An 'Ancient' Book That Appears in Twelfth-Century Provence

The Bahir ("Book of Illumination") presents itself as an ancient work and is attributed to the first- or second-century sage Nehunya ben HaKanah, whose name opens it. In the judgement of modern scholarship, above all Gershom Scholem, this attribution is pseudepigraphic: the book as we have it appears, suddenly and without earlier trace, in Provence in the late twelfth century (about 1176), and it is the first work to present the sefirot as dynamic divine powers rather than as the abstract numbers of the Sefer Yetzirah.

Written as a loose, deliberately obscure chain of sayings and parables commenting on scripture, it introduces themes that become central to the Kabbalah: a divine feminine presence, the transmigration of souls (gilgul), and the symbolic reading of the commandments. Scholem argued that it incorporates older, possibly Gnostic-flavoured material, images of divine powers and a cosmic tree, reworked in a Jewish frame, which is why it reads as archaic even though its extant form is medieval. It stands at the head of the tradition that culminates a century later in the Zohar.