B. Seferim HaTorah (Books of the Law)
The five component books of the Torah are conventionally known
outside of Judaism as Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
However, these are not traditional titles by which Jews refer to the five
books. In the Jewish tradition, the first book is called Torah B'reshith
(In the Beginning or By the First). The second book is called
Torah Shmoth (Names). The third, fourth, and fifth
books are respectively titled Torah Vayiqra (And He Called),
Torah B'midbar (In the Wilderness), and Torah
Doverim (Words).
Most religious Jews regard the present version of the written Hebrew Torah
to be a faithful copy of an original penned by Master Mosheh. They therefore
regard every one of the 304,805 letters and their crownlets, and every word
in the order that it appears in the scrolls to be the manifestation in the
Lower Worlds of the unmanifest supernal Torah (Torah
Qadmah)The unquestionable authority of every letter, crownlet, and
word of the Torah comes from Rabbi Aqiba, a pivotal figure
in the emergence of Rabbinical Judaism who was born 10-20
years after Master Yeshuvah. He supported the three and half
year revolt against the Romans initiated by the messianic
pretender Shimeon Bar Kochba, for which Aqiva was
martyred.. By contrast, few biblical scholars and specialists in ancient
languages share this assessment. In their view, linguistic analyses and
other factors support the argument that the version that we have is a patchwork
quilt containing words and phrases from a variety of languages from different
periods, with threads dating back into deepest antiquity. Most non-orthodox
biblical experts regard the present version of the Hebrew Torah
to be a compilation of writings by several Jewish writers working in successive
periods starting circa 1000 BCE. Those holding this opinion think that the
writings appear to have been combined and assembled in a final redaction
in the fifth century BCE (though no scrolls from that time have yet to be
found).
Whether the present version is the cumulative work of multiple writers or
not, tradition ascribes the final redaction to Ezra the Scribe. The compilation
required the writer(s) to collect, record, and assemble a large corpus of
material from disparate sources. It is impossible to know how much of the
text was passed down over the many centuries in written form, but it still
would have been susceptible to errors of transcription, omission, etc. It
is likely that a substantial amount, if not the majority, of the information
was handed down as an oral tradition of teaching stories that skillfully
mingled historical facts with miraculous acts. Such a rendition would have
been even more vulnerable to corruption, embellishments and outright fictionalization.
While it is highly unlikely that the current version of the Torah
is an accurate version of the Ezra compilation, the living tradition of
the Mystical Qabalah provides us with keys by which we can mine for the
original treasures still embedded within it. Ultimately, the divinely infused
life of Master Mosheh was a vehicle for the renewal and enlivenment of the
underlying mystical spirituality regarding the absolute unity of existence
and the primacy of unconditional devotion and love for the Divine that had
faded in the hearts of Israel.
Despite arguments from religious Jews, there is extensive archeological
evidence of a much older Hebrew alphabet, called Gezer or Sinatic (after
Mt. Sinai), as the original and most ancient Hebrew (see "Hebrew-English
Transliteration"). Sinatic Hebrew is in fact the oldest known alphabet,
suddenly appearing about the time of Abraham (circa 1850 BCE). The original
Sinatic Hebrew became virtually extinct after the decimation of Lachish
circa 701 BCE. The Sinatic alphabet could have evolved as an alphabetic
representation of the twenty-six Sumerian cuneiform ciphersIn 1975, Dr. Paolo Matthiae discovered 20,000 clay
cuneiform tablets at Tell Mardikh in northwestern Syria.
Extensive evidence led to the conclusion that the site was the
ruins of the ancient city of Ebla. The tablets, dating back to
the middle of the third millennium BCE, were the city’s royal
archives. In deciphering the tablets, Professor Pettisate (also
of the University of Rome) concluded that the language was
Old Canaanite, even though written in Sumerian cuneiform.
He found the language to be closer in vocabulary and
grammar to Biblical Hebrew than any other Canaanite
dialect, including Ugaritic. Ebla was destroyed by the
Akkadians circa 1600BCE. The reader is referred to David
Rohl’s controversial book A Test of Time: The Bible From
Myth to History, Century, London, 1995. More recently,
archeologists uncovered the ancient city of Nabada along the
same trade route as Ebla in nothwest Syria. Clay cuneiform
tablets were also found there, and like those found at Ebla,
the language bears great resemblance to Biblical Hebrew., the world's oldest known non-alphabetic language.
)
By the time the current Torah was redacted, the original Sinatic
Hebrew alphabet had long been extinct. After hundreds of years of religious
and cultural repression under the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Romans, the
original biblical Hebrew had faded from the memories of the Jews. As a solution,
the final redactor (i.e. Ezra) chose to record the Torah in
a new alphabet that would be more recognizable to the generations of Jews
who had long forgotten the original. It was derived by using the twenty-two
letter format of the old Hebrew alphabet, with letter forms synthesized
from the familiar alphabets of the Palmyrene and Nabataen dialects of Aramaic
extant in Palestine at that time . Since Ezra is credited with the final redaction of the
reconstructed Torah, this alphabet shall henceforth be referred
to as "Ezra Hebrew."
The oldest existing scrolls of the Hebrew Torah were written
many centuries after the time of Ezra, so we can not be certain that the
ones we have now are completely faithful to the original ascribed to him.
Historically, there are three parallel textual traditions that have contributed
substantially to the way the Torah is composed and translated.
Most Jews now read the Masoretic version of the Torah. The
Masoretic Hebrew text dates from the fourth century CE and the earliest surviving copyThe oldest and fullest surviving manuscript is the Codex
Petropolitanus dating to 916 CE. is from the tenth century CE. The Greek translation of the
Tanakh, called the SeptuagintThe Septuagint is so-named because it was said to have been
the result of identical translations into Greek by seventy-two
different translators working apart in Alexandria, where there
resided the largest colony of Jews outside of Palestine., was made under Ptolemy
in the third century BCE, and the oldest copy is centuries older than the
oldest full Masoretic text. The Septuagint became the authoritative
text for Christianity as it became estranged from its Jewish roots. The
Samaritan Torah evolved during the period after the
Assyrians conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE, and forcibly
resettled many different peoples there. The three source versions vary in
a number of details.
The Masoretes created the first system of vowels placed below the Hebrew
consonants in the sixth or seventh century CE, thereby moving to standardize
the pronunciation of the words and formalizing the structure of the grammar.
Until then, even though the pronunciations and meanings had been passed
down orally for centuries, the way Hebrew verb roots are parsed left considerable
room for ambiguities. As early as the first century BCE, scribes began employing
conventions to reduce such ambiguities. The conventionsMinkoff, Harvey. "Searching for the Better Text," Bible Review, Volume XV, Number 4, August, 1999. generally involved
inserting consonants as vowels to aid reading. Then, between the sixth and
twelfth centuries CE, the Masoretes and Tiberians edited the definitions
of many of the Hebrew words found in the Torah.
The letterforms of the Sinatic and Ezra Hebrew alphabets bear little physical
resemblance to one another, though they share the same twenty-two-letter
format and have the same names for the letters. Hence, the Sinatic Hebrew
letter Alef transliterates with the Ezra Alef, the Sinatic Beyt with the
Ezra Beyt, and so forth. Sinatic letterforms are basically built from the
letters Alef and Ayin . Ezra Hebrew letter forms are built upon variations
of the letter Yod. Both alphabets have letters which overtly or covertly
contain other letters, such as the Tav contained in the Sinatic Alef or
the Beyt contained in the Ezra Alef (as described in the Sefer Bahir)The Sefer Bahir is an important secondary text of the
mystical Qabalah, first published in 1651 in Amsterdam by
an anonymous Christian scholar. The most recent edition was
edited by Reuven Margaliot and published in Jerusalem in
1951..
Unlike the Ezra alphabet, Sinatic does not have final letters, which were
developed much later as a means of showing separation between words in crowded
scrolls. The final letters became significant in the Ezra alphabet when
given extended numerical value in gematria or qabalistic numerologyAll Hebrew letters also have a numerical value e.g. Beyt b
(2), Yod y (10), and Resh r (200). Hence, every Hebrew
word i.e. formula of letters has a numerological value that is
the sum of the values of its constituent letters. In Gematria,
connections are made among words that have the same
composite numerical values. For example, Ahavah (hbha
lit. Love, composed of the letters Aleph (1), Heh (5), Beyt
(2), Heh (5) adding up to 13) has the same numerical value as
Echad (dxa lit. One, composed of Aleph (1), Chet (8), Dalet
(4)). The addition of Ahavah (13) and Echad (13) has the
numerical sum of 26, same as the Name hvhy (Yod (10), Heh
(5), Vav (6), Heh (5))..
)
The sudden appearance of the original Hebrew was paralleled several hundred
years later by the sudden appearance of Brahmi Sanskrit in the Indus Valley.
Sinatic and Brahmi have many similar letterforms, and both were replaced
by later alphabets claimed in present times to be the originals (i.e. Sinatic
replaced by Ezra and Brahmi replaced by Deva Negari). Some Qabalists and
Tantrikas maintain that there is a parent alphabet, called the "Gan
Aden Alphabet" (Garden of Eden), from which both Hebrew and Sanskrit
are derived. The Work of the Chariot translation of the Sefer Yetzirah
included a speculative representation of the Gan
Eden Alphabet composed
of twenty-two families of letters with an aggregate of seventy members.
There is also said to be a Gan Aden Torah, an unbroken sequence
of letters that may be broken into words and sentences in innumerable ways.
Hence, the written Torah is one such "translation"Hence, the first sentence of the extant Hebrew Torah, written
as a sequence of letters not broken down into words, would
be: oratavmymshtammyhlaarbtysarb. If the
reader is sufficiently versed in biblical Hebrew, he/she may
wish to see how many ways they can break the sequence into
strings of words. Keep in mind that meanings are no longer
known for all 462 permutations and combinations of pairs of
Hebrew letters (see Sefer Yetzirah, "The Wall").
of the unbroken letter sequence, minus the letters and anusvara that were
not included in the Hebrew alphabet. A book called the Tiqunim HaZoharThe oldest editions of the Tiqunim HaZohar are the Mantua
(1558) and the Orta Kaj (1719). The most recent version,
under the title Tiqqunei ha Zohar, was edited by Reuven
Margaliot and published in Jerusalem in 1978. For example,
‘Buh-Reshith’ (lit. "By the First", tysar_b referring to the
first "Head of Messiah"), ‘Bara Shith’ (tys arb "IT
created Six," referring to the Chayot and the six Directional
Sefiroth), ‘Bar Esheth’ (tysa rb "Son of Fire", referring to the third Head of Messiah, Master Yeshuvah hvshy), ‘BaRosh Yitav RA Elohai’ (yhla ar bty sarb "In the Head dwells RA ELOHY").
(Perfections of Splendor) discusses seventy ways of translating the
first six letters of the Torah. The Torah contains
many power names, mantra, and visual imagery suitable for use in yogic meditation.
Examples of these mantra and imagery will be discussed in the pages that
focus on the meditation practices of the Mystical Qabalah.
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