Zohar: Genesis: Chapter II.

This is an excerpt from a Kabbalistic mystical commentary — most likely the Zohar, the central text of Jewish Kabbalah — interpreting the opening chapters of Genesis through esoteric allegory. The text argues that the biblical creation narrative encodes a hidden cosmology: primordial discord between elements produced demonic forces, while the divine response was the emanation of the ten Sephiroth (divine attributes such as Kether and Malchuth), which together form a "reflected image" of the infinite, unknowable God called En Soph. A distinctive claim is that divine unity is not undermined but expressed through multiplicity — just as a rainbow's separate colors are one light, the Sephiroth are one God, a point the text grounds in Deuteronomy 6:4 and other scriptural verses. The text also elaborates an intricate angelic hierarchy in which beings shaped like the four living creatures (man, lion, ox, eagle) serve specific cosmic and liturgical functions, with their forms encoded in the Hebrew letters of words like "shinan." Human souls are treated as qualitatively weaker than angels, requiring nightly ascent during sleep to be renewed by divine fire. Throughout, the method is typological and numerological — Hebrew letters, names, and numbers (seven, eighteen, four) are treated as keys to theological truths inaccessible to plain reading.

Zohar: Genesis: Chapter II.

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