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Hekhalot Literature in Context

Between Byzantium and Babylonia

Edited by

Ra‘anan Boustan, Martha Himmelfarb, and Peter Schäfer

Mohr Siebeck

Digitaler Sonderdruck des Autors mit Genehmigung des Verlages

Ra‘anan Boustan, born 1971; 2004 PhD; Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Martha Himmelfarb, born 1952; 1981 PhD; since 2007 William H. Danforth Professor of Reli-gion at Princeton University.

Peter Schäfer, born 1943; 1968 PhD; since 1998 Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religion at Princeton University; since 2005 Director of Princeton’s Program in Judaic Studies.

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Table of Contents

Achnowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . V

Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IX

Introduction: Hekhalot Literature at the Intersections of Jewish Regional CulturesRa‘anan Boustan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XI

Section IThe Formation of Hekhalot Literature:

Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Contexts

1. The Language of Hekhalot Literature: Preliminary ObservationsNoam Mizrahi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2. Metatron in BabyloniaPeter Schäfer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

3. Hekhalot and Piyyut: From Byzantium to Babylonia and BackMichael D. Swartz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

4. The Emperor’s Many Bodies: The Demise of Emperor Lupinus RevisitedAlexei Sivertsev . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

5. Jewish Mysticism in Byzantium: The Transformation of Merkavah Mysticism in 3 EnochKlaus Herrmann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

6. Between 3 Enoch and Bavli Hagigah: Heresiology and Orthopraxy in the Ascent of Elisha ben AbuyahDavid M. Grossberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

7. Hekhalot Literature, the Babylonian Academies, and the tanna’imMoulie Vidas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141


VIII Table of Contents

Section IIThe Transmission and Reception of Hekhalot Literature:

Toward the Middle Ages

8. The Hekhalot GenizahPeter Schäfer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179

9. Observations on the Transmission of Hekhalot Literature in the Cairo GenizahGideon Bohak . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213

10. A Prolegomenon to the Study of Hekhalot Traditions in European PiyyutOphir Münz-Manor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231

Section IIIEarly Jewish Mysticism in Comparative Perspective:

Themes and Patterns

11. Major Trends in Rabbinic CosmologyReimund Leicht . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245

12. Women and Gender in the Hekhalot LiteratureRebecca Lesses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279

13. “What is Below?”Mysteries of Leviathan in the Early Jewish Accounts and Mishnah Hagigah 2:1Andrei A. Orlov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313

14. Rites of Passage in Magic and MysticismMichael Meerson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323

15. Rethinking (Jewish-)Christian Evidence for Jewish MysticismAnnette Yoshiko Reed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379

Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411

Index of Primary Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 413Index of Proper Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 429Index of Modern Scholars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 432


12

Women and Gender in the Hekhalot Literature

Rebecca Lesses

Hekhalot literature contains a host of ascetic prescriptions that the mystic must follow in order to invoke angels or to enter the hekhalot (heavenly palaces), many implying that the world of the merkavah was a male-only sphere.1 The mystical practitioner must avoid any contact with women, including not looking at them and not eating food prepared by them. A distant contact with a woman’s men-strual impurity sufficed to recall R. Nehuniah b. Ha-Qanah from his hekhalot vision. Almost without exception, the Hekhalot texts do not countenance the possibility that a woman could participate in the mystical activities and visions described in them.2 It was a male-only world, and women were mentioned

1 For the texts of the hekhalot literature, see Peter Schäfer, ed., Synopsis zur Hekhalot-Lite-ratur, TSAJ 2 (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1981); and Schäfer, ed., Geniza Fragmente zur Hekha-lot-Literatur, TSAJ 6 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1984). Important discussions of the Hekhalot literature include the following: Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 3rd ed. (New York: Schocken, 1954), 40–79; Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition, 2nd ed. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1965); Ithamar Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, AGJU 16 (Leiden: Brill, 1980); Gruenwald, From Apocalypticism to Gnosticism (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1988); David Halperin, Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision, TSAJ 16 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1988); Peter Schäfer, Hekhalot Studien (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1988); Naomi Janowitz, The Poetics of Ascent (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); Michael Swartz, Mystical Prayer in Ancient Judaism, TSAJ 28 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992); Swartz, Scholastic Magic: Ritual and Revelation in Early Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Joseph Dan, The Ancient Jewish Mysticism (Tel Aviv: MOD, 1993); Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Rebecca Lesses, Ritual Practices to Gain Power: Angels, Incantations, and Revelation in Early Jewish Mysticism, HTS 44 (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1998); James Davila, Descenders to the Chariot: The People Be-hind the Hekhalot Literature, JSJSup 70 (Leiden: Brill, 2001); Rachel Elior, The Three Temples: On the Emergence of Jewish Mysticism (Oxford: Littman Library, 2004); Ra‘anan S. Boustan, From Martyr to Mystic: Rabbinic Martyrology and the Making of Merkabah Mysticism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005); and Peter Schäfer, The Origins of Jewish Mysticism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009). Unless otherwise specified, biblical translations are from the new Jewish Publication Society Tanakh, and translations of rabbinic and hekhalot texts are mine.

2 One short passage in Hekhalot Zutarti (§ 421) and the Midrash of Shemhazai and Azael (in Bereshit Rabbati, among other medieval sources) provide the only exceptions. They will be discussed below.


Rebecca Lesses280

only as possible threats to the sexual or ritual purity of the male practitioners. This article examines the hekhalot requirements of ritual and sexual purity that prohibited the male mystic’s contact with women, as well as the concomitant assumption in the Hekhalot texts that only men can engage in mystical practices. The goal is to answer the following questions: Were there any female hekhalot mystics? And if not, why was the visionary experience “gendered male” in the Hekhalot literature?

My questions arise especially because the comparative evidence – from early Christianity and early Islam – provides evidence of women mystics in those traditions. Other early Jewish literature in Greek (e. g., the Testament of Job) may also suggest the possibility of women’s involvement in visionary mysticism. Rab-binic texts refer occasionally to women’s learning and piety. Even the Babylonian Talmud leaves open the possibility that a woman could be knowledgeable in the Torah (written and oral) with the example of Beruriah (perhaps only to deny the reality), and there are a number of references to women discussing Torah or ha-lakhic questions with male authorities.3 Why then were Jewish women’s mystical experiences not recorded and women’s absence required from Hekhalot circles?

This examination of Hekhalot literature uses gender as a category of analysis, which is accomplished, first of all, through a detailed investigation of the mecha-nisms of exclusion within the texts, and then an examination of biblical and rab-binic writings that bear on the Hekhalot texts and that reveal contradictions to or predecessors to these exclusions.4 In order to identify the androcentric ideology of Jewish mystical texts, I write from an explicitly feminist perspective, drawing on the work of numerous feminist scholars of Judaism and biblical studies.5 Ju-dith Plaskow articulates this approach to ancient texts in her book Standing Again at Sinai, where she argues that a feminist approach to Jewish history must make use of the practice of modern historical writing described by Yosef Yerushalmi,

3 See, e. g., the following discussions of Beruriah as a scholar: Rachel Adler, “The Virgin in the Brothel and Other Anomalies: Character and Context in the Legend of Beruriah,” Tikkun 3 (Nov.-Dec. 1988): 28–32, 102–5; Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 167–96; Tal Ilan, Jewish Women in Greco-Roman Palestine, TSAJ 44 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995), 197–204. On Beruriah and Matrona, see Tal Ilan, “The Quest for the Historical Beruriah, Rachel, and Imma Shalom,” AJS Review 22 (1997): 1–17; and Ilan, Mine and Yours are Hers: Retrieving Women’s History from Rabbinic Literature, AGJU 41 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 55–57, 68–72, 240–62, 288–89, 297–310. For a discussion of Yalta, see Charlotte Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender, Contraversions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 118–27. See also the discussions in Bernadette J. Brooten, Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue, BJS 36 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982) regarding the different leadership roles that Jewish women played in late antiquity.

4 Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 28–50, provides an influential defini-tion of gender and its relation to history.

5 See Judith R. Baskin, Midrashic Women: Formations of the Feminine in Rabbinic Literature (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 2002), 6–8.


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which “brings to the fore texts, events, processes, that never really became part of Jewish group memory.”6 According to Plaskow, this modern practice “challenges and relativizes those memories that have survived.”7 She further argues that,

It is essentially the purpose of the feminist historian to challenge tradition in the way he describes. Surfacing forgotten processes and events, nameless persons and discarded sources, the feminist calls Jewish memory to the bar, accusing it of partiality and distor-tion, of defining Jewish women out of the Jewish past.8

The first part of my task, therefore, is to begin with these questions: why are there no women practitioners in the Hekhalot texts? What are the mechanisms of ex-clusion in these texts? How do these texts operate to make it seem natural – even inevitable – that no women are mentioned as practitioners?

Gabrielle Spiegel provides a useful formulation of the deconstructive analysis of language that I use in analyzing the gaps in Hekhalot literature, stating that:

… deconstructive strategies …have proven to be powerful tools of analysis in uncovering and dismantling the ways in which texts perform elaborate ideological mystifications of which it is proper to be suspicious and which texts themselves inevitably betray through their fracturing of meaning, once we have learned to read them deconstructively. Even more so has deconstruction taught us to heed the silences within language, to search out the unsaid as well as the spoken, and to understand the constitutive force of silence in shaping the texts we read.9

This approach to language is useful for reading the absences – in particular, the absence of women – in the Hekhalot literature. Another, explicitly feminist, for-mulation of this approach is articulated by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza as the “hermeneutics of suspicion,”10 which “seeks to explore the liberating or oppres-sive values and visions inscribed in the text by identifying the androcentric-pa-triarchal character and dynamics of the text and its interpretations.”11 Although

6 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 94.

7 Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991), 35. 8 Ibid., 35. 9 Gabrielle Spiegel, “History and Post-Modernism: IV,” Past and Present 135 (1992): 194–

208, at 204.10 A hermeneutics of suspicion “invites readers to investigate biblical texts and traditions

as one would ‘search’ the place and location where a crime has been committed. It approaches the canonical text as a ‘cover-up’ for patriarchal murder and oppression. It seeks to identify the crime by carefully tracing its clues and imprints in the texts in order to prevent further hurt and violations” (Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Transforming the Legacy of The Woman’s Bible,” in Searching the Scriptures, vol. 1, A Feminist Introduction, ed. E. Schüssler Fiorenza [New York: Crossroad, 1993], 11–24, at 11). What is particularly important about Schüssler Fiorenza’s position is that she writes from an explicitly feminist and political standpoint; she is not just trying to work out a philosophically sound perspective from which to interpret biblical texts.

11 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon, 1992), 57.


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women are not the center of the Hekhalot literature, this reading places them in the center, if only to reveal how absent they actually are.

The article begins by discussing the purity requirements of several rituals in the Hekhalot literature, showing the rabbinic antecedents of many of these re-quirements, and demonstrating that the effect of these requirements is to exclude women from engaging in these rituals. The article then turns to the account of the recall of R. Nehuniah b. Ha-Qanah from gazing at the merkavah, which is effect-ed by imparting to him the slightest possibility of menstrual impurity.12 A woman appears in this narrative, but she never speaks, and her role is solely to furnish the impurity that will make R. Nehuniah unworthy of visiting the celestial realm. The conclusion drawn is that women are entirely excluded from involvement in hekhalot rituals of adjuration and ascent for two reasons: because they are seen as a threat to the purity of the men engaging in these rituals, and because they are unable to become completely pure, no matter the number of times they might immerse themselves to become pure of menstrual impurity.

I then turn to two passages that might call into question this conclusion. The first is from Hekhalot Zutarti, and mentions that women as well as men can see the angel Paniyon, who opens the gates of salvation to all.13 Comparison with an intriguing passage from Seder Eliyahu Rabbah, which states that the holy spirit rests on anyone whose deeds merit it, suggests that the composer of the Paniyon passage may in fact have meant to include women as well as men in the company of those who could see the angel. A variant in the New York manuscript of the Paniyon passage goes further and states that women as well as men may also descend to the merkavah. A close examination of several ascent and adjuration texts in the Hekhalot literature reveals, however, that while men of no great scholarship or lofty pedigree may merit to descend to the merkavah, no women may. The inclusion of women in the New York manuscript is an idiosyncrasy of the medieval redactor of the text.

The second example is not from the Hekhalot texts, but from the medieval Midrash of Shemhazai and Azael, which recounts how a worthy young woman, Esterah, tricks the angel Shemhazai into giving her the knowledge of the divine name to ascend to heaven. This is the only example in a text related to the Hekha-lot literature where a woman ascends to heaven. Through a detailed comparison of the text with the hekhalot ascent instructions, it becomes clear that there are signal differences that do not validate the Midrash of Shemhazai and Azael as a late source for women’s participation in earlier hekhalot rituals of descent to the merkavah. This is also shown in the discussion of the sources of the midrash, which are to be found in earlier pseudepigraphic traditions about the fallen angels Shemhazai and Azael, and in Islamic exegesis of the Qur’an (tafsir), in

12 Schäfer, Synopse, §§ 224–28.13 Ibid., § 420.



particular of Sura 2:102, which mentions two angels named Harut and Marut, who taught people sorcery.

While the Hekhalot texts exclude women entirely, it is clear from the examina-tion of other forms of ancient Jewish literature that some women could have re-ceived revelations and participate in rituals like those recounted in the Hekhalot literature. Through an examination of three early Greek Jewish texts – Philo’s On the Contemplative Life, the Testament of Job, and Joseph and Aseneth – I present a model that accords with ancient notions of women’s proper place and their ability to be pure that would allow for the possibility of Jewish women’s participation in visionary mysticism.

Women – and Their Absence – in Hekhalot Literature

I begin by discussing several representative rituals and the ways in which they de-fine the practitioner as male and exclude the possibility of a female practitioner. By so doing, I will reveal what the important qualifications are for the rituals and the ways in which they define the ideal man who is to perform them. The discussion frequently invites comparisons with rabbinic literature, not because the authors of the Hekhalot literature are necessarily the same as the rabbinic tradents and redactors of rabbinic literature, but because the Hekhalot texts claim to be rabbinic texts, with rabbinic heroes (e. g., R. Aqiba, R. Eliezer, R. Nehuniah b. ha-Qanah), often use rabbinic terminology (e. g., “mishnah” for a section of a Hekhalot text), and exploit the most ascetic aspects of rabbinic culture. If the rabbis could not countenance ascetic women, then certainly the authors of the Hekhalot literature, who go beyond the rabbis in their askesis, could not imagine such women. There is some kind of interplay between the authors of the He-khalot literature and the rabbis, but it does not seem to be direct; the rabbis are not identical to the authors of the Hekhalot literature, but there is knowledge of rabbinic tradition (and maybe resentment of rabbinic power) among the authors of the Hekhalot literature.14

14 See Halperin, Faces of the Chariot, 437–46, for a discussion of the possible antagonism between the authors of the Hekhalot literature and the leaders of the rabbinic movement. Da-vila (Descenders, 274–75) writes that the social background of the composers of the Hekhalot literature “places them in scribal and perhaps synagogue circles of people who were fairly well educated but who lacked the specialized learning of the rabbinic sages in Torah and therefore also lacked the social status and perquisites of the sages.” He continues (276–77), “The com-posers of the Hekhalot texts were scribes who envied the rabbinic sages and sought to compete with them using their own rituals of power. They followed their own rigorous ritual praxes to wrest Torah powers from heaven but they did not keep this power for themselves. It was part of their agenda to share it with all other Jews.” The question, we will see, is whether “all Jews” included women as well as men.


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The first ritual invokes Yofi’el, the angelic prince in charge of Torah knowl-edge.15 This ritual offers instructions for the preparations that the practitioner must undertake in order to make himself fit to receive a revelation of the angel, and then provides a list of divine names to recite in order to achieve the revela-tion.16 This adjuration immediately reveals the purity concerns of the Hekhalot literature. The angel calls R. Ishmael, “Son of Adam, stinking drop, worm and maggot.” The “stinking drop” refers to a drop of semen. This phrase is known from m. Avot 3:1, where Akavia ben Mehalelel says that human beings should “know from whence” they have come: “From a putrid drop.” The idea of the impurity of semen, and its incompatibility with the angels, appears in the adju-rations discussed below, which expressly tell the practitioner to avoid a seminal emission in order to perform the ritual.

It is not only human beings who must be pure in order to have contact with heavenly creatures. The angels themselves must be purified when they return to heaven after their duties on earth. Before the angels who have duties on earth among human beings ascend to heaven to participate in the angelic liturgy, they must immerse in a river of fire to purify themselves from any human impurities, including abnormal genital discharges, with which they may have come in con-tact prior to reentering the firmament.17 This passage is intriguing in part because these impurities all come from those “born of woman.” Women, of course, are

15 This text is one of several examples of Sar Torah invocations present in the Hekhalot texts.16 Schäfer, Synopse, § 314. The manuscript followed is MS Vatican 228 (Synopse, §§ 313–14).

R. Ishmael said: “When I was thirteen, I was disturbed about this matter, and I returned to R. Nehuniah b. HaQanah, my rabbi. I said to him: ‘The Prince of the Torah, what is his name?’ He said to me: ‘Yofi’el is his name.’ Immediately I stood up and afflicted myself forty days, and I said the great name until I brought him down. He descended in a flame of fire and his face was like lightning. When I saw him I was shocked and trembled and fell down. He said to me: ‘Son of Adam, what quality do you have, that you disturbed the great family?’ I said to him: ‘It is revealed and known before the One who spoke and the world came into being, that I did not bring you down for your glory, but to do the will of your Creator.’ He said to me: ‘Son of Adam, stinking drop, worm and maggot.’ The one who wishes that he [the angel] be revealed to him should sit in fasting forty days, and immerse twenty-four times every day, and he should not eat any polluted thing. He should not look at a woman, and should sit in a completely dark house. [Voces mysticae follow].”

17 Schäfer, Synopse, §§ 181, 791, 811. The text reads: “Do the ministering angels have abnor-mal genital discharges and the impurity of menstruation and parturient-impurity, for which they need immersion? [MS Oxford 1531 mentions zav and zavah, niddah, childbirth, “or any impurity.”] Rather, the ministering angels, who are appointed over the work of the world, de-scend every day to make peace in the world, and when the time comes for song, they ascend to heaven [MS Oxford does not include the phrase “to make peace in the world”]. Because of the stench of human beings, born of woman (yelud ’ishah), carriers of impurity, who suffer from genital discharges and filth, they [the angels] wash themselves in fire and cleanse and purify and take care and separate and inspect and strengthen and exalt and improve themselves in fire until they make themselves holy and become like the angels of highest heaven.” The phrase yelud ’ishah occurs elsewhere in the Hekhalot literature, always with the connotation that a human being is invading a realm that truly belongs to the angels and God.



the direct source of many impurities – in particular menstruation and childbirth, which occurs after they have incorporated the “stinking drop” into their own bodies. When Rabbi Ishmael ascends to heaven at the beginning of 3 Enoch, once he has entered the seventh hekhal, the angels ask his sponsor, Metatron, “Why did you permit one born of woman to come and gaze upon the merkavah? From which people is he, from which tribe is he, and what is his nature?”18 Metatron answers them that R. Ishmael is from the people of Israel, chosen by God, from the tribe of Levi, and from the seed of Aaron. His priestly lineage seems to cancel out his being “born of woman.”

These texts are further supported by other texts where directions are given to the initiates, and, implicitly, also to the reader of the text, regarding what to do and what to refrain from doing in order to call upon the angels. Among other rules, the practitioner is frequently told that he must not look at a woman.19 The belief that a man’s spiritual focus may be hindered by seeing a woman, clothed or naked, is well-known in rabbinic literature. As Michael Satlow notes, “The prima-ry rabbinic understanding of female nakedness is that it arouses sexual passion in men.”20 In a passage from tractate Berakhot, several rabbis mention the parts of a woman’s body a man would find sexually arousing (particularly in his wife), and thus prevent him from reciting the Shema‘.21 A woman’s nakedness begins far before complete nudity; it can include her little finger, her leg, her hair and even her voice. “Nakedness” is anything that might sexually arouse a man, and the authors of the Hekhalot literature seem to worry greatly about what might arouse men, doing everything they can to avoid it, so that the man will not have a seminal emission for any reason.

The adjuration of the Prince of the Presence (Sar ha-Panim) provides direc-tions, phrased as a conversation between R. Eliezer and his disciple R. Akiba, for how to invoke Metatron, the Prince of the Presence. The directions are divided into two sections; the first part instructs the practitioner in the ascetic practices

18 Schäfer, Synopse, § 3.19 Another ritual text (Schäfer, Synopse, § 560) requires the practitioner to avoid looking at

colored garments (probably worn by a woman), because of their arousing nature (see m. Zavim 2:2). In the Midrash of Shemhazai and Azael, Azael, who does not repent, “is in change of all kinds of colored garments and adornments of women, by which they incite men to sin.” For the texts of four versions of this midrash (found in the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, ch. 25; Yalqut Shimoni § 44; Bereshit Rabbati; and Raymundi Martini, Pugio Fidei) see Josef Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 321–39. This text will be discussed in greater detail below. The notion that Azael is in charge of colored garments goes back to 1 Enoch 8, where it says “He [Asael] showed them metals of the earth and how they should work gold to fashion it suitably, and concerning silver, to fashion it for bracelets and ornaments for women” (trans. George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, 1 Enoch: A New Translation [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004], 25).

20 Michael Satlow, “Jewish Constructions of Nakedness in Late Antiquity,” JBL 116 (1997): 429–54.

21 b. Ber. 24a.


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that he must follow in order to prepare himself for the utterance of the adjura-tions, while the second part gives the texts of the incantations themselves and describes what will happen when the angel descends. The goal of the ritual is to receive a revelation from the angel and to speak with him “as a man speaks with his friend.”22 As in the previous text, also here R. Eliezer speaks both to R. Akiba and to the implied reader. His directions introduce an explicitly sexual element that the previous ritual does not: the avoidance of ejaculation, either during sexual intercourse or from other causes (nocturnal emission, masturbation). The requirement to “dip in the water-canal” is probably to ensure purification from seminal impurity.23 In addition to avoidance of sexual intercourse with women, the practitioner must also avoid even talking with a woman. The incompatibility of divine revelation with sexual activity goes back to Exod 19:10 and 19:14–15, where “purification” meant avoidance of sexual intercourse.24 According to rab-binic tradition, Moses, who was constantly in contact with God, separated him-self entirely from his wife in order always to be pure.25 The priests in the Temple also had to cleanse themselves from the impurity brought by sexual intercourse before they were able to offer the sacrifices.26

The avoidance of even speaking with a woman is reminiscent of the passage from m. Avot 1:5.27 Not only does sexual intercourse make a man unfit to receive revelation from an angel, but even having any contact with a woman will distract

22 Schäfer, Synopse, § 623, MS New York 8128: “He [R. Eliezer] said to me [R. Akiba]: ‘The one who binds himself to make theurgic use of him should sit in fast one day on the day that he brings him down. Before that day he should sanctify himself seven days from seminal emission (qeri), and dip himself in the water-canal. He should not have conversation with a woman. At the end of the days of his fasting and purification, on the day of his fast, he should go down and sit in water up to his neck and say [the following incantation] before he adjures.’” The other manuscripts of this section (MS Oxford 1531 [Michael 9], Munich 22, and Dropsie 436) do not include the word “with a woman.” A Genizah fragment (Schäfer, Geniza-Fragmente, G-1) of this same section reads: “The man who binds himself to make theurgic use of him, sits in fast one day. Before that day he sanctifies himself seven days and on the eighth day, on the day of his fast …”

23 Lev 15:16.24 The passage in Exodus is addressed only to the men, and thus seems to exclude women

from the coming revelation. The rabbis, however, argued that the prohibition was for the benefit of both men and women (b. Shabb. 86a–b). They believed that after sexual intercourse a woman might keep semen in her body for three days; thus the prohibition of intercourse for three days meant that both men and women would be pure when God descended upon Mt. Sinai after three days.

25 b. Shabb. 87a.26 Lev 15:16–18, 31. Verse 31 reads: “Thus shall you separate the Israelites from their un-

cleanness; that they die not in their uncleanness, when they defile My tabernacle that is in the midst of them.”

27 “Do not speak to much with a woman – it was said about his wife, and so much the more so about his fellow’s wife. From this the sages say, Everyone who speaks too much with women causes evil to himself, and takes himself away from the study of Torah, and his end is to inherit Gehinnom.”



him from his ritual – indeed, just as talking too much to a woman can lead a man away from Torah study.28

A third text gives instructions for a mystical method of learning Torah through the repetition of the names of Metatron.29 This text introduces a new form of avoidance of women: eating bread that a woman has made. The issue at hand is also purity – specifically, whether a menstruating woman can render food that she is preparing impure. An intriguing midrash on the meal that Abraham and Sarah (Gen 18) served to the angels illustrates this issue.30 Abraham did not bring bread to the visitors because on that very day Sarah’s menstrual period had be-gun, presumably as a result of their visit and announcement that she would have

28 Aryeh Cohen (personal conversation) has suggested to me that “speaking with a woman” is a euphemistic way of referring to sexual intercourse, but the earliest commentary on Avot (Avot de-Rabbi Natan 7.3) understands “talking” here as referring to a man speaking to his wife about a dispute he has with other men in the house of study. Maimonides, in his Commentary on the Mishnah ad loc., says that “It is known that conversation with women mostly concerns sexual intercourse, and therefore it [the Mishnah] says that much conversation with her is forbidden because it causes him evil.” Although he thinks that the subject of conversation is sexual, the concern is with speech and not with action.

29 On the adjurations of the Sar Torah as ways of learning Torah, see Swartz, Scholastic Magic, 33–149; Halperin, Faces of the Chariot, 376–86, 427–38; and Lesses, Ritual Practices to Gain Power, 190–203. See also Schäfer, Geniza-Fragmente, G-19, which is part of a larger text that gives instructions on how to adjure Metatron, the Prince of the divine Presence. Another Hekhalot text (preface to a longer text on the power of the names of God) contains similar pro-hibitions on looking at people of various types and not eating bread baked by a woman or water poured by a woman. It also explicitly directs the practitioner to avoid women (Schäfer, Synopse, § 489, MS Oxford 1531 [Michael 9], my translation): “A man who finds this book and discovers everything which is written in it should not lie on his bed for forty days. He should not look at the face of a male or a female twin. He should not look at the face of a male or female leper. He should not look at the face of a man or woman with a discharge. He should not look at the face of a menstruating woman. He should not eat bread (baked) by a woman. He should not drink water (poured) by a woman [MS New York 8128: his wife]. Rather, he should knead (the dough) with his own hands, and he should grind with his own hands, and he should bake one loaf each day and eat it. He should not eat meat, and he should not eat any kind of fish, and he should not drink wine or strong drink. He should not eat onions or garlic or garden vegetables. If he has a seminal emission, even on the last day (of the forty days), all of the previous days are negated, and he must return to the beginning. He should wear white [MS N: clothes] and immerse (him-self) in the river every day, eighty days, evening and morning, and become pure [MS N reads: he should purify himself from all impurity].” This text seems to consider merely gazing at possible sources of impurity (lepers, a man or woman with a discharge, a menstruating woman) as just as dangerous as touching them. Ra‘anan S. Boustan, “Rabbi Ishmael’s Miraculous Conception: Jewish Redemption History in Anti-Christian Polemic,” in The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 314–15, argues concerning a similar text that “the narrative puts the very act of seeing an unclean animal or an impure skin blemish on par with the standard regulations concerning actual physical contact with the sources of impurity, thus going far beyond the normal strictures surrounding contact impurity in conventional Jewish law.”

30 Gen. Rab. 48.14 and b. B. Metsi‘a 87a. Pirqe Rabbi Eliezer, ch. 36, also knows this tradition: “He [Abraham] said to Sarah, make a meal for them. At that time, when Sarah was kneading, she saw the blood of niddah, therefore he did not present the cakes to them.”


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a son.31 Since Abraham was exceptionally pious and ate even ordinary food while in a state of purity, he would not want to eat bread that his menstruating wife had prepared. Because she was menstruating, she rendered the dough, and the cakes made from it, impure, making them unfit for men concerned with remaining pure. According to m. Kelim 1:3, the blood of a menstruating woman renders what it touches unclean, and, according to m. Zavim 5:6, anyone who touches a menstruating woman imparts a certain degree of impurity to terumah, the priestly portion. Thus the woman herself would also make other things impure, including food and drink.

The three incantation texts make it clear that the implied practitioner must be male. He must avoid having a seminal emission,32 talking to a woman, looking at a woman or eating bread baked by a woman. Only a man can have a seminal emission.33 A woman, by definition, cannot avoid having conversation with a woman, if only by virtue of the fact that she herself participates in the conver-sation. Women were the most likely people to bake bread for the household, making it difficult for them to avoid eating bread baked by other women (as well

31 Gen. Rab. 48.17 additionally brings in the idea of Sarah menstruating through exegesis of the word ‘ednah (“pleasure”) in Gen 18:11–12: “Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years; Sarah had stopped having the periods of women. And Sarah laughed to herself, saying, ‘Now that I am withered, am I to have enjoyment (‘ednah) – with my husband so old?’” The midrash says: “A woman – the whole time that she is childbearing, she has periods (vesetot), and I, after I am withered, am I to have ‘ednah – ‘idanin (menstrual periods)?” The word ‘ednah also seems to mean “renew.” See comments in Judah Theodor and Chanoch Albeck, Midrash Bereschit Rabba, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Wahrmann, 1965), 2:494. See also Suzanne Pinck-ney Stetkevych, “Sarah and the Hyena: Laughter, Menstruation, and the Genesis of a Double Entendre,” HR 36 (1996): 13–41, which deals, among other topics, with the interpretation of the retelling of the Sarah and Abraham story in Qur’an 11.71. This verse is usually translated “His wife who stood near, laughed as We gave her the good news of Isaac, and after Isaac of Jacob” (Al-Qur’an, trans. A. Ali [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988], 195). The word translated “laughed” can also mean “she menstruated,” as discussed in medieval Qur’anic exegesis (see Stetkevych, “Sarah and the Hyena,” 27–29).

32 Several other Hekhalot ritual texts also require the practitioner to avoid a seminal emission. See Schäfer, Synopse, §§ 299, 424, 489, and 684.

33 The rabbis, however, thought that women emitted their own seed during sexual inter-course. See discussion in Rachel Biale, Women and Jewish Law (New York: Schocken, 1984), 143–44. She refers to Lev 12:1–2 (“The Lord said to Moses: ‘Say to the children of Israel: When a woman gives forth seed and bears a male child, then she shall be unclean seven days, as at the time of her menstruation’”) as the exegetical hook for such discussions. See also the discussion by Pieter Willem van der Horst, “Sarah’s Seminal Emission: Hebrews 11:11 in the Light of Ancient Embryology,” in Greeks, Romans, and Christians: Essays in Honor of Abraham J. Mal-herbe, ed. David L. Balch, Everett Ferguson, and Wayne A. Meeks (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), 287–302, esp. 299–301. He cites, for example, b. Nid. 31a (which describes the contribution that the man’s white semen makes to the child and the woman’s red semen makes to the child), and b. B. Qam. 92a (where both the man’s and the woman’s seed is referred to as shikhvat zera‘). The reference in the Hekhalot texts does not, however, seem to be to sexual intercourse, but to noc-turnal emission, which is commonly referred to as qeri (see Marcus Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature [New York: Judaica Press, 1975], 1419). My thanks to Bernadette Brooten for drawing my attention to this problem.



as, of course, bread that they had made themselves), while the male adept could ensure this avoidance by baking his own bread, as he is so instructed in other similar rituals.34

The only Hekhalot text in which a woman appears as an individual character presents her solely as an obstacle to the purity that is needed for the descent to the merkavah.35 In this scene, R. Nehuniah b. Ha-Qanah sits in a trance in the midst of his disciples, describing what he saw as he traveled through the hekhalot in order to achieve the vision of the merkavah, and providing instructions for what to do if they wished to follow him. After describing the passage through the first five palaces, R. Nehuniah says something that the disciples do not understand. The descent account is then interrupted by the disciples’ attempt to bring R. Ne-huniah back to earth, so that they can ask him the meaning of his words. They induce in him a slight amount of impurity that will cause him to be dismissed from before the divine throne. This impurity comes from a woman who has had her menstrual period, and then purified herself through immersion in a mikveh, but about whom there is some question whether she is in fact pure.36 Apparently, her first immersion in the mikveh (after the cessation of her menstrual bleeding) was invalid, probably because something interposed between her and the water.37 Therefore, she is instructed to go through another immersion, to rectify what was

34 Schäfer, Synopse, §§ 299, 489, 684.35 Schäfer, Synopse, §§ 224–28. In the European redaction of Hekhalot Rabbati, as evidenced

by the manuscripts used in the Synopse, the directions for how to descend are abruptly inter-rupted by the story of the calling back of R. Nehuniah from the world of the merkavah. There is a sudden break in the instructions about what to do between the fifth and the sixth hekhalot, and the instructions for the sixth hekhal resume in § 229. An earlier redactor of Hekhalot Rabbati therefore inserted the story about the return of R. Nehuniah, rather clumsily, into the series of instructions of what to do to descend. The fact that this was an insertion is shown by a Genizah fragment of Hekhalot Rabbati (corresponding to § 221 of the Synopse) published by Schäfer in Hekhalot Studien, 96–103, “Ein neues Hekhalot Rabbati-Fragment,” where there is no break between the fifth and sixth hekhalot. That the story of the calling back of R. Nehuniah was not originally part of the ascent instructions in Schäfer, Synopse, §§ 219–23 and 229–35 raises the question of where and when it originated. Joseph Dan hypothesizes that all of the European traditions of the some of the major works of the Hekhalot literature derived from one common source, one “European manuscript.” He raises this possibility in Dan, “The Ancient Heikhalot Texts in the Middle Ages: Tradition, Source, Inspiration,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library 75, no. 3 (1993): 83–96, at 92. See also discussion in Dan, “The Entrance to the Sixth Gate” [in Hebrew] in Early Jewish Mysticism: Proceedings of the First International Conference on the History of Jewish Mysticism, ed. Joseph Dan, special issue, Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 6, nos. 1–2 (1987): 197–220, esp. 204–25.

36 Schäfer, Synopse, §§ 225–26. For detailed discussions, see Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, 9–13; Saul Lieberman, “The Knowledge of Halakha by the Author (or Authors) of the Heikhaloth,” in Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, Appendix 2, 241–44; Lawrence Schiffman, “The Recall of Rabbi Nehuniah ben ha-Qanah from Ecstasy in the Hekhalot Rabbati,” AJS Re-view 1 (1976): 269–81; Margarete Schlüter, “Die Erzählung von der Rückholung des R. Nehunya ben Haqana aus der Merkava-Schau in ihrem redaktionelle Rahmen,” FJB 10 (1982): 65–109; and Swartz, Scholastic Magic, 170–72.

37 Schiffman, “Recall,” 274.


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not done during the first immersion. Then she is supposed to go to the group of scholars (the havurah) and explain the cycle of her menstruation. According to what she says, most of them would rule that she is pure, while one would rule that she is impure.38 That decision would theoretically be good enough on earth, where halakhic decisions are made by majority vote, but apparently it does not hold in heaven, where the minority opinion is enough to render her impure.39 This doubtful degree of impurity is imparted to R. Nehuniah through a peculiar mechanism. The woman is given a piece of white cloth and told to examine her-self internally, to see if there is still any blood left in her vagina from her menstru-al bleeding. She is supposed to do this in a very delicate way, by gently pushing the cloth with her middle finger.40 The cloth is then laid before R. Ishmael, and he

38 It is unclear whether the woman actually speaks to the members of the havurah about her menstrual cycle. The relevant part of the text reads (translation is from Scholem, Jewish Gnos-ticism, 11; the Hebrew is from Scholem’s footnote 4): “Immediately I took a piece of very fine woolen cloth (מטלית של פרהבא) and gave it to R. Akiba and R. Akiba gave it to a servant (עבד) of ours saying: ‘Go and lay this cloth beside a woman who immersed herself and had not yet become pure (אשה שטבלה ולא עלתה לה טבילה) and let her immerse herself (והטבילה) [a second time]. For if (שאם) that woman will come and will declare the circumstances of her menstrual flow (מדת וסתה) before the company, there will be one who forbids [her to her husband] and the majority will permit.” Does the woman actually go to the group, explain her cycle to them, and they discuss it and make a decision, with one negative vote? Or is this entirely hypothetical, because they all know the answer (that one will forbid and the rest will permit), and there is no need for the woman actually to speak with them? In either case, how would they find a woman in exactly this situation?

The text is written as if the servant finds a random woman, but it would be more reasonable to assume that R. Akiba had a particular woman in mind. And whose menstrual cycle would he be familiar with other than his own wife’s? I assume that rabbis did not normally initiate conversations with women about their menstrual cycles and immersions, unless a particular woman came and asked a rabbi about her cycle. (The question here is not whether this event actually happened, but whether within the frame of the story the woman spoke to the rabbis or not). Looking at it from the point of view of the woman, one wonders what she would think if asked to participate in such a ritual. Would she be told why she was required to appear before the rabbis? Normally, her status of menstrual impurity would only pertain to her relationship with her husband and whether she was permitted to engage in sexual intercourse with him, and any conversation with a rabbi would only deal with this question. The whole scenario is forced and artificial.

39 Saul Lieberman (“Knowledge of Halakha,” 244) comments on this passage that “[a]ccord-ing to the Halakha prevailing on earth no impurity was imparted to R. Nehunya. The woman was ritually pure, for such was the ruling of the majority of the rabbis …In heaven, however, the rules of R. Eliezer prevailed, and in his opinion the woman was ritually impure.”

40 My interpretation here tentatively follows Schiffman’s understanding of the use of the cloth, which differs from Scholem’s and Lieberman’s interpretations. In the section immediately following what is discussed above, Scholem translates: “Say to that woman: ‘Touch this cloth with the end of the middle finger of your hand, and do not press the end of your finger upon it, but rather as a man who takes a hair which had fallen therein from his eyeball, pushing it very gently.’ They went and did so, and laid the cloth before R. Ishmael. He inserted into it a bough of myrtle full of oil that had been soaked in pure balsam and they placed it upon the knees of R. Nehuniah ben Hakanah; and immediately they dismissed him from before the throne of glory where he had been sitting and beholding” (Jewish Gnosticism, 11). Scholem thus understands



“inserted into it a bough of myrtle full of oil that had been soaked in pure balsam and they placed it upon the knees of R. Nehuniah ben Hakanah.”41 This degree of impurity is enough to render R. Nehuniah impure and dismiss him from the vision of the merkavah.

The woman does not speak or have any part in the mystical descent; she appears only because the sages used her to create the smallest possible level of impurity for R. Nehuniah. Her possible menstrual impurity bars her from any

the impurity to be imparted by the woman’s very light touch on a piece of cloth after she has immersed herself twice.

Lieberman, “Knowledge of Halakha,” 243, understands the text differently to mean that the cloth, not the woman, is supposed to be immersed. He explains this by referring to the strict laws of menstrual purity of the Baraita de-Massekhet Niddah (in Tosfata Atiqata, ed. Chaim M. Horowitz [Frankfurt am Main, 1890]). In his understanding, the slave of R. Akiba is sup-posed to put the cloth next to the woman, and “According to the stringent laws of Baraitha de’Niddah the cloth would become unclean even if it was not touched by the woman.” In the Baraita de-Niddah, 13, it says (my translation), “R. Yohanan says: It is forbidden for a person to walk behind the menstruant and to tread in her dust, because it is as impure as she is; therefore, her dust is impure, and it is forbidden to enjoy the fruit of her hands.” Since the cloth itself is now impure because it was placed on the ground next to the woman, the slave, according to Lieber-man, was ordered to “immerse the strip of cloth in ritual water to render it pure. This procedure was necessary in order to indicate that the immersion was performed with direct intention to purify it from stringent impurity.” Thus the cloth, not the woman, would be immersed in the water, and would be purified. The woman then had to speak to the rabbis about her period, and the rabbis then “instructed the woman to touch the strip of cloth with the tip of her middle finger, but to be careful not to press it,” so as not to impart midras impurity to it (note 74). In this scenario, the piece of cloth initially becomes impure because it is placed next to the woman on the ground. It is then immersed to purify it, and the woman touches it again with her finger, very lightly, still imparting impurity to it.

Schiffman, “Recall,” 272, understands the text in yet a third way. The “piece of very fine wool-en cloth” in Hebrew is matlit shel mela’ parheba’ (this is the reading according to MS Munich 22 in Schäfer, Synopse, § 226; Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, 11n4, does not have the word mela’, which is probably a simple error). Mela’ parheba’ only occurs in a halakhic discussion in b. Nid. 17a about self-examination after intercourse – both the man and the woman are required to examine themselves with a cloth “after sexual relations to be sure the woman has not had an emission of blood, which would render her ritually impure and disqualify her from handling pure food.” Mela’ parheba’ was, therefore, a white piece of cloth used for this examination. Schiffman thus interprets the use of the cloth differently from both Scholem and Lieberman: “Rabbi Ishmael took a piece of cloth appropriate for a woman’s internal examination and gave it to a servant. He had him give the cloth to a woman whose first immersion had been invalidated because of an interposition, but who had immersed a second time. (There should be no question of the woman’s purity). This should be a woman, however, about whom a minor question still exists regarding the fixing of her menstrual cycle. This question would involve the date when her period began and ended, and, hence, the correct date of her immersion, such that one opinion would still forbid her to have relations with her husband even after immersing twice. She is to use this cloth for the bediqah, the internal examination. The servant is told to instruct this woman to touch the cloth lightly and not to press too hard. Apparently, the cloth was to be wrapped around the middle finger and inserted with the least pressure possible” (“Recall,” 274). It is hard to know which interpretation of the use of the cloth is correct. The text itself does not mention inserting the cloth into anything.

41 Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, 11.


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positive role in the descent; she only participates in the action because of her impurity. While the descent texts do not explicitly say that women are forbidden to “descend to the merkavah,” the fact that a woman appears in the texts only in this connection intimates that women can be actors only on the very periphery of the ritual, and only in a negative sense, because of the impurity they may possibly still bear from their menstrual periods even after they are finished and have im-mersed in the mikveh. Adherence to normal rabbinic laws of menstrual impurity might make it possible for women to not obstruct, and perhaps even achieve the required level of purity for descent to the merkavah, but not adherence to this stricter level of purity.42

Angels and Women

Are women entirely excluded from performing the rituals of ascent and adju-ration of Hekhalot literature? The bulk of the evidence in the Hekhalot texts points to the thoroughgoing exclusion of women from the company of those who engaged in adjurations of angels or journeys to the merkavah. There are, how-ever, two texts that hint at the possibility of women’s involvement, one found in Hekhalot Zutarti, the other in the late midrashic anthology Bereshit Rabbati, at-tributed to R. Moses ha-Darshan.43 In Hekhalot Zutarti, the angel Paniyon opens the gates of salvation to all who see him, including women (in one manuscript,

42 See Biale, Women and Jewish Law, 160.43 Could we view the appearance of Metatron to the mother of R. Ishmael in the Story of

the Ten Martyrs and in the Baraita de-Niddah as another example? See discussion in Boustan, “Rabbi Ishmael’s Miraculous Conception.” In this story, R. Ishmael’s mother immerses in the mikveh many times, even up to forty times. After the fortieth time, God tells Metatron to stand before the woman and tell her that she will become pregnant that night with a son (313). This appearance of an angel to a woman is in accordance with the common biblical pattern in which an angel or God announces to a woman that she will have a child.

In the Baraita de-Niddah, the mothers of the patriarchs have their sons because of their great attention to the details of purity requirements (Boustan, “Rabbi Ishmael,” 323). In Baraita de Niddah 2.6 (Horowitz, 19, my translation): “Rabbi Hiyya said in the name of R. Hanina ben Dosa: You find that the first matriarchs kept niddah, and were immediately answered. Sarah, when she was barren and her vagina was stopped up and the walls of her womb were shut, because she kept the days of her niddah she was immediately answered. ‘Sarah was barren’ (Gen 11:30) and after that (Gen 21:2) ‘she conceived and gave birth to a son.’” Rachel and Leah are similarly mentioned, and also the mother of Samson. “About the wife of Manoah what is written? Because she kept niddah (Judg 13:3–4), ‘The angel of the Lord appeared to the woman and said to her, “Behold, you are barren.” Even though she was barren and did not give birth, and her neighbors led her astray and said to her, “If you want to give birth, take the skin of a fox and burn it in fire until it turns to ash, and take from it and put it in water and drink from it for three days, three times a day, you will immediately be visited,” even though they misled her, the Holy One, blessed be He heard her voice and the angel was immediately revealed to her and said to her, “My daughter, be careful, and do not eat anything impure,” and because she kept niddah, she was immediately visited, and the angel did not seek to humiliate her in front of her



“seeing him” is replaced by “all who ascend to the merkavah”). In the Midrash of Shemhazai and Azael, found in Bereshit Rabbati, a young woman named Esterah learns the divine name from Shemhazai and uses it to ascend to heaven, where God places her among the stars of the Pleiades. What do these texts mean in the larger context of Hekhalot texts that exclude women? Do they provide evidence for the inclusion of women among those who participated in the rituals detailed in the Hekhalot literature? Or should we read them merely as literary statements that do not reflect ritual practices?

The first example, from Hekhalot Zutarti reads:44

He [Paniyon]45 stands before the Throne of Glory and puts the Throne in order, and clothes (God) with the robe,46 and beautifies the ḥashmal and opens the gates of salvation to show47 love and mercy to all who see him. All who see him, whether young man, or virgin, or youth, or old man,48 or Israelite man, or Gentile,49 or female slave50 – they will run to him, they will greet him, they will hasten for his favor, and they will rejoice in his sustenance, whether or not he returns the favor.51

This remarkable text lists the different types of women (including a virgin and a slave) who may gain a vision of the angel who has the exalted duties of putting the divine throne in order, clothing God with his glorious robe, and opening the gates of salvation.52 Everyone, male, female, Jewish, Gentile, slave or free, may

husband, so (Judg 13:13) “The angel of the Lord said to Manoah, ‘Let the woman give heed to all that I said to her.”’”

44 Schäfer, Synopse, § 420, largely following MS Oxford 1531. 45 This is probably another name for Metatron, the highest angel next to God, whose name is

like God’s name. See Peter Schäfer, ed., Übersetzung der Hekhalot-Literatur, vol. 3: §§ 335–597, TSAJ 29 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1989), 175n10.

46 Both James Davila (Descenders, 279) and I translate this to mean that the angel clothes God with the garment, (as does the German translation, Schäfer, Übersetzung III, 177n42, and Schäfer, Hidden and Manifest God, 65). By contrast, Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, 63, understands it to mean that the divine glory is clothed by the angel.

47 MS Oxford 1531 at this point reads “to show him.” MS Munich 40 reads “to glorify them.” MS Munich 22 reads “to show him.” MS D 436 reads “to show them.”

48 MS Munich 22 adds “whether man or woman.”49 MS New York 8128 adds “whether male slave.”50 MS Oxford adds “whether Israel” again. The complete list seems to be: “whether young

man or virgin, old man or youth, man or woman, Gentile or Israel, male slave or female slave.”51 Or, “whether or not for his good,” or “willingly or unwillingly.”52 This is part of a microform (§§ 420–21) that comes after the ascent account of Hekhalot

Zutarti and before several traditions ascribed to R. Akiba and R. Ishmael (§§ 422–26). There is an important parallel (with significant differences) in one of the Genizah texts – T.-S. K. 21.95.C fol. 2b lines 34–49 (Schäfer, Geniza-Fragmente, 105). In this version, however, the reference to many kinds of people, including women, is part of a statement by the angel Anafiel that he will attack anyone who tries to adjure him. In Synopse, § 421, Anafiel, instead, will follow the will of anyone who recites “one letter from among these letters” and will protect him from evil speech – “Anafiel said: everyone who wishes to pray this prayer and to contemplate the deeds of his creator should recite one letter from among these letters. I will turn neither to right nor to the left until I turn towards (him) and do his will. Anyone who tells an evil story about him, I will hit him and destroy him, other than the angel who is the messenger of the King of Glory.” It


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gain this angel’s favor so that he “opens the gates of salvation.” Notably, unlike the adjurational or ascent texts, nothing has to be done to gain favor and receive salvation. As James Davila comments on this passage,

It seems to say that the vision of this exalted angel is potentially available to anyone at all: a man or woman of any age, gentile or Jew, slave or free. This openness is problematic in that the ascetic rituals described in the Hekhalot literature frequently assume the practitioner keeps standards of ritual purity available only to a male Jew.53

How can we understand this passage? Does it testify to the possibility that a woman as well as a man could achieve the vision of the angel? A statement from Seder Eliyahu Rabbah, that both men and women can merit to receive the holy spirit, may shed light on this tradition from Hekhalot Zutarti. Seder Eliyahu Rabbah is a late midrash (probably composed between the completion of the Babylonian Talmud and the ninth century) whose main topics are ethics and the study of the Torah.54 It “is a uniform work stamped with a character of its own,” probably composed by one person.55 According to Jacob Elbaum, the author of Seder Eliyahu knew the topics found in the Hekhalot literature – for example, the descent to the merkavah, and descriptions of the heavens and the Throne of Glory – but reinterpreted them according to his valuation of Torah study and ethical deeds.56 Elbaum gives many examples of the author’s use of mystical language for Torah study. He writes,

From his words it seems that he also recognizes the high level of those who engage with the Merkabah, although at the same time we hear that he does not recoil from advocating

is impossible to decide what might be the “original” text. As Schäfer in Geniza-Fragmente, 111, says, “Die Parallelität des Fragmentes ab 2b/38 mit § 400 f. und vor allem § 420 f. lässt auf die unterschiedliche Bearbeitung gemeinsamer Traditionsstücke schliessen. Auf jeden Fall belegen beide Texte die extreme Fluidität der Hekhalot-Überlieferungen.”

53 Davila, Descenders, 279.54 It is also known as Tanna de-vei Eliyahu.55 Jacob Elbaum, “Tanna de-vei Eliyahu,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum

and Fred Skolnik, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007): 19:508. In “The Midrash Tana Devei Eliyahu and Ancient Esoteric Literature” [in Hebrew], Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 6, 1–2 (1987), 144n2, Elbaum writes, “I relate to this midrash as a work that was pro-duced by one composer.” William Braude and Israel Kapstein, Tanna debe Eliyyahu: The Lore of the School of Elijah (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1981), 3, argue that the work has a “unity of thought and feeling, of style and structure, that makes it seem the work of a single in-dividual.” Both its dating and the place of origin are difficult to determine. It uses both the Bab-ylonian Talmud and midrashim dated after it. Natronai Gaon (9th century) quoted it, so it seems likely that it originated between the Babylonian Talmud and the ninth century (H. L. Strack and Günter Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, trans. Markus Bockmuehl [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996], 341). Ephraim E. Urbach, “On the Question of the Language and Sources of the Book Seder Eliyahu” [in Hebrew], in The World of the Sages (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2000), 418–33 argues from internal linguistic and literary evidence that the book was composed in the ninth century. Meir Friedmann (Ish-Shalom) published the modern scholarly edition, Seder Eliyahu Rabbah (Tanna de-vei Eliyahu) (Warsaw: Achiasaf, 1904).

56 Elbaum, “Tana Devei Eliyahu,” 140–43.



values that according to him are of equal worth with occupying oneself with this secret (of the Merkabah).57

In chapter 18, the author explicitly recommends that a man who occupies himself with the merkavah should go engage in Torah study:

Therefore I say, even if a man sits and occupies himself with the mystery of God’s chariot and with all His beneficent ways in the world, he should put it all aside and go to a syn-agogue or to a house of study – indeed to any place where new insights into Torah are discovered. Because of a man’s presence in a synagogue or a house of study, joy is renewed for him every day without fail.58

The author does not, however, always privilege Torah study. In chapter 29, he refers explicitly to entering into the Throne of Glory, with a hint that this is some-thing that humans should seek to do. He states that when God created the world, he first created the cherubim, the ofannim, and the ministering angels, and above them, the Throne of Glory, with sapphire above it, and finally, God himself above everything else – “The Holy One, blessed be He, sits in the highest heavens of heavens.”59 The author then goes on to say, about the angels and those who stand outside the Throne of Glory:

Behold, they are like those who eat and drink and are satisfied and greatly rejoice. To argue from the lesser to the greater: if those who stand outside and see the Shekhinah within are like those who eat and drink and are satisfied and greatly rejoice, so much the more so (do) those (rejoice) who enter into his Throne of Glory.60

The point seems to be that while the various types of angels stand outside the Throne of Glory and gaze upon the Shekhinah within, there are also those who enter into the Throne of Glory and rejoice. The author does not explicitly say that these are the descenders to the merkavah, who enter into the seventh hekhal where the Throne of Glory is situated, but reading this passage in the light of the author’s knowledge of the Hekhalot literature, it is plausible that he is referring to them.61

Given the knowledge of Hekhalot concepts and of the descent to the mer-kavah evinced by the author of Seder Eliyahu Rabbah, it is fruitful to compare

57 Ibid., 141.58 Ibid., 142; Friedmann, Eliyahu Rabbah, 94; English translation based on Braude and Kap-

stein, Lore, 249.59 Friedmann, Eliyahu Rabbah, 160.60 Ibid., 161.61 Gershom Scholem also wrote about a fragment of the literature of chiromancy and phys-

iognomy found in Seder Eliyahu Rabbah (Friedmann, 162): “Physiognomy and Chiromancy” [in Hebrew] in Sefer Assaf: A Collection of Research Articles in Honor of Rabbi Professor Simcha Assaf, ed. by M. D. Cassuto, Joseph Klausner, and Joshua Gutmann (Jerusalem: Mossad haRav Kook, 1953), 462–64. The passage reads: “Our sages of the merkavah taught: if you have seen a man whose eyelids are fair and whose eyes are light, know that he is wicked and sinful before our God.”


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the passage from Hekhalot Zutarti with his attitude towards women’s ability to experience revelation. In a discussion of the prophet Deborah, he writes:

“And Deborah the prophetess” (Judges 4:4). And what is the nature of Deborah that she judged Israel and prophesied for them? Was not Pinchas ben Eleazar alive then?62 I testify by heaven and earth that whether Gentile or Jew, whether man or woman, whether male slave or female slave – the Holy Spirit will rest upon one in keeping with the deeds that he (or she) performs.63

The passage from Hekhalot Zutarti gives a more exhaustive list of “all who see him” (the angel Paniyon) than Seder Eliyahu Rabbah, but the meaning is the same – anyone can see the angel, run to him, greet him, and rejoice in him, while in Seder Eliyahu Rabbah, the holy spirit rests upon anyone whose deeds merit this divine gift. What does it mean to have the “holy spirit rest upon” a person? The term “holy spirit” is used in this text as a term for God in communication with human beings, speaking through prophets, the patriarchs, and the righteous.64 It is “the spirit of prophecy which comes from God, a divine inspiration giving man insight into the future and into the will of God.”65 When the holy spirit “rests upon” someone, it means that that person is receiving divine inspiration or prophecy. In Hekhalot Zutarti everyone merits to see and run to the angel Paniyon; this is not identical with having the holy spirit rest on one, but it sug-gests something similar – an immediate experience of the high angel who stands before the Throne of Glory and clothes God in his robe. If the author of Seder Eliyahu Rabbah considers that anyone whose deeds merit it could receive the holy spirit, the author of this passage in Hekhalot Zutarti may also have thought it possible that women, as well as men, could share in the vision of a high angel.

Let us now turn to a significant variant of the passage about Paniyon, found in MS New York 8182, which goes further than the other manuscripts in its possible affirmation of women’s involvement in visionary mysticism:

He [Paniyon] stands before the Throne of Glory and puts the Throne in order and clothes (God) with the robe, and beautifies the ḥashmal and opens the gates of salvation to show them grace and love, to all who ascend to the merkavah – whether young man or virgin, or youth, or man, or woman, or Gentile, or Israelite, or male slave, or female slave – they will run to him, they will have peace toward him, they will hasten for his favor, and they will rejoice in his sustenance, whether or not he returns the favor.

62 The question is asked because the assumption is that he should have been the one who saved Israel from the Canaanites.

63 Meir Friedmann (Ish-Shalom), Seder Eliyahu Rabbah, 48. It is quoted exactly in Yalqut Shimoni, Judges, § 42. The expression “I testify by heaven and earth” occurs only in Seder Eliyahu Rabbah (out of all of the aggadic midrashim), according to the electronic database of the Bar-Ilan Responsa Project, http: / /www.responsa.co.il (accessed July 10, 2011). Braude and Kapstein, Lore, 153, note the comparison with Gal 3:28.

64 Max Kadushin, The Theology of Seder Eliahu: A Study in Organic Thinking (New York: Bloch, 1932), 50.

65 Alan Unterman, “Ru’ah Ha-Kodesh,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, 17:506–7.



In contrast to the other manuscripts of this section, which do not specify how or where (heaven or earth) Paniyon opens the gates of salvation and shows grace and love to everyone, MS New York informs us that Paniyon does this for all who ascend to the merkavah, who can, surprisingly, include women, Gentiles, and slaves. This is the only place in the Hekhalot literature that mentions women among those who can ascend to the merkavah.66 Is this passage relevant? Does it in fact testify to women’s participation in rituals of ascent? Davila suggests that while some of the Hekhalot texts seem to assume an esoteric, limited audience of practitioners, others open the door to participation in the rituals to a far wid-er population, including someone who has just converted to Judaism. 67 Let us examine some of those texts to see if they could possibly include women as well as men.

In Hekhalot Rabbati, as part of the description of what those who descend to the merkavah will encounter, one text asserts that God looks forward to when “each and everyone” (כל אחד ואחד) from Israel will descend and have the experi-ence of the wonderful events that occur three times every day before the Throne of Glory. This text does not limit the descent to the merkavah to those who possess certain qualities, in strong contrast to a parallel text that occurs earlier in Hekhalot Rabbati.68

And all of the descenders to the chariot ascend and are not harmed, except that they see all of this destruction, and they descend in peace. They come and stand and witness and tell of the awesome and frightening sight, which is not found in all of the palaces of a king of flesh and blood.

They bless and sing and praise and glorify and exalt and adorn and give honor and great splendor to Totroisiai YHWH God of Israel, who is happy with the descenders to the chariot, and who sits and looks forward to each and everyone from Israel – when will he will descend?

in the wondrous pride and strange lordship,in the pride of exaltation and the rulership of splendor,which rush before his Throne of Glory,

66 See below for discussion of the Midrash of Shemhazai and Azael.67 Davila, Descenders, 280–81: “In this passage in the Hekhalot Zutarti (with its parallel in

G8) the Hekhalot literature does at least entertain the possibility of women – and gentiles – en-gaging in the ascent and having to do with angels. Perhaps the assumption is that the gentile in question is a proselyte, but if so we would expect this to be made explicit as it is in the Merkavah Rabba. According to the Cairo Geniza documents and related evidence, women could be Bible teachers, scholars, and calligraphers, so they were not unknown in the sorts of scribal circles that produced the Hekhalot literature. In addition, at least one woman inscribed and installed an incantation bowl (Montgomery 17), so we must reckon with the possibility that there were female practitioners among the descenders to the chariot. At the very least, women made use of bowl incantations composed in the circles that included the descenders to the chariot. Gentiles did as well, of course, but we can only identify them in bowls that use explicitly polytheistic or Christian traditions.”

68 Schäfer, Synopse, § 216, MS New York, my translation. The parallel text is §§ 199–200.


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three times daily on highsince the world was created until now,for praise.

Does this “each and every one” include women as well as men? According to the story of the recall of R. Nehuniah, women would not be able to make the descent.69 The following paragraph, found earlier in Hekhalot Rabbati as part of the instructions for the descent to the merkavah, restricts this experience to those who are free of eight sinful characteristics.70 The sinful characteristics are ones that either men or women could engage in, but since this paragraph is part of the havurah account, which cites only male participants, it seems likely that it refers only to men.

R. Ishmael said: R. Nehuniah ben HaQanah said to me, “Son of the proud, happy is he, and happy is his soul: everyone who is clean and empty of these eight characteristics that Totrochiel YWY and Suria his servant hate. He descends and beholds

the wondrous pride and strange lordshippride of exaltation and rulership of splendorwhich rush before his Throne of Glorythree times daily on highsince the day that the world was created until now,for praise.

in which Totrochiel YWY moves on high.

In the Sar Torah section of Hekhalot Rabbati, the revelation is addressed not to an elite group, but to “Israel” as a whole.71 One paragraph makes clear that the Sar Torah praxis could be open even to the most ignorant Jewish man.72

R. Ishmael said: This thing was done by R. Eliezer and he was answered, but he did not believe it. It was done again by me but I did not believe it until I brought in a certain dull-ard73 and he became equal to me. It was done again by the shepherds and they became

69 Ibid., §§ 224–28. It is not clear if this section is relevant, however, to the discussion of § 216, since the recall account appears to be from a different redactional strand than § 216. See Dan, “Ancient Heikhalot Texts in the Middle Ages,” 93.

70 Schäfer, Synopse, § 200. The characteristics are listed in Schäfer, Synopse, § 199: idolatry, sexual transgression, bloodshed, slander, a false oath, profanation of God’s name, arrogance, and causeless hatred. Three of these belong to the rabbinic category of the seven commandments given to all of humanity (the descendants of Noah). Paragraph § 199 adds to these the require-ment that the descender to the merkavah must have obeyed all of the positive and negative commandments, but section § 200 does not mention these additional requirements.

71 Schäfer, Synopse, §§ 281–306. Davila, Descenders, 273–74, comments: “… the revelation comes to the ‘beloved seed,’ the ‘faithful people,’ and the ‘fathers’ in a very public place. It is also true that the practitioners are promised a special public status in the world, but these promises appear alongside the assurance that anyone can achieve the status if they just carry out the prop-er praxes of the mystery. The express goal is that ‘the people of the land shall not be found in the world.’ Every Jew in the world will become a sage.” Every Jewish man, that is.

72 Schäfer, Synopse, § 305. Translation is from Davila, Descenders, 274–75.73 In MS Munich 22, the word כסיל is used, while טיפש appears in MSS Vatican 228 and

Budapest 238.



equal to me. They brought R. Akiba out of the Land (of Israel) with the permission of the law court and he tarried until it was done by the multitude who did not read or study and they became equal to the others and were made like the disciples of the sages.”

In a Sar Torah section of Merkavah Rabbah, R. Akiba reports that during a vi-sionary journey he saw God enthroned and God told him that he would bind even a very recent convert to Metatron to learn much Torah.74

R. Akiba said, “When I went and asked this question before the Throne of Glory, I saw YHWH God of Israel, who rejoiced greatly, and extended his right hand and struck the Throne of Glory. He said, ‘Akiba my son, this Throne of Glory upon which I sit is a precious vessel that my hands, my right hand, prepared. Even if one has been a proselyte for only an hour, and his body is innocent of idolatry and bloodshed and incest, I am bound to him. I bind to him Metatron my servant – to his steps and to much study of Torah.’ When I left the Throne of Glory to descend to human beings, He said to me, ‘Akiba my son, descend and bear testimony to this praxis75 to humans.’” R. Akiba descended and taught this praxis to humans.

Thus all of Israel, even the most ignorant, even a man who had just converted to Judaism, could engage in the Sar-Torah praxis. Neither of these texts, however, mentions women among the “dullard,” shepherds, or recent converts.

From comparing the relevant passages in Hekhalot Rabbati and Merkavah Rabbah to Hekhalot Zutarti it is clear that they do not contemplate the possibility that women could be among those who descend to the merkavah. There is an additional reason to doubt that the special passage in the New York manuscript really tells us that women were among the practitioners. The New York man-uscript is significantly different from the other manuscripts that belong to the European redaction because it appears to be the product of a redactor who thor-oughly revised the Hekhalot texts contained within it.76 He had a strong interest in rabbinic tradition, inserting, for example quotations from the Talmud (b. Ber. 7b and b. Hul. 9b).77 He also inserted a great deal of magical material to both Hekhalot Rabbati and Hekhalot Zutarti, which was not published in the Synopse zur Hekhalot-Literatur. This material included secret names of God, adjurational prayers, dream-questions, rituals for healing, and other types of Jewish magic often present in medieval manuscripts.78 According to Klaus Herrmann and Claudia Rohrbacker-Sticker, the special material in the New York manuscript has no direct relationship to the theurgical-magical strata of the other Hekhalot

74 Schäfer, Synopse, § 686. The translation is based on Davila, Descenders, 284. The three manuscripts where this section is present are MSS New York 8128, Oxford 1531, and Munich 40.

75 The word used is מידה. 76 Klaus Herrmann and Claudia Rohrbacker-Sticker, “Magische Traditionen der New Yorker

Hekhalot-Handschrift JTS 8128 im Kontext ihrer Gesamtredaktion,” FJB 17 (1989): 101–149 (101, 143). See also Klaus Herrmann, “Rewritten Mystical Texts: The Transmission of the Heikhalot Literture in the Middle Ages,” BJRL 75, no. 3 (1993): 97–116.

77 Herrmann and Rohrbacker-Sticker, “Magische Traditionen,” 119.78 Ibid., 121–27. Herrmann and Rohrbacker-Sticker published it in this article.


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texts, in particular the Sar Torah and Sar ha-Panim complexes.79 The ascent account of Hekhalot Zutarti, which comes directly before mention of Paniyon, contains extra material in the New York manuscript in comparison with the other manuscripts. In some instances this is because the other manuscripts offer an abbreviated version of the common material, but in others it is because the New York manuscript has inserted material from Hekhalot Rabbati into Hekhalot Zutarti.80 The addition of “all who ascend to the merkavah” appears to be the special contributor of this redactor, and has no parallel elsewhere.

Let us turn to the second text that may evidence women’s involvement in He-khalot rituals, the Midrash of Shemhazai and Azael, found in several medieval anthologies of midrashim, and given the name by its first modern editor.81 The earliest version appears in the Bereshit Rabbati of R. Moses ha-Darshan, from eleventh-century Narbonne.82 This narrative begins with a statement of the clas-

79 Ibid., 143.80 Schäfer, Synopse, § 413, MS New York, lists the names of the seven hekhalot as pride,

loftiness, wonders, purity, rulership, splendor, and holiness. The other manuscripts of the Synopse include only pride, loftiness, rulership, and wonders. § 414 lists the names of the seven princes who are set over the entrances of the seven hekhalot, one prince per hekhal. All of the manuscripts are roughly the same here, with variations in the names. § 415, in the New York manuscript, presents a full list of the seals (seven in all), that are supposed to be shown to the seven angelic princes, and in addition has the instructions to show each seal to the appropriate prince. All of the other manuscripts abbreviate the list of the names of the seals and the princes. At § 416, all of the manuscripts except for Munich 22 present an abbreviated text; Munich 22 gives a list of the princes and the seals that should be shown to each one that is similar to the MS New York version of § 415. § 417 tells what happens at the entrance of the seventh hekhal – the practitioner is supposed to show the seal of Shatqayyar YHWH the God of Israel to the Prince set over that entrance, Shahariel. When he does this, the princes each in their turn take him and hand him over to the next prince, until he is placed into the bosom (חיק), successively, of the next seven divine beings, until he reaches Shatqayyar. The other manuscripts simply say that the adept should be taken by the first prince to the second prince, etc., without giving their names, while the New York manuscript gives the names of each angelic prince and divine being. At § 418, all of the manuscripts begin with the opening words of a request of God (שאלה), but only the New York manuscript gives the full text. It adds in material that is found in Hekhalot Rabbati: §§ 256/265, 257/266, 268, 274, and 276 (Schäfer, Übersetzung, 167–69). § 419 is also much longer in MS New York, but in all of the manuscripts it completes the request of God (that he should bind the angels to the practitioner to do his will). In all the manuscripts there are quotations from the Song of Songs, but they are more extensive in the New York manuscript, which also ends this section with a mention of additional angels.

81 Adolf Jellinek, Bet ha-Midrasch, 6 vols. (Leipzig: Vollrath, 1857), 4:127–28.82 Chanoch Albeck, Midrash Bereshit Rabbati, based on the book of R. Moses ha-Darshan

(Jerusalem: Mekize Nirdamim, 1940), 29–31. It also appears in the twelfth- to thirteenth-century Yalqut Shimoni Genesis § 44 (Dov Hyman, Dov Lerrer, and Yitzhak Shiloni, eds., Yalqut Shimoni of Rabbenu Shimon ha-Darshan, 9 vols. [Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 1973], 1:154–55) and in the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, chapter 25 (Eli Yassif, ed., The Book of Memory, that is The Chroni-cles of Jerahme’el, Chaim Rosenberg School of Jewish Studies [Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 2001], 116). These versions, plus one in the Pugio fidei adversus Mauros et Judaeos of Raymundi Martini, are presented synoptically by Milik, Books of Enoch, 321–33. Annette Yoshiko Reed, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 259–60, argues that the version in Bereshit Rabbati is the earliest.



sic rivalry between angels and humans, sometime before the Flood.83 God regrets having made human beings, and two angels stand forth – Shemhazai and Azael.84 They say to him, “Master of the world, did we not say before You, at the time You created Your world, do not create humans, as it says ‘What is man (’enosh) that You have been mindful of him?’” (Ps 8:5). God replies by asking what will hap-pen if there are no humans dwelling in the world – who will live on it? The two angels say that the angels will inhabit it. God objects: “It is revealed and known before Me that if you had been in their world and the evil inclination had ruled over you just as it ruled over humans, you would have been more stubborn than they.” The two angels request permission to descend to earth and live with human beings. God gives them permission, they descend, and immediately surrender to the evil inclination. At this point they see the “daughters of men” (Gen 6:2) and trouble ensues.

They immediately descended, and the evil inclination ruled over them. When they saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, they went astray after them, and they were not able to defeat the inclination, as it is written, “And the sons of God, etc.” (Gen 6:1)

Shemhazai saw a young woman whose name was Esterah and gazed at her.85 He said to her, “Listen to me.” She said to him, “I will not listen to you until you teach me the Explicit Name (שם המפורש) by which you ascend to heaven when you recite it.” He immediately taught her, and she recited it and ascended to heaven.

The Holy One said, “Because she separated herself from sin, I will make her an example so that the world will remember.” The Holy One immediately fixed her among the seven stars of the Pleiades. When Shemhazai and Azael saw this, they took women and fathered sons.

The story of Esterah runs counter to some early interpretations of Gen 6:1–4, which hold women culpable for the sin of the angels. In the Greek translation of parts of 1 Enoch by George Syncellus, the women learn the arts of beautification from Asael and then seduce the other angels: “And the sons of men made for themselves and for their daughters, and they transgressed and led astray the holy ones.”86 This idea is followed by later interpreters. In the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan to Gen 6:2, the daughters of men “were beautiful with their eyes painted and their hair combed and walking in nakedness of flesh.”87 Testament of Reuben 5 picks up this same theme and says that the women charmed the Watchers, who appeared to them as they were engaged in sexual intercourse with their husbands, as a result of which they gave birth to the giants.88 In Pirqe Rabbi Eliezer chapter 22,

83 Peter Schäfer, Rivitalität zwischen Engeln und Menschen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1975), 105–6.84 In 1 Enoch, they are the two leaders of the rebel angels. In Tg. Ps.-J. Gen 6:4 they are also

mentioned: “Shemhazai and Azael fell from heaven and were on the earth on those days.”85 The name appears in several forms. In Genesis Rabbah it is אסטירה. In Yalqut Shimoni it is

.אסתירא In Pugio Fidei it is .איסטירה In The Chronicles of Jerahmeel it is .איסטהר86 1 En. 8:1. George Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 188–89 and 194–

96, believes that this is the early tradition of 1 En. 8:1, not a corruption in the text.87 Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1, 195.88 Howard Clark Kee, trans., “Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs,” OTP 1:784.


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the daughters of Cain enticed the angels to sin: “The angels who fell from their holy place in heaven saw the daughters of the generation of Cain walking about naked, with their eyes painted like harlots and they went astray after them and took wives from amongst them.”89

Esterah, on the other hand, is innocent. She does not try to entice the angels to sin with her, nor does she give in to Shemhazai’s attempt at seduction. Instead, she insists that he teach her the divine name that he recites when he wants to ascend to heaven. He goes along with this, not realizing that she will immediately use it to escape from him. She then receives a reward for her refusal to sin, when God places her among the Pleiades as an example of good behavior. The story of Esterah has no parallel in all of the Jewish (or Christian) literature relating to the fallen angels. In the other Jewish or Christian texts that give any details about the women’s actions vis-à-vis the angels, the women are usually culpable for the angels’ sins, and none of them ascended to heaven using knowledge gained from the angels. 1 Enoch recounts the sorcery that the angels teach their wives, but this is part of the genealogy of evil and how it spread in the world. Only in the story of Esterah does anyone (male or female) learn something good from one of the fall-en angels – this is true even of the account in Jubilees, where the Watchers “came down to the earth in order to teach the sons of man, and perform judgment and uprightness upon the earth.”90

If we compare this story with how the male rabbis in the Hekhalot literature at-tain the knowledge necessary for ascent to the merkavah, there are some obvious similarities and differences. In both cases, the ultimate source of knowledge is the angels. In both cases, the ascender must use the divine name in some way, either by reciting it or by showing seals with the divine name to the angels who guard the entrances to the seven hekhalot.91 In both cases, the ascender must remain sexually pure. In the Hekhalot texts, however, angelic knowledge is mediated through the master-disciple relationship. The master purposefully teaches the student in order to enable his journey to the merkavah or to adjure angels. In the midrash, on the other hand, while Esterah learns directly from Shemhazai, he does not give her the knowledge in order to teach her how to ascend to heaven. He tells her the name in order to gain her consent to seduction. She seizes upon the divine name to escape him, not in order to ascend to the merkavah. They do not have a master-disciple relationship: Shemhazai intends to exploit her, not teach her. When she arrives in heaven, she does not do what the Hekhalot mystics do when they enter the divine throne room in the seventh palace. While they take

89 Gerald Friedlander, ed., Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, 4th ed. (New York: Sepher-Hermon, 1981), 160.

90 Jub. 4:15, trans. O. S. Wintermute, “Jubilees,” OTP 2:62.91 In Hekhalot Rabbati, §§ 204–5, one method of descent to the merkavah is by adjuring

Suriah, Sar ha-Panim, one hundred and eleven times by the name Totroisiah YHWH.



part in the heavenly liturgy and praise God, together with the angels, and then return to earth,92 she is welcomed by God and then placed among the Pleiades. Her journey to heaven is permanent, a reward for her avoidance of sexual sin. The whole story seems much more like a folktale or a myth, transposed into the setting of the generation before the Flood, than part of the Hekhalot ritual lit-erature. The detail that Esterah is placed among the Pleiades certainly supports this conclusion.93

Does the story of Esterah reflect the involvement of women in the circles of Hekhalot mystics? For a number of reasons, I believe that this is unlikely. First of all, there are obvious details in this story that do not appear in any of the Hekha-lot texts – Shemhazai and Azazel do not play a role in the Hekhalot literature, but they are to be found in 1 Enoch and in literature that has drawn from the Enochic literature in direct or indirect ways (for example, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan). In the Hekhalot texts themselves, the angels do not sin, and certainly do not have lust for human women.94 The story of Esterah, although it may have some generic similarities to the Hekhalot ascent passages, is not part of the Hekhalot literature. The larger midrash of which the story of Esterah is a part is constructed from several disparate sources. In Bereshit Rabbati, R. Moses ha-Darshan collected

92 Schäfer refers to this as a “unio liturgica: a liturgical union, or communion, of the Merkavah mystic with God” (Origins, 281).

93 To pursue this point, Milik, Books of Enoch, 330, following M. Grünbaum (“Beiträge zur vergleichenden Mythologie aus der Hagada,” ZDMG 31 [1877]: 229), argues for the influence of Greek mythology through the story of Pleione, the mother of the Pleiad nymphs who is pursued by Orion. Grünbaum writes (my translation), “It is strange that Istahar in the midrash is placed in the constellation Kimah – which is understood to be the Pleiades. It appears that two legends flow together here. The young woman Istahar set among the stars of the Pleiades recalls very vividly the Greek myth of the nymphs, who, pursued by Orion, are transformed into doves and later form the constellation of the Pleiades. Although the setting among the stars is so frequent in Greek mythology that there is even a special word for it – καταστερίζω – it appears that the circle of legends to which the constellations of the Pleiades (כימה), Orion (כסיל), and the Great Bear (עיש) are connected is of oriental origin. Orion, the pursuer, as well as the neighbor, of the Pleiades, is in any case of oriental origin, he is Nimrod.” The other legend that Grünbaum refers to is of Arabic-Persian origin, which I will be discussing below.

Joseph Fontenrose, Orion: The Myth of the Hunter and the Huntress, Classical Studies 23 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 16, recounts the myth as follows: “Orion saw Pleione, mother of the Pleiades, walking with her daughters in Boiotia and lusted after her; or, in another version, all the Pleiades aroused his lust. They fled from him, and Orion gave chase. The chase lasted five years, until Zeus out of pity made the Pleiades into stars, which Orion still pursues in the sky.”

Ellen Robbins, “The Pleiades, the Flood, and the Jewish New Year,” in Ki Baruch Hu: Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Judaic Studies in Honor of Baruch A. Levine, ed. Robert Chazan, William Hallo, and Lawrence Schiffman (Winona Lake: IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999), 329–44, argues that Esterah’s name appears to be a Semiticized feminine of the Greek aster (“star”), whose fate derives from Greek mythology, where the Pleiades were described as catasterized women pur-sued by the giant hunter Orion. (“Catasterized” means to be transformed into a star.)

94 Metatron gives Elisha ben Avuyah the mistaken idea that he is a second god, because he sits in heaven – but this story is imported into the Hekhalot texts from the Babylonian Talmud.


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commentaries and midrashim from many different sources, both Jewish and non-Jewish, including the pseudepigrapha. Martha Himmelfarb has discussed R. Moses’ use of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and Jubilees, and how these traditions might have come to him.95 The other parts of the Midrash of Shemhazai and Azael have diverse roots: the Qumran Book of Giants, the Enochic Book of the Watchers, 3 Enoch, and Pirqe Rabbi Eliezer.96

The most likely source from which the story of Esterah was adopted and then adapted is not, however, earlier Enochic literature or even midrashim (early or late), but Islamic exegesis of the Qur’an (tafsir), specifically, on Qur’an 2:102, which mentions the “two angels in Babil, Harut and Marut.”97 This passage says that the “satans” taught the people sorcery.98

Solomon did not disbelieve, but the satans disbelieved, teaching the people sorcery, and that which was sent down to the two angels in Babil, Harut and Marut; they did not teach any man without saying, “We are but a trial, do not disbelieve.” From them they learned how they might sunder a man from his wife, yet they did not hurt any man thereby, save with God’s knowledge, and they learned what hurt them, and did not profit them, knowing well that whoever buys it shall have no share in the world to come; evil then was that they sold themselves for, if they had but known.

95 See Martha Himmelfarb, “Rabbi Moses the Preacher and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs,” AJS Review 9 (1984): 55–78; Himmelfarb, “Some Echoes of ‘Jubilees’ in Medieval Hebrew Literature,” in Tracing the Threads: Studies in the Vitality of Jewish Pseudepigrapha, ed. John Reeves (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994), 115–141. Michael Stone, “Testament of Naphtali,” JJS 48 (1996): 311–21, demonstrates that several passages in this midrash go back to the Qumran Testament of Naphtali (4QTestNaph). Rachel Adelman writes that “[t]he evidence points to an original Aramaic or Hebrew manuscript, no longer extant, to which R. Moshe had access” (“The Poetics of Time and Space in the Midrashic Narrative – The Case of Pirke deRabbi Eliezer” [PhD diss., Hebrew University, 2008], 216).

96 Reed, Fallen Angels, 261–68; Milik, Books of Enoch, 335–39; John C. Reeves, Jewish Lore in Manichaean Cosmogony: Studies in the Book of Giants (Cincinnati: HUCA Press, 1992), 84–87. Immediately after the story of Esterah in the Midrash of Shemhazai and Azael, there are two paragraphs about the descent of the angels and the birth of the giants that are very close (although not identical) to Pirqe Rabbi Eliezer, ch. 22.

97 Bernard Heller, in “La Chute des Anges: Schemhazai, Ouzza et Azaël,” REJ 60 (1910): 202–12. Abraham Geiger, Judaism and Islam, trans. F. M. Young (Madras: MDCSPCK, 1898), 84, argues that the story of Esterah is alluded to in Qur’an 2.102 – “It is evident that this story is alluded to in the passage in the Qurán, where the two angels Hárút and Márút are said to have taught men a charm by which they might cause division between a man and his wife.” Contra Geiger, it is far more likely that there is a relationship between the tafsir on this passage and the Midrash of Shemhazai and Azael than that the Qur’an alludes to the midrash. Adelman, Poetics, 219, writes: “A third possibility, however, must be entertained. As Reeves pointed out, it is not incidental that the rise of Second Temple sources evident in early medieval midrash follows the advent of Islam. Genizah documents suggest that transcontinental travel and trade, in which the Jewish community was widely engaged, brought about the dissemination and cross-fertil-ization of folklore and perhaps even the exchange of textual traditions between Arabs, Jews and Byzantine Christians.”

98 J. Cooper, trans., The Commentary on the Qur’an by Abu Ja’ far Muhammad b. Jarir Al-Tabari (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 476–77.



A number of Muslim commentaries on this passage recount several versions of a story that has striking similarities to the story of Esterah in the Midrash of Shem-hazai and Azael. In these stories, the angels are often identified with the Harut and Marut of the Qur’an – they do not have angelic names derived from Jewish tradition. The angels assert that when they go down to earth, they will not sin, unlike human beings. However, like human men, they also lust after women. The woman whom they see and lust after is given the name of Baidhakht, al-Zuhara (Venus), or Anahidh. In some versions of the story she is innocent of attempts to tempt the angels, while in others she tempts them to commit sins before she sub-mits to them – the sins of associating partners with God, drinking wine, killing someone, and prostrating oneself before an idol. In some versions of the story she learns the secret which permits the angels to ascend to heaven at the end of each day and then return to earth the next. She uses this secret when the angels try to force themselves upon her, ascends, and God places her as a star in the heavens.99

Abu Ja’far Muhammad b. Jarir Al-Tabari (ca. 839–923) is one of the important early commentators on the Qur’an. He generally begins his commentary on a passage with a summary of earlier and contemporary scholarly views and tradi-tional narratives.100 His commentary on Qur’an 2:102 includes several versions of a narrative close to the story of Esterah. I include several of them here with comments on how they relate to the Midrash of Shemhazai and Azael.

When the children of Adam had increased in the earth and committed acts of disobedi-ence, the angels, heavens, earth, and mountains invoked God against them, saying: “Oh Lord, would You not destroy them?” God revealed to the angels, “Were I to put lust in your hearts and given Satan authority over you, and you were then to descend to earth, you would do the same.” The angels thought in their hearts that if they were sent down, they would not sin. God then revealed to them, “Choose two of the best angels among you,” and they chose Harut and Marut. They were thus sent down to earth, and Venus was sent to them in the image of a beautiful Persian woman. They fell into sin [by lusting after her]. They were therefore given the choice between the punishment of this world or that of the world to come, but they chose the punishment of this world.101

This version includes several of the elements of the Midrash of Shemhazai and Azael: the angels are scornful of human sin, and believe that if they had been placed in the same situation, they would not have sinned. When they see a beau-

99 Cooper, Commentary on the Qur’an, 484–85.100 Gabriel Said Reynolds, The Qur’an and Its Biblical Subtext (London: Routledge, 2010),

220–23. He writes: “For each individual passage Tabari concerns himself first with recording traditions containing the views of earlier and contemporary scholars on a certain question. Only thereafter does he express his own opinion, an opinion generally based on his evaluation of the preceding traditions. Not only does Tabari admit of opposing views, he seeks to catalog as many of them as possible. Accordingly, his tafsir has been justly described as polyvalent” (222). Tabari also includes narrative traditions among the opinions that he considers.

101 Mahmoud Ayoub, The Qur’an and Its Interpreters, 2 vols. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 1:131 (Tabari II, 428).


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tiful woman, however, they lust after her, and are punished. This version gives us no information about Venus’s actions – she is sent (presumably by God) to serve as temptation for the angels, but does not act independently.

A second version presents the woman as tempting the angels to commit sin, after they have confidently asserted, “Glory be to You, it ought not to happen with us!” The angels were told by God that they were permitted do anything except to associate anything with God, drink wine, commit adultery, or kill anyone. “They were not there long before a woman appeared to them to whom half of [all] beauty had been given, and she was called Baidhakht. When they saw her, they wanted to commit adultery with her, but she said, ‘No, not unless you associate [partners] with God, drink wine, kill someone, and prostrate before this idol.’” Eventually, they drink wine and kill a beggar. God then punishes them for their sins.102 In this version, we still have the angels arrogantly assuming that they will not sin, but the woman herself is active in tempting them to sin.

The third version includes more details that are also found in the story of Es-terah, but her motives do not appear to be as pure as Esterah’s.

One of the things about Harut and Marut was that they criticized the people of the earth and their legal rulings. So they were told: “I gave mankind ten carnal desires, and it is through these that they disobey Me.” Harut and Marut said, “O Lord, if You gave us those carnal desires we would descend, and we would judge with justice.” He said to them: “Go down, I have given both of you these ten carnal desires, so judge between the people.” So they came down to Babil in Dunbawand, and they judged until the evening when they ascended, and when it was morning they came down.

They continued thus until a woman came to them to bring a complaint against her husband, and they wondered at her beauty. Her name was Al-Zuhara (Venus) in Arabic, Baidhakht in Nabatean, and Anahidh in Persian. Then one of them said to the other, “How she delights me!” And the other said, “I wanted to tell you, but I was ashamed in front of you.” The other said, “Do you want me to mention it to her?” He said, “Yes, but what about our being punished by God?” The other said, “We shall hope for God’s mercy.” Then, when she came to bring the complaint against her husband, they spoke to her about herself, but she said, “No, not until you give judgement in my favor against my husband.” So they found for her against her husband, and she promised a meeting with them among some ruins to come to her there. So they came to her accordingly. And when one of them wanted to have sexual intercourse with her, she said, “No, I [will] not do this until you both tell me what words to say to ascend to heaven, and what words you say to come down therefrom.” So they told her, and she uttered them and ascended; but God made her forget what she could come down with, so she stayed where she was, and God made her a star.103

In this version, the angels are subjected to the same temptations that humans are, since they receive the “ten carnal desires” that humans have. They do not stay on earth all the time – each night they return to heaven by reciting some words, and then they recite other words and descend the next morning. They both lust after

102 Cooper, Commentary on the Qur’an, 484, on the authority of Ibn ‘Abbas.103 Ibid., 485, on the authority of Al-Suddi.



the woman (known by three names) but are ashamed of their lust, only reluctant-ly confessing it to each other. (Contrast this with Shemhazai, who is the one angel who seeks out Esterah and does not seem to feel any shame). The woman throws up two barriers to the fulfillment of their lust. First, they must rule for her against their husband, which they do, and then they have to tell her the words by which they ascend and descend, which they also do. She, however, like Esterah, says the words to escape them and ascends to heaven, but God makes her forget how to descend to earth, which to me indicates a certain judgment of the woman’s virtue. He does, however, transform her into a star, like Esterah, although the text does not specify in which constellation she can be found, nor is she described as setting an example to humanity because she refused to sin with the angels.

Despite the close similarities between the versions of the story of the Muslim story with the story of Esterah, there are also clear differences. The versions quot-ed by Tabari are clearly Islamic stories. They connect the story to the Qur’anic passage about Harut and Marut, rather than using Jewish angel names. In the sec-ond version of the story, Harut and Marut are tempted to commit acts which are sins in both Islam and Judaism (polytheism and idolatry, adultery, and murder), and one that is a transgression only in Islam: drinking wine, which leads to their downfall. The woman’s name is not Esterah, but an Arabic or Persian name.104 R. Moshe, or more likely his source, adapted the story to make it explicitly Jewish. A direct quote from Ps 8:5 is put into the mouths of two angels with names from 1 Enoch, also known from Targum Pseudo-Jonathan. The young woman’s name is Esterah, a name of Esther according to one Talmudic passage.105 Gen 6:1 is quot-ed explicitly, tying this story to earlier elaborations of the biblical (not qur’anic) story of the fall of the angels. Esterah pronounces the shem ha-meforash, not just “some words,” in order to ascend. The image of Esterah as wholly innocent seems to me to come from the Jewish adaptation, perhaps to present her not just in contrast to the Islamic story of the woman whom the angels lust after, but also in contrast to other Jewish versions, including that found in Pirqe Rabbi Eliezer, where the daughters of Cain entice the angels to sin.

The conclusion to be drawn from this analysis of the story of Esterah in the Midrash of Shemhazai and Azael is that, in fact, it does not allude to women’s participation in the circles of merkavah mystics. The story’s earliest appearance in Jewish sources is in the eleventh century, making it likely that it was written several centuries after the composition of the Hekhalot texts. It is an intriguing

104 Where, then, does the name Esterah come from? According to Grünbaum, “Beiträge,” 228–29, it is the Persian name for Venus. In the Talmud (b. Meg. 13a), Esther’s name is interpret-ed as אסטרה, which is explained by Rashi as referring to the Moon (סיהרה). Jastrow (Dictionary, p. 98) defines it as “the bright,” or Venus, and points to the Tg. Job 31:26: “If I have looked at the light of Venus (אסתהר) when it shines, or the moon moving brightly.”

105 b. Meg. 13a.


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and lovely story, but its literary affinities are both with earlier Jewish pseudepi-graphic literature and Islamic tafsir, not with the Hekhalot literature.

The Excluded Woman: Concluding Observations

The root of women’s exclusion from the Hekhalot literature and the practices de-scribed in these texts is the role they play in men’s imagining of the qualifications for contact with the holy. Women are only seen as a potential source of impurity, either from sexual temptation (possibly leading to the ejaculation of impure semen) or from menstrual/parturient impurity (transmitted to a man through touch or food prepared by a woman). Even if a woman could not threaten a man’s purity by her own body’s impurity, her presence could lead to the man’s arousal. The fear of impurity brought by women in the Hekhalot literature goes beyond the strictures expressed in rabbinic literature (although often showing knowledge of those strictures).106 The insistence in the Hekhalot literature upon a man’s purity seems to reflect a belief that women could never be sufficiently pure either to descend to the merkavah or to adjure angels for revelation; therefore, the possibility is never raised in this literature. Judith Baskin makes a statement about the place of women in Sefer Hasidim that could equally well apply to the Hekhalot literature: “The pietist’s desire for separation from the corruption of the material world, and his wish to displace the pleasures of human sexuality through his devotion to the divine, is built, in part, upon the objectification of women. That such spiritual options were simply not available or even imagined for Jewish women is, perhaps, the other side of the coin.”107

As a heuristic exercise, let us address the question of what could have made revelatory mysticism possible for Jewish women by comparing the Hekhalot texts with three early Jewish Greek texts that present women as recipients of heavenly revelation, receiving wisdom from angels and engaging in ecstatic worship of God. The three texts are On the Contemplative Life by Philo, the Testament of Job, and Joseph and Aseneth. Of the three, Philo’s work is indisputably Jewish and is from first century CE Alexandria.108 The Testament of Job is a midrashic retelling in Greek of the book of Job, dated by most scholars to the first century BCE or CE, and also perhaps stemming from Egypt.109 The dating and provenance of Jo-

106 Lesses, Ritual Practices to Gain Power, 123: t. Ber. 2:13 permits the menstruant and women after childbirth to read the Torah and study “mishnah, midrash, halakhot, and aggadot.”

107 Judith R. Baskin, “From Separation to Displacement: The Problem of Women in Sefer Hasidim,” AJS Review 19 (1994): 1–18, at 18.

108 F. H. Colson and G. H. Whitaker, Philo, 12 vols., LCL (London: Heinemann 1929–1962), vol. 9.

109 Berndt Schaller (Das Testament Hiobs, JSHRZ 3 [Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1979], 308) argues for the Jewish nature of the work, writing “About the Jewish background of the Testament of Job there can remain no doubt.” He dates it (311) between the



seph and Aseneth is in dispute, but I find most persuasive the arguments of those who hold, like Christoph Burchard, Randall Chesnutt, and Edith Humphreys, that it is a Jewish work from first century BCE or CE Egypt.110

beginning of the first century BCE to the middle of the second century CE. Russell P. Spittler, “Testament of Job: A New Translation and Introduction,” OTP 1:833, writes, “Although Chris-tian editing is possible, the work is essentially Jewish in character.” He argues (834) that the first 45 chapters were written by a member of the Therapeutics in the mid-first century BCE but that they might have been “reworked in the second century by Montanists.” He believes that chap-ters 46–53, which tell the story of the daughters of Job, came from the Montanist who rewrote the older Therapeutic work. Pieter van der Horst argues against Spittler’s proofs of a Montanist provenance in “Images of Women in the Testament of Job,” in Studies on the Book of Job, ed. Michael Knibb and Pieter van der Horst (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 108–9. He argues (113) that chapters 46–53 were adapted by the author of the Testament of Job from an aggada on Job 42:15 which dealt with the inheritance of Job’s daughters. “It is probable that this haggada originated in ecstatic-mystical circles of early Judaism from about the beginning of the Common Era, very probably also in a group in which women played a leading role by their greater ecstatic gifts and their superior spirital insight into heavenly reality.” He does not think (114–115) that the hypothesis of Therapeutic origins can be sustained. Robert A. Kugler and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, “On Women and Honor in the Testament of Job,” JSP 14 (2004): 46n9, argue for a date and provenance of second half of the first century Egypt. James Davila, The Provenance of the Pseudepigrapha: Jewish, Christian, or Other? (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 197, writes that because the oldest manuscript is Coptic from the first half of the fifth century CE, “our earliest context for the work remains Christian circles in Egypt in the early fifth century CE at the latest.” It has no “indubitably Christian or Jewish signature features,” and is “entirely at home in late antique Egyptian Christianity.” He also writes (198) that the ascetic, world-denying ten-dencies of the book are also entirely consonant with Egyptian Christianity. He depends on the manuscript evidence to date the work to early fifth century CE Egypt, arguing that (199), “if we start from the manuscript evidence and move backwards only as needed, no positive evidence compels us to move beyond a Greek work witten in Christian, perhaps Egyptian circles by the early fifth century CE.” My discussion here of the Testament of Job agrees with the judgment of most scholars that it is a product of Egyptian Judaism of the first century BCE or CE.

110 For the view that Joseph and Aseneth was composed by Jews in first century BCE or CE Egypt: Christoph Burchard, “Joseph and Aseneth,” OTP 2:187, writes that the work is Jewish, and argues that it was probably written between 100 BCE and Hadrian’s edict against circum-cision in the second century; if it is from Egypt, it would have to have been written before 115 CE. Burchard, “The Text of Joseph and Aseneth Reconsidered,” JSP 14 (2005): 89, maintains the same view. In A Minor Edition of the Armenian Version of Joseph and Aseneth (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 2, he reaffirms this view. Randall D. Chesnutt, “The social setting and purpose of Joseph and Aseneth,” JSP 2 (1988): 21, and Chesnutt, From Death to Life: Conversion in Joseph and Aseneth, JSOPSup 16 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 71, 76, 80–81, argues that it could not have been written before 100 BCE, given its dependence on the Septuagint, and must have been written before 115–117, the dates of the Jewish revolt in Egypt. Edith Humphrey, Joseph and Aseneth, Guides to Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha 8 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 30–31, agrees with Burchard and Chesnutt, and argues against attempts to date the work much later or earlier. She also points out (37), that “The very comfort of the Christian community with a piece that shows no irrefutable evidence of Christian normalization suggests that Aseneth comes from a period before the ‘parting of the ways,’ and before nascent rabbinic Judaism and Christianity established their own distinct practice, theology, and liturgy.”

Gideon Bohak, Joseph and Aseneth and the Jewish Temple in Heliopolis, Early Judaism and its Literature 10 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1996), xiii, agrees that the book is Jewish and that it was written in Egypt, and he also argues that it was written “sometime between the second


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In both the Testament of Job and Joseph and Aseneth, women are in intimate contact with God’s principal angel. In both texts, the women take on an angelic existence – speaking in the tongues of angels, or eating the food of angels. In both texts the women undergo angelic transformation. Aseneth is “renewed and formed anew and made alive again” and “eat[s] blessed bread of life, and drink[s] a blessed cup of immortality, and anoint[s] [herself] with blessed ointment of incorruptibility.”111 The daughters of Job take on a new heart and speak in the tongues of angels. They are heavenly-minded, not earthly-minded, and receive unearthly revelations.

Neither text completely challenges the androcentric worldview of their time, nor do they challenge the notion that one needs to be sexually pure in order to come into contact with heavenly realities. Aseneth is a virgin, as the text men-tions many times, and the daughters of Job are unmarried (as far as we know from the text).112 In this they agree with Philo in On the Contemplative Life, who says of the women in the Therapeutic community:

The feast is shared by women also, most of them aged virgins (geraiai parthenoi), who have kept their chastity not under compulsion, like some of the Greek priestesses, but of their own free will in their ardent yearning for wisdom. Eager to have her for their life mate (symbioun), they have spurned the pleasures of the body and desire no mortal offspring but those immortal children which only the soul that is dear to God can bring to the birth unaided because the Father has sown in her spiritual rays (aktinas noetas) enabling her to behold the verities of wisdom (ta sophias dogmata).”113

century BCE and the second century CE.” Because it is familiar with much of the Septuagint, it cannot be dated earlier than the second century BCE, and if it was written in Egypt, it cannot be dated later than 115–17 CE. Bohak disagrees with the earlier cited authors in arguing that the work comes from the second century BCE, and that it was written to justify the existence of the Temple of Onias in Heliopolis (Joseph and Asenath, 90–94).

Ross Kraemer, on the other hand, in When Aseneth Met Joseph: A Late Antique Tale of the Bib-lical Patriarch and His Egyptian Wife, Reconsidered (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) argues for a much later origin – post 200 CE Christian in Syria or Asia Minor. George J. Brooke, “Men and Women as Angels in Joseph and Aseneth,” JSP 14 (2005): 176–77, argues against Krae-mer’s interpretation on the basis that the angelic transformation of Aseneth “could have been appreciated by many Jewish readers and hearers at any time in the late Second Temple period and beyond. Because of its dependence on certain passages of the LXX, Joseph and Aseneth must have been penned after most of the LXX had been completed, but there is sufficient information in late Second Temple Jewish sources to permit the possibility of a date for Joseph and Aseneth well before the end of the third century CE. As for its location, a Greek-speaking Jewish com-munity with an interest in the Egyptian connection is required; whether or not that was actually in Egypt remains to be demonstrated.”

The English translation is according to Christoph Burchard, “Joseph and Aseneth,” OTP 2:177–248. The Greek is according to Christoph Burchard, ed., Joseph und Aseneth (Leiden: Brill, 2003).

111 Aseneth 15:4.112 Although Aseneth also remains in contact with heavenly realities after her marriage to

Joseph, through the revelations she receives from her brother-in-law Levi.113 Contempl. Life, 68 (trans. Colson, 9:155).



In the account of Philo, the women of the group were able to engage in study of scripture and composition of hymns because most of them were “aged vir-gins,” without the encumbrances of family or the impurity of sexuality to hinder them.114 While Philo does not describe the members of the Therapeutic society as conversing with angels or ascending to heaven, in many respects their way of life resembles that required for the Hekhalot invocations: isolation in a house by oneself, plain food and drink, and abstinence from sexual activity. Since most of the women of the group are “aged virgins,” their menstrual periods have probably ceased, so they do not have to deal with that source of impurity (although Philo does not address this question). In agreement with the authors of the Hekhalot texts, the authors of these other Jewish works share the belief that one must be pure in order to participate in heavenly realities. But, unlike the Hekhalot texts, these earlier Jewish texts do not assume that women are incapable of reaching such a level of purity. In these three texts, the division between purity and im-purity is not one that divides men from women; it is an opposition that crosses gender lines and in fact enables both women and men to converse with angels or engage in contemplation.

The existence of these other (more inclusive) traditions raises historical as well as theoretical questions. Why were such works possible in early Greek-speaking Judaism? What factors made it possible to portray a mystical ideal for women as well as for men? In order to explain this divergence it is helpful to delineate three axes of difference that the Greek Jewish texts and the Hekhalot texts think with: purity/ impurity, male/ female and celibate/sexual. The Greek Jewish texts present celibate women as being pure enough to attain heaven. The celibate state is a possibility for women (even if marriage might be considered better); it is not entirely ruled out as a social option. However, rabbinic Judaism rules out celiba-cy for both men and women. Early Christianity leaves open this possibility for both men and women (as evidenced in the canonical letters of Paul and the Acts of Paul and Thecla), a tendency which continues in the development of monas-ticism. One could perhaps say that early Christianity continued this possibility while rabbinic Judaism rejected it.115 Christian monasticism, and the valuation of celibacy and virginity in general, provided a social space for women to be intensely involved with the spiritual life, a space that was not similarly provided for women in Judaism. The study-house provided such an alternative place for

114 Note, however, that Philo does not assert that all of them are aged virgins. Some may not have been aged, while others may not have been virgins. Philo’s idea of the “good woman” is that she is married with children; she certainly does not abandon her husband and children to live by herself in a community with unrelated men. See discussion by Joan Taylor, Jewish Women Philosophers of First-Century Alexandria (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) 248–64, esp. 253 where she writes: “But Philo could not have written that the women left their husbands and children behind and still have considered them ‘good.’”

115 Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press), 31–60.


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men (away from women) to seek spiritual ideals (principally study), but women were not welcome there except as occasional visitors.

The rabbinic rejection of celibacy works with the other two axes of pure/impure and male/ female so as to exclude women from the mystical ideal. One could argue that in the rabbinic worldview women are generally less pure than men; they can become impure through their menstrual periods and through childbirth. The various other purity restrictions to which both men and women were to adhere during the time of the temple fell by the wayside after its destruc-tion, while the laws of niddah remained in full force.116 This does not mean that men could not become impure; the Hekhalot texts are very concerned with the possibility of a man having a seminal emission, but this possibility does not keep all men from attaining the proper state of purity. Although men’s semen can render them impure, they are conceived of as being in control of it, in contrast to women who completely lack control of their menstrual blood.117 The need to be pure was thus enforced unequally on men and on women. Although one could theoretically imagine that a woman could be pure enough to engage in the Hekhalot adjurations or the descent to the merkavah, this does not seem to have been a possibility entertained by the authors of this literature. The tendency to identify women with impurity, in fact, may have led to the association between women and the demonic found in the later Kabbalah, as Gershom Scholem argues, “This exclusive masculinity for which Kabbalism has paid a high price, appears rather to be connected with an inherent tendency to lay stress on the demonic nature of women and the feminine element of the cosmos.”118

116 Biale, Women and Jewish Law, 147–74.117 See the discussions by Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, The Savage in Judaism: An Anthropology

of Israelite Religion and Ancient Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 177–94; and Lawrence Hoffman, Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 136–54. Hoffman writes about his and Eil berg-Schwartz’s research that for both of them “the key to understanding the map of pollution, and therefore the taboo against menstrual blood, was to be found in the concept of self-control” (151). He, like Eilberg-Schwartz, points out that “Menstrual blood, of course, is completely uncontrollable; it thus shares with nonseminal emissions the status of pollutant” (153). He draws the conclusion that “the binary opposition obtains between men who are in control of their blood, so of themselves, and therefore of society, and women who, lacking control of blood and therefore of self, are thus denied control of society as well” (154). Eilberg-Schwartz also discusses the binary opposition between self-controlled men and uncontrolled women in terms of the different valuations of the blood of circumcision and menstrual blood: “Women’s blood is contaminating; men’s blood has the power to create covenant” (180).

118 Scholem, Major Trends, 37.
