Cube of Space

Jewish mysticism is full of numbers and geometry. The Kaballah is the most well known but there are other, equally compelling strands of mystical thought.

The very first mystical tractate in Jewish tradition was the Sephir Yetzirah that appeared between the second and third century A.D.  Jewish historians today consider it to be one the precursor to the later Jewish Kabbalah mysticism. 

The Sephir Yetzirah is an attempt to explain how the infinite merged with the finite.  What is interesting is that it emphasizes the power of supernatural “spheres” that correspond with numbers and letters.  These letters and numbers form the very alphabet of creation, to put it in terms of its textual analogy. 

The spheres of the Sephir Yetzirah are said to correspond with the directions of space.  Based on these cryptic remarks, a huge body of mystical Jewish literature emerged including commentaries that organized these spheres into a conceptual “cube of space”.  The directions of space given in the Sephir Yetzirah—which constituted the very bridge between the infinite and the finite—came to be seen in terms of a cube.  Which, as we have seen, seems not to strange when taken in the context of the Jewish Holy of Holies—also cube, and also the bridge between this world and the next, the veritable “footstool” of the Jewish lord.

The “cube of space” pictures the “container of creation”—all things exist within it.  It is a convenient way to visualize space and all such systems that stress such imaginative work ultimately trace their origins back to the Sephir Yetzirah.  While it never mentions such a form explicitly, it has been understood in this manner.