The Creation of the World in the Sefer Yetzirah

Abstract

The Sefer Yetzirah is the "Book of Creation", one of the earliest extant texts about the creation of the world of the Jewish tradition, a book that some scholars are supposing of an early Medieval origin. The Sefer tells the origin of the world as it was revealed to Abraham, in a cosmogony based on numbers and letters of the alphabet, through their combinations and permutations. The reading of this book can be interesting for a comparison to the thoughts of some medieval philosophers, Al-Farabi, Ibn Gabirol, Robert Grosseteste and others, about the primordial point and its spatial extensions.

Keywords: Cosmogony, Ancient cosmology