Levi (2009), Structuralism and Kabbalah: Sciences of Mysticism or Mystifications of Science?, in Anthropological Quartlery 82(4), pp. 929-984), citing Aryeh Kaplan (1997), Sefer Yetzirah, p. 111). The wheel turns back and forth. This is a cypher for the matter: There is nothing in goodness higher than Delight, and nothing in evil lower than Affliction. ‘delight, pleasure’ and נֶגַע negaʽ ‘affliction, plague, strike’ are anagrams and antonyms.

5How did He weigh and transform them? Alef with them all and all of them with Alef; Bet with them all and all of them with Bet. And so it turns, such that all matter is found and all speech emerges into one name.

6He formed matter from chaos, meaning a ‘void’, ‘chasm’, or state of emptiness and inactivity. The Hebrew term תֹּהוּ tohu is much more similar in sense to the Greek kháos than it is to English chaos. Most literally, it means ‘waste(land)’, the lifeless open desert, a translation of [Genesis 1:2] so far captured in English only by Robert Alter’s The Hebrew Bible (2019), who poetically renders תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ tohu vavohu as “waste and welter”; cf. Onqelos, who renders it into Aramaic as צָדְיָא וְרוֹקָנְיָא tzadya weroqanya ‘(and the earth was) barren and desolate’ (https://cal.huc.edu/comment.php?coord=5100101021). The SY seems to employ tohu here a similar sense of profound primordial emptiness and inactivity, paralleled by אֵינוֹ eno, ‘nothingness’, literally ‘it is not’ or ‘there is no one/none/nothing’. and made nothingness somethingness; He hewed great columns out of imperceptible Air. This is a cipher: observing, transforming, making all matter and all words one name. A cipher for the matter: twenty-two (numbers) [objects] in one body.