KABALA or KABBALAH (kab'bi-Igh), usu ally anglicized Cabala (Heb.11.,.5;Z, kab-baw-law').
This word is an abstract, and means reception, a doctrine received by oral transmission; so that with mere reference to its etymological significa tion, it is the correlate of the Hebrew word tra dition. The term Kabbalah is employed in the Jewish writings to denote several traditional doc trines: as, for example, that which constituted the creed of the patriarchal age before the giving of the law ; that unwritten ritual interpretation which the Jews believe was revealed by God to Moses on the mount, and which was at length committed to writing and formed the Mishnah. Besides being applied to these and other similar traditions, it has also been used in, comparatively speaking, modern times, to denote a singular mystical mode of in terpreting the Old Testament.
This Kabbalah is an art of eliciting mysteries from the words and letters of the Old Testament by means of some subtle devices of interpretation, or it is an abstruse theosophical and metaphysical doctrine containing the traditional arcana of the remotest times.
(1) Traditional Doctrine. The inartificial or dogmatical Kabbalah consists solely of a tradi tional doctrine on things divine and metaphysical, propounded in a symbolical form. It treats prin cipally of the mysteries of the doctrine of emana tion, of angels and spirits, of the four Kabbalisti cal worlds, and of the ten Sephiroth or so-called Kabbalistic tree. It is a system made up of ele ments which are also found in the Magian doc trine of emanation, in the Pythagorean theory of numbers, in the philosophy of the later Platontsts, and in the tenets of the Gnostics; but these doc trines are here stated with enigmatical obscurity, and without the coherence and development of a single and entire scheme. Its general tenor may be conceived from the eminent prerogatives which it assigns to the law, and from the consequent latitude of interpretation.
Thus, it is argued in the book of Sohar: 'Alas for the man who thinks that the law contains nothing but what appears on its surface ; for, if that were true, there would be men in our day who could excel it. But the law assumed a body;
for if angels are obliged, when they descend to this world, to assume a body in order that they may subsist in the world, and it be able to receive them, how much more necessary was it that: the law, which created them and which was the in strument by which the world was created, should be invested with a body in order that it might be adapted to the comprehension of man? That body is a history, in which if any man think there is not a soul, let him have no part in the life to come.' Manasseh-ben-Israel, who makes this ci tation from the book of Sohar, enforces this view with many arguments (Conciliator, Amste lod. 1633, ?. t69).
(2) Origin. The origin of the Kabbalah is in volved in great obscurity. The Jews ascribe it to Adam, or to Abraham, or to Moses. or to Ezra; the last being apparently countenanced by 2 Esdras xiv:20-48. Eichhorn accounts for the origin of that important part of this Kabbalah, the system of allegorical interpretation (by which their occult doctrine was either generated, or, if not, at least brought into harmony with the law), by supposing that the Jews adopted it immedi ately from the Greeks.
According to him, when the Jews were brought into contact with the enlightened speculations of the Greek philosophers, they felt that their law (as they had hitherto interpreted it) was so far behind the wisdom of the Gentiles, that—both to vinclicate its honor in the eyes of the scoffing heathen, and to reconcile their newly adopted philosophical convictions with their ancient creed —they borrowed from the Greek allegorizers of Homer the same art of interpretation, and ap plied it to conjure away the unacceptable sense of the letter, or to extort another sense which harmonized with the philosophy of the age (Bibl.
v, 237, sq.). J. N.