By Gershom Scholem
This little ebook offers Gershom Scholem discoveries within the zone of Jewish Gnosticism which cross at the back of of what he already did in his “Major tendencies in Jewish Mysticism”. the following, Scholem provides an intensive re-examination of traditions embedded in Hekhalot Books preserved in Rabbinic circles which had retained deep attachment to Pharisaism. Having underrated the antiquity of those texts, so much students therefore have been not able to correctly assessment the phenomenon. Gnosticism, a spiritual stream that believed in mystical esotericism for the select derived from illumination and the purchase of the information of heavenly issues, now turns out to were on the subject of the very middle of Judaism in Roman Palestine and in response to Scholem has to be ascribed to both the Tannaitic or the early Amoraic interval. Did the differentiation of the top God and Demiurge, supposedly God of Israel, preceeded the increase of Christianity and probably served as some extent of departure for definite Christian heresies? Scholem indicates that records of Christian Gnosticism presuppose the lifestyles of easy conceptions of Merkabah Mysticism and derides students who glance towards Iranian sources…
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Extra resources for Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition
Sample text
I n another text (to be found in Appendix C) from M S Oxford 1 5 3 1 , fol. :>n:1 1::1? l'l:J' ; fol. 111 . Cf. III n::J:J,D, fol. ·ll:) cnn1. s Cf. on some aspects of these contacts between the Coptic Gnostic writings and their Hekhaloth counterparts, the writer's article "'Ober eine Forme! in den koptisch-gnostischen Schriften und ihren jiidischen Ursprung," Zeitschrift fur die neutestamentliche Wissenschajt, XXX (1931), 1 7D-176. 6 Cf. Major Trends, p. 362. 7 The manuscripts read c•n,,,;"ll ,':::I N .
I'1:l1 n1CII', Par. XLI I , 1 : �1p:l 1�'11;:) 1n11. v SOME OLD ELEMENTS IN THE GREATER HEKHALOTH The Hekhaloth books, I have said, describe at great length the ecstatic ascent of the soul to heaven. Although the details of this ascent in the Greater Hekhaloth differ in many ways from those in the Lesser ones, it is difficult t o decide whether either of these two texts represents an earlier stage of tradition or whether both are parallel versions of only slightly different groups. Still, both texts together present us with such an abundance of particulars, in contra distinction to the talmudic material, that we begin to wonder about the relation of these Hekhaloth traditions to the talmudic injunction against precisely this kind of revelation.
Cf. Wertheimer, nliV1,D •n::1, I I , 130: :1'HD '1 1DHIV ;'l'll)ID 'Dl' '1 clrvD •1? '1 1DH );'1::1 nl::1:::1 1C ;'I)I::IIVl ronp;, H1::1 C')l'i'1 ;'I)I::IIV. " This type of secret name abounds both in the Hebrew and Aramaic Hekhaloth texts and in the Greek and Coptic magical papyri. We read the following in the Visions about the third heaven , called Zebul (in the parallel recension in lfagigah 1 2b it is considered the fourth ) , where Michael, " the Great Prince," stands and makes an offering in the celestial temple :'J And what is there in Zebul?