Sefer Yetzirah · Free PDF Edition with the 22 Hebrew Letter Table

Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation, is the earliest text that later Kabbalists treated as foundational: a very short text, some three thousand words, that describes the world as formed through ten numbers and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. This page carries the complete text in English, free of charge, in Isidor Kalisch's public-domain translation of 1877, newly set by Global Spiritual Studies as an 86-page book measuring six inches by nine, with an introduction, a pause for study after each of the six chapters, four appendices, a glossary, a historical timeline and a further-reading list. Below it you will also find the canonical table of the twenty-two letters and every correspondence the text itself assigns to them, section by section.

The free edition

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86 pages, six by nine, complete and unabridged · opens a short form, and the PDF arrives by email.

The edition reproduces Kalisch's translation entire: all six chapters, all sixty-five sections, in his own numbering, with nothing omitted and nothing inserted. Everything written for this printing · the introduction, the note on the translation, the bridge chapter, the pauses, the appendices, the glossary and the timeline · is set apart from the translation in a different face, so that the reader can always see where the ancient text ends and a modern editor begins. Five diagrams were drawn as original vector artwork for the book. The typography uses Cormorant Garamond, Source Serif 4 and Source Sans 3, with Frank Ruhl Libre for Hebrew.

The 22 Hebrew letters in Sefer Yetzirah · complete correspondence table

Sefer Yetzirah divides the twenty-two consonants of the Hebrew alphabet into three groups: three mothers (Aleph, Mem, Shin), seven doubles (Bet, Gimel, Dalet, Kaf, Pe, Resh, Tav) and twelve simples (the remaining twelve). That division is the text's own, at I.1 and II.1. Each letter is then set over something in the world, something in the year and something in the human body · an element for the mothers, a planet for the doubles, a sign of the zodiac for the simples.

The table below gives every one of those assignments exactly as Kalisch's 1877 translation gives them, with the chapter and section number for each row so that you can check it against the text. Nothing has been supplied from any other system. Where the text says nothing, the cell is marked with a dash rather than filled in from a later source.

Notes on the blank cells and the text's own disagreements

• Kalisch's spelling. Kalisch spells out only three letter names in the entire translation · Aleph, Mem and Sheen, the three mothers. The other nineteen he prints as bare Hebrew characters, which is why those cells are dashed. The names in the second column are therefore editorial throughout, except for those three. "Sheen" is his spelling of what is now usually written Shin.
• Numerical value. The text assigns no number to any letter and performs no calculation with them. The values above belong to the ordinary Hebrew system of letter-numerals, in use long before this book and long after, and are given because readers meet them everywhere else in Kabbalistic literature. They are not part of the text's argument.
• Directions. No letter is given a compass direction of its own. The twelve oblique points are listed as a group at V.2, and the ten "infinitudes" of chapter one include six directions, but neither list is matched letter by letter.
• The mothers disagree with themselves. III.5 says the head was created from fire, the breast from water and the body from air. Two sections later the per-letter assignments pair air with the breast (III.6) and water with the belly (III.7). Only fire and the head agree across both passages. The table follows III.6 to III.8, because those are the sections that assign letters; a reader working from III.5 would draw it differently. Kalisch does not reconcile them, and neither do we.
• The doubles disagree with themselves. IV.7 lists the seven planets in the descending order of ancient astronomy · Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon · but the per-letter assignments at IV.8 to IV.14 run in a quite different order. The table follows IV.8 to IV.14, the sections that do the assigning.
• The year is not four seasons. For the three mothers the "year" is three qualities, heat, coldness and moistness (III.4). No spring, summer, autumn or winter appears anywhere in the book.

Kalisch and the Golden Dawn · two different systems

Readers who come to the Hebrew letters by way of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its descendants will find a different planet attached to each of the seven doubles. The two lists below are set side by side so the difference is visible at a glance. They are not rival readings of one tradition; they are a nineteenth-century translation of an ancient text on the one hand, and a nineteenth-century magical system with its own internal logic on the other.

Not one of the seven agrees. Any chart showing Bet as Mercury or Resh as the Sun is following the Golden Dawn, not this text. Both systems are worth knowing; they should not be quietly merged. Resh is a double letter in Sefer Yetzirah, and this edition does not "correct" it.

What is in the edition

The book runs to 86 pages at six inches by nine. Beyond the translation itself it contains:

• A publication and source note · what is reproduced, what is not, and every change made to the working transcription.
• Before You Begin and an Introduction · what kind of book this is, and how it came to sit at the head of the Kabbalistic tradition.
• On This Translation · who Isidor Kalisch was, what his 1877 English does and does not do, and which modern translations to read next.
• From Sefer Yetzirah to the Living Tree of Life · a bridge chapter on how a text with no diagram in it became the diagram everybody knows.
• Six Pauses for Study · one after each chapter, a sentence or two of framing and three to five questions. They have no answers at the back.
• Four appendices · A, the twenty-two letters; B, the correspondences given in the text, with the inconsistencies shown rather than resolved; C, the later Tree of Life; D, a note on the "Thirty-Two Paths of Wisdom" supplement, which is not part of this text.
• A glossary, a historical timeline and a further-reading list, followed by a colophon.

About this translation

Isidor Kalisch (1816 to 1886) was a rabbi, scholar and journalist, born in the Prussian province of Posen, educated in Germany and settled in the United States from 1849. He served congregations across the American Midwest and East and was among the early figures of American Reform Judaism. He was not an occultist. His translation, published in New York in 1877 under the title Sepher Yezirah: A Book on Creation; or, The Jewish Metaphysics of Remote Antiquity, was the work of a philologist arguing for the antiquity and philosophical dignity of a text his contemporaries were inclined to dismiss.

He translated from the Hebrew edition of Johann Friedrich von Meyer, published at Leipzig in 1830, which he names in his preface. Meyer's text is generally understood to follow the family now called the Short Recension, though Kalisch himself uses no recension terminology · the concept post-dates him · and neither he nor Meyer states the manuscript basis.

What was and was not modernised. His English is of 1877 and reads like it, and it has been left as he wrote it, inconsistencies included: "producibility" for a quality of Dalet, "milt" for the spleen, "Schevat" at V.4 against "Schwat" at V.15. One feature will surprise readers who arrive with later vocabulary in hand: Kalisch never writes "Sephiroth" in the translation, and never writes "belimah". Where the Hebrew has sefirot belimah he reaches for a fresh English paraphrase almost every time · "a decade out of nothing", "Ten are the numbers out of nothing", "the ten categories of existence out of nothing". His restlessness is itself informative.

Only the translation is reproduced. Kalisch's preface, his forty-four explanatory notes, his glossary and his Hebrew text are not, and their exclusion was editorial, not a matter of rights. The working transcription was proofed against two scans of the 1877 printing, and nine changes were made · four corrections where a superscript footnote numeral had been absorbed into the text as a word, four Hebrew letter-group strings normalised to standalone letters, and one list restored to numerical order. Every one of them is itemised in the editorial record for this edition, published openly alongside the proofed source text and the sources-and-licences note.

One more editorial choice, flagged as such: Kalisch called the book A Book on Creation. This edition is titled The Book of Formation, because yetzirah is conventionally rendered "formation" today.

How to read it

This is a short book. You could read it through in an hour. Almost nobody does. Sefer Yetzirah does not explain itself; it states. There are no parables here, no narrative, very little that we would recognise as instruction, and whole centuries of commentary exist because readers found the text had left them holding something they could not put down and could not quite open.

So a suggestion, offered lightly. Read one chapter, then stop. That is what the six Pauses are for · not comprehension checks, and there are no answers at the back, but a page of questions that stay close to what the chapter in front of you actually says. Let the difficult parts stay difficult. When Kalisch writes that the ten "run by His order like a whirlwind", the strangeness is not a flaw in the translation. It is what the book is doing.

Go further

For the text in its historical setting · its dating, its recensions, the ten and the twenty-two, and how it became the Tree of Life · see our complete guide to Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation. Three shorter pieces go deeper on particular questions: the thirty-two paths of wisdom, and what the later supplement of that name added; the three mothers, seven doubles and twelve simples; and which translation of Sefer Yetzirah to read, from Kalisch and Westcott to Kaplan and Hayman.

If you are working on the Tree of Life itself rather than on this text, two free reference charts sit alongside this edition: the Kabbalah Tree of Life chart of the ten Sephirot and the chart of the twenty-two paths, which places the Hebrew letters on the Tree in the later manner.

To study the Tree as a practice rather than only as a text, Evelynne Joffe, Director of the Institute of Esoteric Studies in Melbourne, has taught it for more than thirty years, and approaches Kabbalah as a way of personal development and self-realization rather than as religious instruction. Her course on the ten stations is Living the Tree of Life · The Sephirot, which states that it is based on Sefer Yetzirah; her course on the twenty-two connecting paths is Living the Tree of Life · The Paths. Hers is one contemporary approach among many, a late and clearly identified layer resting on centuries of development, and not a recovery of what this text originally meant.

Frequently Asked Questions

A complete text, freely given · read it slowly, and more than once.