The Sefer Yetzirah is about sixteen hundred words long depending on the recension, which is shorter than this article and its neighbour combined, and it has generated a commentary literature of enormous size.
Its content is a cosmology built from two sets of things. There are the ten sefirot, here called sefirot belimah, described as depths or dimensions rather than as the divine attributes they became in later Kabbalah; and there are the twenty two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, divided into three mothers, seven doubles and twelve simples. Ten and twenty two together make the thirty two paths of wisdom with which the text opens. The letters are not symbols of creation in this account. They are its instruments, combined, weighed and permuted by God to make everything that is.
That doctrine, that reality is generated by letter combination, is the root of the entire later tradition of Hebrew letter mysticism, and it is also the root of the golem legends, in which a practitioner who understands the combinations makes a living thing. The atlas records the golem material elsewhere; the text underneath all of it is this one.
Three principal recensions survive, the short, the long and the Saadia version, and they differ enough that a commentator's argument often depends on which one is in front of him. Modern editions print them in parallel for that reason.