282 A History of Judaism
Four entered the Garden. One cast a look and died. One cast a look and
was stricken. One cast a look and cut among the shoots. One entered
safely and departed safely. Ben Azzai cast a look and was stricken. Of him
scripture says: ‘If you have found honey, eat only enough for you’ (Prov
25:16). Ben Zoma cast a look and died. Of him Scripture says, ‘Precious in
the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints’ (Ps 116:15). Aher cast a look
and cut among the shoots ... R. Akiva entered safely, and departed safely.^23
At least some of the mystical stories arose from a natural desire to
attribute superhuman qualities to sages from the past, like the heroic
Shimon bar Yohai who was believed to have lived in a cave for twelve
years at the time of the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century ce in
order to preserve the Torah, fortified by a miraculous carob tree and
well of water and visited by the prophet Elijah. A strange cosmological
writing, Sefer Yetsirah, ‘The Book of Creation’, presents a systematic
view of the creation of the world through ‘ thirty- two paths of wisdom’
made up of the first ten numbers and the twenty- two letters of the Heb-
rew alphabet. It seems to have had its origin in the third or fourth
centuries ce. It was to be treated in the medieval period as a source of
much mystical speculation, but whether this was already true at the
time of its composition is uncertain. The obscure contents of the text are
of little help:
The ten sefirot are the basis; their measure is ten for they have no limit:
dimension of beginning and dimension of end, dimension of good and
dimension of evil, dimension of above and dimension of below, dimension
of east and dimension of west, dimension of north and dimension of south.
And the unique Lord, a trustworthy divine king, rules over them all from
his holy abode for ever and ever.The term sefirah, which means literally ‘enumeration’ and was to acquire
great importance in later Jewish mysticism (see below, p. 347), evidently
had some mystical significance for the author of this text, but the style
of the book is so allusive that it is hard to know exactly what he intended
to convey. The obscurantism may have been deliberate. It certainly did
not prevent the text becoming popular.
Equally embedded in rabbinic discourse was astrology, with frequent
references in the Talmuds to the mazal, ‘planet’ or ‘luck’, of individuals,
despite the hostility of those, like R. Yohanan in the third century, who
asserted that ‘Israel has no planet’. Also deeply embedded, despite similarly
strong opposition by some rabbis, were magic and dream interpretation: