Concepts of Scripture in Jewish Mysticism 159God created the world. If this is so, then the question needed to be asked:
what was this preexistent Torah written on? It could not, aft er all, be writ-
ten on leather (like Torah scrolls used in synagogues), since the animals
from whose skin leather is made had not yet been created; nor could it
be written on any other matter, since matter did not yet exist. Midrashic
texts that show affi nities to the literature of the heikhalot6 provide an an-
swer: the Torah was written on God’s own arm. More specifi cally, the arm
of God consisted of white fi re, and the Torah was written on it in black
fi re. (Incidentally, here we must recall that, contrary to what many people
nowadays assume, neither biblical nor rabbinic texts believe that God is
completely incorporeal; for the Bible and classical rabbinic literature, it is
a given that God has a body, though this body may be made of a substance
that diff ers from a normal human body.)7 Th is link between the preexistent
Torah and the limbs of God’s body also shows up in the similar language
used in Shi ’ur Qomah and heikhalot texts to describe the extraordinary size
of both the divine limbs and the preexistent Torah. In this conception, the
Torah at its esoteric level, like God, has the form of a human being. For
prekabbalistic Jewish mystics, the secrets of the Torah revealed to Moses or
to Rabbi Yishmael enable a diff erent way of reading its words, so that the
adept reader can come to gaze on the limbs of God to which Torah gives
access or, perhaps, to see the limb of God that the Torah in fact is. Intensive
study of the Torah on this esoteric level allows one to see God, because at
this level, the Torah is on the body of God.
Th is confl uence of ideas becomes clearer in the writings of the earli-
est kabbalists. Th e term kabbalah refers to the hidden meanings of ritual
practices and to the esoteric doctrines that emerged in the twelft h century
in the Provence region of southern France, spreading from there to Spain,
Italy, and other parts of the Jewish world; these doctrines assume many
forms but are especially concerned with the doctrine of sefi rot and with
the impact of the rituals upon them. Th e sefi rot are manifestations of God
(or, alternatively, powers emanating from God) that enter into the created
world; each of the ten sefi rot embody or refl ect a particular aspect of God,
such as Wisdom, Justice, Mercy, or Royalty.
Th e writings of thirteenth-century kabbalists display a concept of Torah
based on two fundamental principles, which were described by the mod-
ern scholar of kabbalah Gershom Scholem:8 the Torah is conceived of as
a name of God (or a series of divine names), and the Torah is conceived
of as an organism. Th e conception of Torah as an organism grows out of
earlier conceptions which emphasize that the Torah has the form or shape