Sefer HaBahir: The Book of Brilliance

Before the Zohar was known, before the Arizal, a short and cryptic book circulated among the Kabbalists of medieval Provence. It was called Sefer HaBahir (the “Book of Brilliance”), and almost every later system of Kabbalah draws on something that first appears in it.

The name and the opening

The title comes from a verse the book interprets in its first lines: “And now they do not see the light; it is brilliant (bahir) in the skies” (Iyov 37:21). The book opens in the name of Rabbi Nechunya ben HaKanah, a Sage of the Mishnaic period, and tradition attributes the work to him and his circle. It is also known as Midrash Rabbi Nechunya ben HaKanah HaGadol. Modern historians of Kabbalah date its first written form to the twelfth century. The tradition holds that its teachings are far older, and the matter of its authorship has been argued for centuries. For the reader, the more important question is what it says.

A book of short questions

The Bahir does not read like a treatise. It is a series of short passages, usually a question or a verse followed by an answer, in the manner of a midrash. A student asks, for example, why the letter bet is closed on three sides and open on one, and the answer opens into an account of Creation and direction. This style means that each passage can be read on its own, and also that the text is easy to misread.

What the Bahir introduces

Several ideas that became central to Kabbalah appear here in an early form.

The first is the sefirot (Divine attributes) as a structured set. The Bahir speaks of ten ma’amarot (utterances) through which the world is sustained and describes them with images. One is the image of a tree, with roots above and branches below.

The second is the idea that the Divine can be described through a set of qualities such as kindness, strength, and beauty, each connected to a Name and a verse.

The third is gilgul (reincarnation of souls). The Bahir is among the earliest Kabbalistic works to speak of it, and it ties the idea to questions of justice and suffering that the text raises. The Arizal later gave the subject its full form in Sha’ar HaGilgulim.

Its place in the chain

The Bahir reached the Kabbalists of Provence and then Gerona, where it influenced the teachers and contemporaries of the Ramban. Its ideas passed from there into Spain, where the Zohar was later revealed. In the sixteenth century, the Safed Kabbalists quoted it as a source. For anyone who wants to understand where the language of the sefirot began, it is the place to look.

How to read it

A reader approaching the Bahir should not expect a system. It is better read slowly, one passage at a time, with a commentary and with the later Kabbalistic literature in mind, since the Bahir often hints at things the Zohar and the Arizal later state openly. Its images of the sefirot can be compared with Sefer Yetzirah, and its early mention of gilgul with Sha’ar HaGilgulim.