Sepher Ha-Razim

The Sepher Ha-Razim is a Jewish mystical text supposedly given to Noah by the angel Raziel, and passed down throughout Biblical history to Solomon, for whom it was a great source of his wisdom, and purported magical powers. Note that this is a different book than the Sefer Raziel HaMalach, which was given to Adam by the same angel, but they stem from the same tradition, and large parts of Sepher ha-Razim were incorporated into the Sepher Raziel under its original title. This is an unorthodox text; while traditional Jewish laws of purity are part of the cosmogony, there are "praxeis which demand we eat cakes made from blood and flour" (Morgan 9). It is thought to be a sourcebook for Jewish magic, calling upon angels rather than God to perform supernatural feats. The text itself was once considered to be part of "orthodox" Judaism under the influence of Hellenism, but this text, along with some other works, are considered to be unorthodox or heretical in modern Judaism.

The text was rediscovered in the 20th century by Mordecai Margalioth, a Jewish scholar visiting Oxford in 1963, using fragments found in the Cairo Geniza. He hypothesised that several fragments of Jewish magical literature shared a common source and was certain that he could reconstruct this common source. He achieved this in 1966 when he published Sepher Ha-Razim. The first English translation of the book was undertaken by Michael A. Morgan in 1983; the book is now in print, as of summer 2007. A new scholarly edition of the main extant manuscript witnesses including Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic Geniza fragments and a 13th-century Latin translation was prepared by Bill Rebiger and Peter Schäfer in 2009, with plans for a translation and commentary in German.

Margalioth places the date of the original text to the early fourth or late third century CE. This date is almost universally accepted; a notable exception is Ithamar Gruenwald who dates the text to the sixth or seventh century CE. Nonetheless, it is clear that this text predates Kabbalistic texts, including the Zohar (thirteenth century CE), the Bahir (thirteenth century CE as well), and possibly the proto-Kabbalistic Sefer Yetzirah (fourth century CE). There are certain textual clues that point toward this early date, specifically the reference to "the Roman indictions in 1:27-28 [which] gives a clear terminus a quo of 297 CE" (Morgan 8).

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