Book of Splendor, Jewish mystical work, part of the Kabbalah
Fishburn and Hughes: "Hebrew, meaning 'splendour', 'the book of splendour': a mystical thirteenth-century work written in Castile in the Aramaic dialect and thought to be by Moses de Leon. It is a prime example of the literary form of Cabbalistic pseudepigraphy, its author pretending that it was the work of an apocryphal writer, hinting at mystical origins and permitting the persons in his dialogues a profusion of invented book titles and citations. Though considered the canonical book of the Cabbalists, the Zohar is not in any sense a systematic exposition of Cabbalistic doctrine but a work of mystical allegorisation in which the most seemingly insignificant verses of Scripture acquire unexpected depths of meaning. The style of the Zohar has been described by G. Scholem as 'tortuous and abstruse, lightened up occasionally by a magnificent clarity of symbolic expression'. The reference is to Zohar I, 240b, where the process of creation is explained as having taken place on two planes, one above and one below; the lower occurrence, the world of visible creation, corresponds to the higher world of the sephirot or Divine Emanations. This duality of creation is taken as a Cabbalistic explanation of the opening letter of Genesis, Beth, the numerical value of which is two." (215)