Sefer ha-Zohar (The Book of Splendor)

Sefer ha-Zohar, the Book of Splendor, is the foundational text of Kabbalah, circulated as the recovered teaching of the second-century sage Shimon bar Yochai though modern scholarship identifies Moses de León as its principal author. Its central vision is of reality as the dynamic emanation of ten sefirot, divine attributes through which the hidden Infinite, Ein Sof, unfolds into the world.

Written in a distinctive Aramaic and woven from earlier Kabbalistic and midrashic materials, the work reads Scripture as a living web of symbols, names, and letters in which meaning is creative rather than merely descriptive. It insists that the lower world mirrors the upper and that human action below stirs the realms above.

Its conviction that the visible is the outer garment of an unseen inner reality became a root assumption of later mystical thought, presenting the cosmos as the expression of a mind-like, conscious source.