Concepts of Scripture in Jewish Mysticism 161Th e identifi cations, “God’s name = God’s body” and “name = Torah,” recall
Ezra ben Solomon’s words quoted earlier, suggesting that we can equate
“body” (which may be parallel to the “divine edifi ce” in Ezra’s statement)
with Torah.
In all likelihood, what stands behind the teachings of these kabbalists is
a notion drawn from the Shi ’ur Qomah literature, that the Torah — on its
esoteric level — is the full height of God’s body. But one should note some
diff erences between these notions as they appear, say, in a prekabbalistic
work such as the Sefer Shimmushei Torah and in these thirteenth-century
kabbalistic works. In the former, a relatively small number of esoteric
names of God can be derived from specifi c verses throughout the whole
Torah, if one has access to the secret knowledge revealed to Moses or Rabbi
Yishmael. For the kabbalists (not only the two cited here but others as
well — in particular, Nahmanides),11 not only can specifi c verses serve as
a source of divine names, but the Torah in its entirety can be transformed
into a long series of divine names. Doing so requires correct knowledge
of how to redivide its constituent letters into this series of names, without
regard for how those letters form Hebrew words and sentences on the To-
rah’s overt level. Further, for kabbalists, the Torah is full of names of God,
while for the earlier heikhalot mystics, the Torah also contains names of
various angels. (Many kabbalists, including Nahmanides, resemble the
heikhalot mystics in maintaining that one can use knowledge of these di-
vine names embedded in the Torah for magical purposes.)12 An additional
kabbalistic perspective that coexisted with the one just described also de-
serves mention: to wit, the notion that the Torah not only contains esoteric
divine names but is itself one long divine name. Th ese two notions (the
Torah as containing divine names, and the Torah as a divine name), viewed
together, return us to the idea that the Torah is the body of God: the in-
dividual divine names found throughout the Torah are individual limbs;
when combined, these individual limbs/names form the whole body of
God, which is to say, form the Torah’s text, which is one long and mysteri-
ous appellation for God.
Th ese kabbalistic conceptions of Torah were oft en linked with doc-
trines of the sefi rot. In some early kabbalistic systems, the second-highest13
sefi rah, H.okhmah or Wisdom, stands for the primordial or heavenly To-
rah; the sixth-highest sefi rah, Tiferet or Glory, stands for the Written Torah
(that is, the Bible); and the lowest sefi rah, Malkhut or Kingship, is associ-
ated to the Oral Torah.14 From this point of view, the Torah (in its various