Sefer Shimmush Torah I

Sefer Shimmush Torah (The Magic-Theurgical Uses of the Torah) is paradigmatic of a still under-researched group of texts circulating from the thirteenth-century Kabbalistic centres in Europe. It is grounded in the idea that the Torah contains an infinite number of divine names, which can be derived and extracted through permutation and gematria techniques. Accordingly, Shimmush Torah presents a range of such names, arranged according to the liturgical structure of the weekly Torah readings. What at first appears to be an alternative compositional logic of the Torah readings is, in fact, an exercise in encipherment aimed at explicating divine names known from earlier magical, mystical, and liturgical traditions. Its narrative introduction, published independently as Ma‘ayan ha-Ḥokhmah, presents the work as revealed to Moses at Sinai by the angels upon the reception of the Torah. This volume offers the first scholarly edition of the text and its introduction, a facing English translation, and an overview of its redactional and transmission history, intended as reference for philologists, historians of religion, medievalists, scholars of Jewish studies, and beyond.