When people speak of the origins of Kabbalah they often think of the Zohar, the great book of splendour. But before the Zohar there was a shorter, enigmatic text that scholars regard as the first document of Kabbalah in the proper sense: the Sefer ha-Bahir, the "Book of Brightness" or "of Radiance". Its title comes from a biblical verse that speaks of a light shining in the heavens.
Origin and attribution
The Bahir appears in the second half of the twelfth century in Provence, in southern France, in rabbinic circles linked to figures such as Abraham ben David of Posquières and his son Isaac the Blind. It is in these circles that Kabbalah emerges as a recognisable movement.
The text presents itself as the work of Rabbi Nehunya ben ha-Kanah, a first-century sage, and many of its sections open with his name. This is a pseudepigraphal attribution: its purpose is to link the book to the ancient tradition of the masters of the Mishnah. Scholars nonetheless believe the Bahir made use of older material, perhaps of Eastern origin, reworked in Provence.
An important milestone in the study of the text was Gershom Scholem's doctoral dissertation, published in 1923 and devoted to the Bahir. It marked the beginning of the work that would transform the academic study of Jewish mysticism.
The form of the text
The Bahir is not a systematic treatise. It consists of short sections, about two hundred, commenting on biblical verses, letters of the alphabet and divine names. Its method is that of midrash, the rabbinic tradition of interpreting Scripture, but its content is new and surprising.
A characteristic element is the meshalim, the parables. The text explains divine realities through simple stories: a king who builds a palace, a king who has a daughter, a king who plants a garden. These images make it possible to express abstract ideas in concrete and memorable form.
The ten divine powers
The Bahir's most important contribution is the idea that God manifests Himself through ten powers or attributes. The text calls them by various names, including ma'amarot, "sayings", linking them to the ten utterances through which, according to rabbinic tradition, the world was created. In later Kabbalah these ten powers would become the sefirot, the heart of the tree of life.
In the Bahir the ten powers are not yet organised into a rigid system. They are described through symbols, attributes and images that later Kabbalists would develop.
The tree
One of the text's central images is the tree. The divine powers are described as a cosmic tree that God planted and on which the life of the world depends. Its roots, branches and fruits become symbols of the relationships between the various divine manifestations. This image would enjoy immense fortune in Kabbalah, up to the graphic representation of the tree of the sefirot.
The feminine principle
The Bahir is among the first texts to introduce explicitly the idea of a feminine dimension within the divine. Through the parables of the king and his daughter, the text speaks of a feminine divine power, associated with God's presence in the world, which Kabbalah would call the Shekhinah. This is a significant novelty compared with earlier rabbinic tradition.
The transmigration of souls
The Bahir also contains one of the first hints in Jewish literature of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, which later Kabbalah would develop under the name of gilgul. The text expresses it through a parable about a man who plants a vineyard and replants it when it bears no fruit, an image of the soul returning to complete its task.
How to read it
The Bahir is short but extremely dense. A few suggestions for approaching it:
- read the parables as images to contemplate rather than as arguments;
- follow the way the text comments on letters and verses;
- recognise the themes that would become central in later Kabbalah;
- read it alongside the Sefer Yetzirah, which precedes it and which the Bahir presupposes.
Its obscurity is not a flaw but a feature: the text seems to address readers already introduced to an oral tradition, and it leaves many questions open.
In short
- The Sefer ha-Bahir appeared in Provence in the second half of the twelfth century.
- It is attributed to Rabbi Nehunya ben ha-Kanah, but the attribution is pseudepigraphal.
- It consists of short midrashic sections and parables about a king.
- It introduces the ten divine powers, the image of the tree and the feminine principle.
- It contains one of the first hints of the transmigration of souls in Jewish literature.
