Sefer ha-Bahir

Sefer ha-Bahir, the "Book of Brightness," is one of the earliest works of Kabbalah, a short and enigmatic collection of parables and comments on scripture that surfaced in twelfth-century Provence.

It introduces, in embryonic form, ideas that would define later Jewish mysticism: the divine potencies later systematised as the ten sefirot, the mystical significance of the Hebrew letters, and hints of the soul's transmigration. Reality is read as the outward expression of an inner divine life whose structure the initiate can trace.

Cryptic and much-interpreted, the Bahir stands with the Sefer Yetzirah and the later Zohar as a headwater of the Kabbalistic vision of a God whose hidden anatomy underlies the world.