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Full Description
Sefer Shimmush Torah (The Magic-Theurgical Uses of the Torah) is a representative example of a little-studied group of texts that crystallised in the Kabbalistic centres of thirteenth-century Europe. It rests on the premise that the Torah contains an infinite number of divine names, which can be uncovered through techniques of letter permutation and gematria. The text presents these names in a sequence structured around the weekly Torah readings. Although it appears to based on an alternative exegetical logic, the work can be more appropriately read as a form of encipherment that explicates divine names known from earlier magical, mystical, and literary traditions.
The narrative which introduces Shimmush Torah also circulated independently under the title Maʿayan ha-Ḥokhmah. In the present textual context, it legitimises the use of the names by presenting them as having been revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai. This volume offers the first scholarly edition of both the text and its introduction, with facing English translations, alongside an overview of their redactional and transmission histories. It will be of interest to philologists, historians of religion, medievalists, scholars of Jewish studies, and others interested in the textual cultures of medieval Europe.
