158 Moshe Idel
names of God that are otherwise not known and that these names have
the power to aff ect God and/or to aff ect the material world. Th us, for some
mystics, the revelation of Torah was a revelation not only of a set of laws
and narratives but of God’s names, which is to say, God’s very essence; rev-
elation yielded not only information and guidance but a key with which to
come into relationship with God.
According to this way of thinking, the Torah has two levels: an overt
or manifest level and a hidden or secret level. Th e overt level was revealed
to Moses at Mount Sinai, and it contains the narratives, laws, and poems
known to anyone who studies or even simply reads the Torah. (Most mid-
rashic interpretations, which one can arrive at through close reading, be-
long to the Torah’s overt level.) Th e hidden level, according to the heikhalot
mystics of the Talmudic era, was revealed to a famous sage of the Mishna,
Rabbi Yishmael,2 and also to those heikhalot mystics who delved into the
secrets of Shi ’ur Qomah, the literature that discloses the measurements of
the divine body. Some mystics also regarded this hidden level of Torah as
having been revealed to Moses at Sinai. Th us, one early medieval magical
text, Sefer Shimmushei Torah (a heikhalot text dating to the Talmudic era or
shortly thereaft er), avers that at the time of the revelation of Torah, Moses
ascended to heaven and received from various angels there secrets of the
divine names found in each section of the Torah. Th ese secrets included
specifi c magical or mystical uses to which these divine names could be put.
While Moses made the overt level of the Torah (that is, the laws and nar-
ratives found in the Torah) known to all Israel, Moses transmitted the hid-
den level of the Torah only to his nephew Eleazar, who succeeded Moses’s
brother Aaron as high priest; Eleazar transmitted it to his son and succes-
sor Phinehas, and through a continuing process of transmission, this eso-
teric heavenly knowledge ultimately came to the mystics of the rabbinic era
themselves.3 According to both Sefer Shimmushei Torah itself and the text
known as Shi ’ur Qomah, it is possible to use the secrets the angels vouch-
safed to Moses (or Rabbi Yishmael) to read the Torah in a manner diff ering
from the more widespread methods.4 Th is esoteric reading yields its practi-
tioners the ability to perform magical acts.
Further, this notion of an alternate, esoteric reading of the Torah’s words
at times relates to another idea that appears in heikhalot literature. Th e
heikhalot mystics, like the rabbis, believed that the Torah existed already
before the creation of the world; aft er all, according to the rabbis (at the
beginning of Midrash Genesis Rabbah),5 God used the Torah as a blue-
print for creating the world; thus, Torah is the instrument through which