Sefer Yetzirah and the Cosmology of Letters

The Sefer Yetzirah ("Book of Formation") is one of the oldest texts of Jewish cosmological speculation. It describes the formation of the world through the thirty-two "paths of wisdom": the ten sefirot and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Brief and enigmatic, it generated many medieval commentaries and fed later Kabbalah as well as traditions of creation through letters.