Chronicles of Jerahmeel

Introduction

There are books that inform, books that entertain, and then there are books that fundamentally alter the way you understand the world you thought you knew. The volume you hold in your hands belongs to that rarest third category. It is a work that reaches back across more than two thousand years of Jewish literary tradition, gathering into a single extraordinary anthology the myths, legends, sacred histories, and esoteric chronicles that shaped the spiritual imagination of an entire civilization — yet remained hidden from mainstream readers for centuries, locked away in manuscript form, accessible only to a handful of scholars who understood the magnitude of what they were reading.

The text known to scholars as the Chronicles of Jerahmeel is one of the most remarkable and underappreciated treasures in all of world literature. Compiled sometime in the medieval period but drawing on sources of breathtaking antiquity, it is a vast, sprawling, endlessly surprising anthology of Hebrew narrative that weaves together biblical commentary, apocalyptic vision, ancient legend, cosmological speculation, and historical chronicle into something that defies easy categorization. It is part sacred scripture and part adventure story, part theological treatise and part folklore collection, part history and part dream. To read it carefully is to enter a world where the boundaries between the human and the divine are perpetually dissolving, where angels walk among men, where the secrets of creation are whispered in the margins of history, and where the story of the Jewish people unfolds not merely as a sequence of earthly events but as a cosmic drama playing out across multiple dimensions of existence.

For most of its history, this text existed in profound obscurity. It was known to exist — medieval Jewish scholars occasionally referenced it, and later European antiquarians sometimes glimpsed fragments of it in private collections — but it was not until the late nineteenth century that the full manuscript came to scholarly attention in a serious way. The Oxford scholar Moses Gaster, one of the great figures of Jewish studies in the Victorian era, obtained a manuscript of the work and produced the first English translation, published in 1899. That translation was a landmark achievement, but it was also, inevitably, a product of its time — written in the somewhat stiff, formal English of Victorian scholarship, annotated with the concerns of nineteenth-century textual criticism, and presented in a format that made it accessible primarily to other scholars rather than to the general reader who might find in these pages something genuinely transformative.

The present edition aims to change that. It seeks to restore to this extraordinary anthology the sense of living vitality, narrative urgency, and spiritual depth that animated it for its original readers and compilers. It seeks to make available to the modern reader — whether that reader comes from a Jewish background or from no religious background at all, whether they are a scholar or simply a curious person who loves stories and wonders about the deep roots of human spiritual experience — the full richness of what is contained in these remarkable pages. And it seeks to provide the kind of contextual framing that allows a contemporary reader to understand not just what the text says, but why it matters, where it came from, and what it can still offer us in the twenty-first century.

To understand why this anthology is so significant, it helps to think for a moment about the nature of the Hebrew literary tradition from which it emerges. The Hebrew Bible — the Tanakh, the text that Christians know as the Old Testament — is itself only the visible tip of an enormous iceberg of Jewish literary production. Beneath and around and beyond the canonical scriptures lies a vast ocean of texts: the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Targumim, the Midrashim, the Talmud, the Kabbalah, and countless other works that elaborated, extended, questioned, reinterpreted, and reimagined the biblical narratives. Jewish tradition has always understood the written Torah as only one dimension of a much larger revelatory process. Alongside the written text, tradition held, there existed an oral Torah — a living stream of interpretation, legend, and secret knowledge that had been transmitted from teacher to student since the time of Moses himself.

The anthology assembled under Jerahmeel's name is, in a very real sense, a monument to that oral tradition finding written form. It gathers together materials from an astonishing range of sources — some of them well-known texts like the Book of Jubilees or the Book of Enoch, others obscure midrashic compilations that survive nowhere else, still others fragments that appear to preserve genuinely ancient traditions that predate even the canonical scriptures in some of their elements. The compiler — whoever Jerahmeel actually was, a question to which we will return — was not simply a passive collector. He was a creative intelligence who understood that the true history of the Jewish people was not contained in any single text but had to be assembled, like a mosaic, from hundreds of different sources, each contributing its own fragment of a larger picture.

What emerges from that mosaic is nothing less than an alternative history of the world — a history that begins before the creation of the physical universe, traces the cosmic drama of angels and demons, follows the fate of humanity from Adam and Eve through the great flood and the tower of Babel and the patriarchs and the exodus and the conquest of Canaan, and extends forward through the entire sweep of biblical history to the destruction of the Temple and beyond. But it is an alternative history in a very specific sense: it is a history that takes seriously the invisible dimensions of events, that insists on the spiritual significance of what appears on the surface to be merely political or military history, that understands every human action as embedded in a vast cosmic context that ordinary perception cannot grasp.

This is not escapism or mere fantasy. It is, rather, a profoundly serious attempt to answer the deepest questions that human beings have always asked: Why does the world exist? Why is there suffering? What is the nature of evil? What is the relationship between human freedom and divine providence? What happens to the soul after death? What is the ultimate destiny of humanity? These are questions that every religious tradition has grappled with, and the answers that emerge from the pages of this anthology are often startlingly sophisticated, nuanced, and — to a modern reader — surprisingly relevant.

Consider, for example, the treatment of the fall of the angels — one of the great mythological themes that runs through the early sections of the anthology. Drawing on the ancient Book of Enoch and related traditions, the text presents a vision of cosmic catastrophe in which divine beings, overwhelmed by desire for human women, descend to earth and in doing so unleash a tide of violence, corruption, and forbidden knowledge that nearly destroys the world. This is not simply a colorful myth. It is a profound meditation on the nature of transgression, on the dangers of power without responsibility, on the way that the corruption of the highest can produce the worst forms of evil. The Watchers — as these fallen angels are called — are not simply villains. They are tragic figures, beings of genuine grandeur who are destroyed by their inability to accept the limits of their own nature. There is something in their story that resonates deeply with our own moment in history, when we too are confronting the consequences of power exercised without wisdom and knowledge deployed without ethical constraint.

Or consider the extraordinary material relating to the figure of Enoch — the mysterious patriarch who, the Bible tells us in just a few tantalizing words, walked with God and was not, for God took him. In the traditions preserved in this anthology, Enoch becomes one of the most extraordinary figures in all of religious literature: a human being who is transformed through his intimacy with the divine into something more than human, who is taken up into the highest heavens and shown the secrets of the cosmos, who becomes the heavenly scribe Metatron and serves as a kind of bridge between the human and the divine. The Enoch traditions are among the oldest and most fascinating in all of Jewish literature, and the anthology preserves versions of them that are not found in any other single source. To read them is to encounter a vision of human spiritual potential that is simultaneously ancient and startlingly modern — a vision of what human beings might become if they could fully open themselves to the transformative power of divine encounter.

These are just two examples from a text that is rich with such moments of unexpected depth and beauty. There are passages here that will take your breath away with their poetic power, passages that will challenge you with their theological complexity, passages that will make you laugh with their earthy humor, and passages that will move you with their compassionate understanding of human weakness and longing. This is a text that rewards patient, attentive reading — not because it is difficult in the way that academic texts are difficult, but because it is dense with meaning in the way that great literature is always dense with meaning, offering new layers of significance each time you return to it.

The World That Shaped This Text

To fully appreciate what you are about to read, it is worth pausing to consider the world in which this anthology took shape. Jewish literary culture in the medieval period was a culture under extraordinary pressure — a culture that had survived the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, the catastrophic failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE, and centuries of exile, dispersion, and persecution. It was a culture that had watched its sacred center destroyed, its people scattered across three continents, its political autonomy extinguished. And yet it was also, paradoxically, a culture of remarkable intellectual vitality, creativity, and resilience — a culture that responded to catastrophe not by collapsing inward but by generating an extraordinary flowering of literary, legal, philosophical, and mystical production.

The compiler of this anthology — the figure known to us as Jerahmeel ben Solomon — worked within this tradition of creative response to adversity. We know relatively little about him as a historical individual. He appears to have lived in southern Italy sometime in the eleventh or twelfth century, in a region that was at that time a remarkable crossroads of cultures: Byzantine, Arabic, Norman, and Jewish traditions all intersected in the towns and cities of the Italian south, creating an environment of unusual intellectual openness and cross-cultural exchange. It was an environment in which a Jewish scholar might have access to texts and traditions from across the entire Mediterranean world — texts that had been preserved in different manuscript traditions, in different languages, in different communities, and that had never before been brought together in a single place.

Jerahmeel's great achievement was precisely this work of gathering. He was not primarily an original thinker in the philosophical sense — he was not trying to construct a new theological system or to advance a particular interpretive agenda. He was, rather, a collector and preserver, a man who understood that the richness of the Jewish literary tradition was in danger of being lost through neglect, dispersal, and the simple attrition of time, and who set himself the task of gathering as much of it as he could into a single comprehensive anthology. In this sense, he was doing for Jewish legend and sacred history what the great Talmudic rabbis had done for Jewish law: creating a monument of preservation that would ensure the survival of precious materials through the uncertain centuries ahead.

But the sources he drew on were themselves of extraordinary antiquity and diversity. Some of the texts incorporated into the anthology — particularly those dealing with the antediluvian period, the age before the flood — appear to draw on traditions that go back to the Second Temple period, roughly the last three centuries BCE and the first century CE. This was the period that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Book of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, and a host of other texts that modern scholars have come to recognize as representing a distinct and extraordinarily rich phase of Jewish religious creativity. These texts were produced in a world of intense eschatological expectation — a world in which many Jews believed that they were living in the last days before a divine intervention that would transform the cosmos and establish God's kingdom on earth. They were produced by communities that took seriously the reality of angels and demons, that believed in the literal truth of cosmic warfare between divine and diabolical forces, that understood human history as a battlefield on which the ultimate fate of creation was being decided.

Many of these texts were eventually excluded from the canonical Hebrew Bible and from the official rabbinic tradition that emerged after the destruction of the Temple. They were preserved, ironically, primarily by Christian communities — particularly Ethiopian and Slavic Christians — who recognized their spiritual value even after mainstream Judaism had moved away from the apocalyptic worldview they represented. When Jerahmeel incorporated versions of these materials into his anthology, he was, in effect, recovering a lost dimension of the Jewish spiritual imagination — a dimension that had been suppressed or marginalized but never entirely forgotten.

The result is a text of remarkable temporal depth. When you read the opening sections of this anthology, you are not simply reading a medieval compilation. You are reading materials that in some cases preserve traditions going back two thousand years or more — traditions that were already ancient when they were first written down, that had been transmitted orally for generations before finding written form, that carry within them echoes of the earliest human attempts to make sense of the world and humanity's place within it. This is one of the things that makes the anthology so uniquely valuable: it is a kind of archaeological site of the Jewish imagination, in which different layers of tradition are compressed together, each one illuminating the others.

It is also worth noting that the anthology does not present itself as a work of fiction or imagination. For Jerahmeel and his intended readers, these stories were true — not necessarily true in the flat, literal sense that modern fundamentalists mean when they use that word, but true in a deeper sense, the sense in which a great myth is true: true to the structure of reality, true to the nature of human experience, true to the character of the divine as it had been revealed through centuries of Jewish encounter with the sacred. The medieval Jewish reader who opened this anthology was not entering a world of fantasy. He was entering a world of expanded reality — a world in which the dimensions of existence that ordinary perception cannot grasp were made visible through the power of sacred narrative.

This is a distinction that modern readers sometimes find difficult to navigate. We have been trained by centuries of post-Enlightenment rationalism to draw a sharp line between fact and fiction, between history and myth, between what really happened and what was merely imagined. But this distinction, which seems so obvious and necessary to us, would have been largely unintelligible to the tradition from which this anthology emerges. For that tradition, the question was not whether the stories were literally true in the modern empirical sense, but whether they were spiritually true — whether they accurately conveyed the nature of the relationship between God and humanity, between the visible and invisible worlds, between the human soul and its divine source. And by that standard, the materials gathered in this anthology were not merely true but were among the most important truths available to human understanding.

Approaching the text with this understanding — holding in suspension our habitual demand for empirical verification, allowing ourselves to enter into the imaginative world that the text creates — is the key to getting the most out of what follows. This does not mean abandoning critical intelligence or suspending all judgment. It means, rather, adopting the kind of intelligent openness that we bring to any great work of literature: the willingness to inhabit a world different from our own, to take seriously a set of assumptions and values that may differ from ours, to allow ourselves to be changed by the encounter with a genuinely different way of seeing.

How to Read What Follows

A word about the structure and organization of the anthology itself will help orient you as you begin. The text is organized roughly chronologically, following the arc of sacred history from the creation of the world to the later periods of biblical history. But it is important to understand that this is not a linear narrative in the modern sense. It does not proceed smoothly from one event to the next in the manner of a novel or a conventional history. It is, rather, an anthology — a gathering of many different texts and traditions, each with its own voice, its own perspective, its own set of concerns. There are places where the same event is described from multiple angles, where different traditions offer conflicting accounts, where the narrative doubles back on itself or leaps forward unexpectedly. This is not a flaw in the compilation. It is, rather, a reflection of the nature of the tradition itself — a tradition that has always understood multiplicity of interpretation not as a problem to be resolved but as a sign of the inexhaustible richness of sacred truth.

The opening sections, dealing with the creation of the world and the events of the antediluvian period, are in many ways the most cosmologically ambitious and the most challenging for modern readers. Here you will encounter the great myths of origin — the creation of the angels, the war in heaven, the fall of Satan, the creation of Adam and Eve, the transgression in the garden, the murder of Abel, the descent of the Watchers, the birth of the giants, the life and translation of Enoch. These are stories that many readers will find familiar in outline from the Bible and from later literary treatments — Milton's Paradise Lost, for example, draws heavily on traditions related to those preserved here. But the versions preserved in this anthology are often startlingly different from the familiar versions, richer in detail, more theologically complex, more willing to sit with ambiguity and paradox.

The great flood narrative, which occupies a central position in the anthology's early sections, is another case in point. The biblical account of Noah and the flood is one of the most familiar stories in all of world literature. But the version preserved here — drawing on the Book of Noah and related traditions — presents the flood not merely as a punishment for human wickedness but as a cosmic reset, a moment of divine despair and divine renewal in which the entire project of creation is brought to the brink of abandonment before being recommitted to with new conditions and new covenants. The Noah of this tradition is not simply a righteous man who builds a boat. He is a cosmic figure, a second Adam, a hinge point in the history of the universe, around whom the fate of all creation turns.

As the anthology moves into the patriarchal period — the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph — the register shifts somewhat. The cosmic mythological dimensions are still present, but they are now interwoven with a more intimate kind of storytelling, a storytelling that is deeply interested in the psychology of its characters, in the dynamics of family relationships, in the way that divine calling intersects with human weakness and human longing. The Abraham of this tradition is one of the most fully realized characters in all of ancient literature — a man of extraordinary spiritual courage and equally extraordinary human vulnerability, a man who hears the voice of God and follows it into the unknown, who bargains with the divine and argues with angels, who loves his son with a love that makes the demand for sacrifice almost unbearable to contemplate.

The sections dealing with Moses and the exodus from Egypt are among the most narratively compelling in the entire anthology. Here the text draws on a rich tradition of midrashic elaboration that fills in the gaps of the biblical narrative with extraordinary inventiveness — giving us the childhood of Moses in Pharaoh's court, the hidden years in Midian, the cosmic dimensions of the plagues, the terrifying encounter at Sinai where the entire people of Israel stood at the boundary between the human and the divine and heard the voice that no human voice can imitate. These sections also contain some of the anthology's most powerful theological material — extended meditations on the nature of divine law, on the meaning of covenant, on the relationship between freedom and obligation that lies at the heart of the Jewish religious vision.

Throughout all of these sections, one of the most striking features of the anthology is its treatment of women. The Hebrew Bible has often been criticized — with some justice — for marginalizing female characters, reducing them to supporting roles in narratives that are fundamentally about men. The traditions preserved in this anthology offer a significant corrective to that picture. Here women are often central figures, possessed of their own spiritual authority, their own prophetic gifts, their own direct relationships with the divine. The Eve of this tradition is not simply the woman who brought sin into the world. She is a complex, fully human figure whose transgression is understood in the context of a genuine spiritual hunger, a desire for knowledge and experience that is, in its own way, a reflection of the divine image in which she was created. The Sarah, the Rebekah, the Rachel of these pages are women of formidable intelligence and spiritual power, whose choices and actions shape the course of sacred history in ways that the canonical text sometimes obscures.

There is also, running through the entire anthology, a thread of what can only be called mystical geography — a sustained interest in the invisible architecture of the cosmos, the structure of the heavens and the underworld, the nature of the spaces between the human world and the divine. The various heavenly journey narratives preserved here — Enoch's ascent, Abraham's vision of the cosmos, the descriptions of the divine throne-chariot — represent some of the earliest and most detailed accounts of mystical experience in all of world literature. They are the ancestors of the great Kabbalistic literature that would flower in medieval Spain and the Rhineland, and reading them one can feel the deep roots from which that later tradition grew. But they are also, in their own right, extraordinarily beautiful and powerful texts — texts that convey, with a vividness that transcends their antiquity, something of what it might feel like to stand at the threshold of the infinite and look in.

What ultimately makes this anthology so remarkable — and so worth reading in the twenty-first century — is not any single element but the cumulative effect of all these elements working together. It is a text that takes human beings seriously: seriously as spiritual creatures, seriously as moral agents, seriously as participants in a cosmic drama whose stakes are nothing less than the fate of creation itself. It does not offer easy comfort or facile reassurance. It does not pretend that the world is simple or that the divine is easily understood. It sits with mystery, with paradox, with the irreducible complexity of a universe in which good and evil are genuinely in conflict and the outcome is not predetermined. And yet it is also, at its deepest level, a profoundly hopeful text — a text animated by the conviction that the story is not over, that the arc of history bends toward something worth bending toward, that the human capacity for goodness and wisdom and love is not an illusion but a reflection of something real at the heart of things.

As you turn the pages that follow, you are entering a world that is simultaneously utterly ancient and startlingly contemporary — a world in which the questions that matter most to human beings have been asked with extraordinary seriousness and answered with extraordinary imagination. You are entering a tradition that has sustained one of the world's great civilizations through millennia of adversity, that has nourished the spiritual lives of countless generations of men and women who found in these stories the resources they needed to live with dignity and purpose and hope. You are, in short, entering one of the great storehouses of human wisdom. Take your time. Read slowly. Let the stories work on you. And prepare to be surprised by what you find.

The Chronicles of Jerahmeel

Chapter 1

Eight things were created on the first day: heaven and earth, light and darkness, that which was without form and void, air and water, and the Spirit of God hovering over the surface of the waters. Some say day and night were also included in the first day of creation, as it is written: "And it was evening, and it was morning, one day." Eight things were also created on the second day: the well of Miriam, manna, the rod of Moses, the rainbow, the letters and the writing, the clothes of Adam and Eve, and demons.

Ten things were paramount in the mind of God at the creation: Jerusalem, the spirits of the patriarchs, the ways of the righteous, Gehinnom, the flood, the two tablets of stone, the Sabbath, the Temple, the ark, and the light of the world to come. From what were the heavens created? From the brilliance of God's own covering, which He took up and spread out as a garment, and the heavens kept extending until He said to them, "Be still," and they stopped. From what was the earth created? From the snow beneath the throne of glory.

God took that snow and scattered it upon the waters, and the waters congealed and became the dust of the earth, as it is written: "For He says to the snow, Become earth." The boundaries of the heavens touch the waters of the ocean, for the waters of the ocean flow around the outermost edges of the heavens and the earth, and the edges of the heavens rest upon the waters of the ocean, as it is written: "Who lays the foundation of His upper chambers in the waters." The heavens rise to an immense height in the form of a tent spread wide, and mortals stand beneath it; its edge is below and its center is above.

This is the form of the heavens — their edge below and their center above — so that all God's creatures sit beneath them as though inside a tent, as it is written: "He spread them out as a tent for dwelling therein." Four winds were created in the world: the winds from the east, the south, the north, and the west.

From the eastern corner the light of the world goes forth; from the south, the dews of blessing descend upon the world; from the west come the stores of snow, hail, cold, heat, and rain for the benefit of the world. The northern corner of the world He created but did not complete, for He said: whoever declares himself to be God, let him come and finish this corner which I have left, and then all will know that he is truly God.

There the demons, earthquakes, evil spirits, and Shiddim dwell, and from there they go out into the world, as it is written: "Out of the north evil shall break forth."

On the second day He created the firmament, the angels, the warmth of living bodies, and the heat of Gehinnom. But were not the heavens created on the first day, as it is written: "In the beginning God created the heavens"? What, then, is this heaven that was created on the second day? Rabbi Eliezer says: it is the firmament above the heads of the four holy creatures, as it is written: "In the likeness of a firmament above the holy creatures." It appears like hoarfrost, made of precious stones and pearls; it lights up the whole heavens as a lamp lights up a house, and as the sun lights up the world at noon, as it is written: "And light dwells with Him." In the same way, the righteous are destined in the future to illuminate the world, as it is written: "And the wise will shine as the brightness of the firmament." Had the firmament not been created on the second day, the whole world would have been drowned by the waters from above, but the firmament now separates the upper waters from the lower.

The angels created on the second day, when sent out by God, become winds, as it is written: "He made His angels winds." When they minister before Him, they become like fire, as it is written: "His ministering angels are a flaming fire." Four bands of angels minister to God: the first band, under Michael, on His right; the second, under Gabriel, before Him; the third, under Uriel, on His left; and the fourth, under Raphael, behind Him.

The divine presence of God sits at the center on a high and exalted throne, exceedingly majestic, suspended in the air. The appearance of its glory is like a carbuncle — one half fire and the other half snow. A resplendent crown of glory rests upon His head, and upon His forehead is written the ineffable name of God. His eyes survey the whole earth; on His right is life, on His left is death; a scepter of fire is in His hand; a curtain is spread before Him; and the seven angels who were created first minister before Him within the curtain.

His footstool is like fire and hail, and beneath the throne of glory the ground has the appearance of sapphire; fire plays all around it; righteousness and justice are the foundations of His throne; clouds of glory surround it; and the wheel, the ophan, the cherub, and the holy creatures sing praises to Him.

The throne is like sapphire; it stands upon four legs, and four holy creatures are attached to it. On each side are four faces and four wings, as it is written: "There were four faces, which were four angels." When He speaks from the east, from between the two cherubim, He speaks in the direction of the face of a man; when He speaks from the south, He speaks in the direction of the face of a lion; when from the west, in the direction of the face of an ox; when from the north, in the direction of the face of an eagle. Opposite Him are the ophanim and the wheels of the chariot.

When He sits upon the throne, high and exalted, and looks out over the earth, His chariot resting on wheels, the noise of those wheels causes lightning and earthquakes throughout the world.

When He traverses the heavens, He rides upon a swift cherub, as it is written: "And He rode upon a swift cherub." When He hastens to act, He flies upon the wings of the wind, as it is written: "And He flew upon the wings of the wind." Two seraphim stand near Him, one on His right and one on His left, each having six wings. With two wings each covers his face, so as not to gaze upon the Shekinah; with two wings each hides his feet, so as not to call to mind the sin of the golden calf; and with two wings each flies, exulting in and sanctifying His great name.

One answers while another proclaims, and one proclaims while the other answers, and they say, "Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of Hosts." The holy creatures stand with reverence and awe, with trembling and quaking, lest they be consumed by the fire of the angels; and from their faces streams down a fiery river, as it is said, "And a river of fire flows before Him." The holy creatures do not know the place of His glory, but answer and exclaim wherever His glory may be, "Blessed is the glory of the Lord in His place."

On the third day the earth was like a plain, and the waters covered the face of the whole earth.

When the word of God went forth, saying, "Let the waters be gathered together," the mountains were lifted up and scattered over the earth, and deep valleys were dug down in the bowels of the earth, into which the waters rolled and were gathered, as it is said, "The gathering of waters He called seas." The waters then immediately rose tumultuously to a great height and covered the face of the earth as before, until God rebuked them and subdued them, and placed them under the hollow of His feet, and measured them in His palm, so that they could neither diminish nor increase.

He surrounded the sea with sand as a fence, just as a man makes a fence for his vineyard, so that when the waters approach and see the fence before them they recede, as it is said, "Will they not fear My signs, says the Lord." Before the waters were finally gathered together, the rivers and the fountains of the deep were created, for the earth was stretched over the waters just as a ship floating in the midst of the sea, as it is said, "To spread out the earth over the waters." And God opened a gate in the Garden of Eden and brought forth all kinds of plants, every kind of tree yielding fruit after its kind, and every kind of grass.

He took their seeds and planted them upon the earth, as it is said, "Whose seed is within itself upon the earth." He prepared food for His creatures before they were created, as it is said, "You prepare a table before me." All the fountains of waters rise from the depths. Rabbi Joshua said that the depth of the earth would take sixty years to walk through. There is one fountain close to Gehinnom which receives and gives out hot waters that delight man.

Rabbi Jehudah says: Once every month rivulets ascend from the depths and water the face of the whole earth, as it is said, "And a spray went up from the earth to water the garden." The thick clouds pass on the sound of the water-courses to the seas, and the seas to the depths, and the depths to each other, and finally rise and give moisture to the clouds, as it is said, "Who causes the vapors to ascend at the end of the earth."

The rains descend upon every place bidden them by the King, so that the earth immediately flourishes and becomes fertile. But when God wishes to bless the land and make it fertile and prosperous, so as to feed His creatures, He opens His storehouse of good contained in the heavens and rains upon the earth, so that it immediately becomes fertile and produces the seed of blessing, as it is said, "The Lord will open for you His treasure of good."

On the fourth day He formed two lights, one not larger than the other; they were identical both in their form and in their light, as it is said, "And God made the two lights." A quarrel ensued between them; one said to the other, "I am greater than you." Therefore God, in order to make peace between them, enlarged the one and diminished the other, as it is said, "And the greater to rule by day."

Rabbi Eliezer said that God uttered one word and the heavens were created to become the dwelling-place of the throne of the glory of His kingdom, as it is said, "By the word of the Lord the heavens were made," but for the numerous host of heaven God exerted Himself more; He blew with the breath of His mouth, and all the host of the heavens were created, as it is said, "And with the breath of His mouth all their host." All the stars and planets and the two lights were created at the beginning of the fourth night.

One did not precede the other except by one minute particle of time; therefore all the work of the sun is done slowly, while that of the moon is done quickly. What the sun takes twelve days to do the moon can do in one day; what the sun does during the whole year the moon does in thirty days, as it is explained in the chapters of Rabbi Eliezer. Three letters of the ineffable name of God are written upon the heart of the sun, and angels lead it.

Those that lead it in the day do not lead it in the night, and those that lead it in the night do not lead it in the day.

The sun rises in a chariot and rides forth crowned as a bridegroom, as it is said, "And he goes forth from his canopy as a bridegroom." The rays and the fiery face of the sun look upon the earth in the summer; they would consume it with fire if the ice above did not temper the heat, as it is said, "Nothing is hidden from his heat." In the winter the sun turns his icy face to the earth, and were it not for the fire that warms the cold, the world would not be able to endure it, as it is said, "Who can stand before his cold?" The sun rises in the east and sets in the west.

The Shekinah always resides in the west, and the sun enters in its presence and, bowing down before the King of kings, says: "O Lord of the universe, I have fulfilled all Your commands." These are some of the ways of the sun. The habitation of the moon is placed between the clouds and the thick darkness, which are like two dishes one above the other; within them the moon travels. These two clouds turn themselves toward the west, and the moon peeps out from between the two in the form of a little horn.

On the first night of the new month one part is visible, on the second night a second portion, and so on until the middle of the month, when it is full moon. From the middle of the month onwards these two clouds turn themselves eastward, and the part of the moon that appeared first is the first to be covered by the two clouds — on the first night one part, on the second night a second part, until the end of the month, when it is entirely covered.

How do we know that the moon is between two clouds? Because it is said, "The cloud is its clothing, and clouds of darkness its covering."

God created the following seven planets and placed them in order in the firmament for the benefit of the world, for by means of them people calculate the signs, seasons, and astronomical reckonings — the time of summer, the number of hours, days and months, periods and festivals — as it is said, "They shall be for signs, for seasons, for days and for years." The seven days of the week are named after the seven planets: the Sun, Venus, Mercury, the Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars. On the first day Sol, that is the Sun, rules, and this day is called Zondakh.

On the second day the Moon serves; it is called Luna, and so the second day is called Lunedi, that is Mondakh. On the third day Mars serves; it is called Mar, and hence the day is called Mardi, that is Diensdakh. On the fourth day Mercury, or Marcurios, serves, and therefore the day is called Markusdi, that is Godansdakh. On the fifth day Jupiter serves; it is called Iovis, and hence the day is called Iovisdi, that is Donnersdakh. On the sixth day Venus, that is Veneri, serves, and therefore the day is called Vindredi, that is Vredakh. On the seventh day Saturnus serves, and therefore the day is called Sabbatdi, that is Satuldakh. In what order are they placed in heaven?

They are distributed there as sun and moon and the five planets. The firmament is divided into seven degrees, one above the other. There are seven distinct places for these seven planets, and this is their order: the first degree is nearest the earth, and this lowest degree is the dwelling place of the moon, in which the moon makes its circuit around the firmament. The second degree is the dwelling place of Mercury, in which it describes its circuit in the firmament. The third degree is the dwelling place of Venus, in which it likewise describes its circuit in the firmament.