Beyond Heaven and Earth by Gabriel Levy

Author:Gabriel Levy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: religion; religious; psychology; evolution; mind; science; philosophy; Donald Davidson; anomalous monism; metaphysics; language; linguistics; science studies; fiction; celebrity; celebrities; surprise; comedy; Joe Rogan; narrative; narratives; myth; myths; cognition; cognitive science; Judaism; alien; aliens; communication; information; intimacy; semantics; animal; animals; animal communication; life; life sciences; origin of life; two cultures; anthropomorphism; agency; explanation of religion; science and religion; meaning; systems theory; animism; cosmology; monism; dualism; nature; naturalistic approach
Publisher: MIT Press

The Book of Creation

It is in the context of an anomalous monist approach to ethnomathematics that I want to situate the main subject of this chapter, the ancient Middle Eastern text known as Sefer Yetzirah (SY). Religion and math have a deep sympathy in the period when this text was composed, probably because it was especially trippy to be discovering connections between new culturally derived mathematical concepts and nature. If mathematician Graham Farmelo is right that the universe speaks in numbers, since math is a combination of a number sense, discrete ordering, and language, we should also say that the universe speaks in natural language (Farmelo 2019).

Though SY possibly existed in some form, either oral or written, before the tenth century, that was when the first commentary on it was written by Saadya Gaon, one of the most important early medieval scholars and president of the Talmudic academy of Sura in Babylonia. Subsequently, many different recensions have been discovered over the years. The most recent translator, Peter Hayman, consulted at least nineteen different recensions in making his critical translation, though he focused on three of these: Ms A in the Vatican, Ms K in Parma, and Ms C in Cambridge (Hayman 2004).

Different recensions probably indicate that there was not really an authoritative version by the time Sefer Yetzirah showed up on the desk of Saadya Gaon, a prominent voice within the Jewish world of his day. It was his choice to comment on the text that set it apart as an important text for Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals in the Middle Ages and beyond. Saadya likely found it interesting because it was a text that spoke in the scientific terms of the day at the same time that it used Judaic concepts. By “scientific,” I mean it was some combination of ideas recognizable from Egypt, from Philo; it was an account of creation echoing, for example, the monologue of Timaeus in the dialogue by that name, but also “Pythagorean” ideas, which saw an alignment between arithmetics and creation.2 Whatever the origin of such ideas and speculation, they were certainly well in circulation in that part of the world at the time. By “Judaic,” I mean that the deity in the text is no other than “Yah,” a living superhuman agent, referred to with names similar to other “Israelite” texts at the time. Also, no less significant, the language of creation in the text is Hebrew.

Since there is no evidence that the text had a definite form before the tenth century, dating it has been extremely difficult; dates range from the second century BCE until the tenth century CE, immediately before commentaries started being written. Some scholars note a text of a similar name mentioned earlier in the Talmud and related to similar combinatorial speculation, so it is possible that ideas of this type go very far back in rabbinic thinking (Weiss 2019). However, dating of Talmudic texts precisely is nearly impossible, so this does not give us much to go on.

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