For scholars, schools, and seminaries

A library and an apparatus your program can use freely.

Hekhal publishes rigorously sourced primary texts of the mystical, contemplative, and philosophical traditions, in the original beside English, with the full scholarly apparatus exposed. All of it is openly licensed and free to read, assign, and cite. If you teach or research in these areas, it is built for you.

Most digital resources for these traditions are one of three things: encyclopedically shallow, locked behind a publisher's paywall, or unreliable. Small and growing programs, in particular, rarely have affordable, trustworthy, openly-licensed infrastructure for teaching Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, Akbarian and formative Sufism, Christian apophatic and hesychast theology, Hermetism, Neoplatonism, and the traditions around them. Hekhal exists to close that gap, in the open.

Everything below is available now, at no cost, under a Creative Commons license. There is nothing to buy and nothing to sign. The invitation is simply to use it, and, if you are willing, to make it better.

What your program can use, freely

The bilingual library → Primary texts in the original beside a transparent English rendering, each passage carrying its provenance and an honest translation status. Complete works, including the 63-chapter al-Insan al-Kamil of al-Jili and the full 200-section Sefer ha-Bahir. The controlled lexicon → Technical terms across traditions (tzimtzum, fana, henosis, gnophos, kavod) defined against cited usage, not paraphrase. A vocabulary a course can rely on. Guided reading paths → Opinionated, sequenced routes through a tradition, ready to assign as a syllabus spine or adapt to your own. The engines → Targum (translation), Sugya (the debate mapped), Chakira and Topology (the fault-lines beneath the disputes), and Rosetta (cross-tradition concept maps). Research instruments, not summaries. Citable datasets → The full edition catalog, the disagreement topology, and the lexicon as openly-licensed, machine-readable datasets (schema.org), several with minted DOIs. Ingest the corpus wholesale, assign it, cite it. The source sheets → A passage set beside its witnesses, the apparatus fully exposed. Built for the seminar table.

In the classroom

Assign a Hekhal edition and your students read the primary source and a transparent translation side by side, with every interpretive choice visible and every term linked to its sourced definition. The reading paths give you a sequenced route through a tradition to use as a syllabus spine or to adapt. Machine-assisted drafts are labeled as provisional, so a class always knows exactly how much trust a given passage has earned.

If you send us a reading list, we will build it into Hekhal as a course space, with editions and apparatus in place, at no cost. Tell us the tradition and the texts and we will do the work.

In research

The corpus and its datasets are openly licensed and citable, with minted DOIs, per-page scholarly citation metadata, and machine-readable exports. The disagreement topology maps where the same conceptual fault-line recurs across the Abrahamic traditions, sourced and provisional, an instrument rather than an assertion. Every position traces to a real, locatable document; cross-tradition parallels are reported only where a named scholar drew them, with a citation. Corrections are genuinely welcome and are recorded.

See it, ready to teach

Concrete artifacts you can open, assign, or adapt today, each free and openly licensed.

A ready syllabus → The apophatic tradition as a sequenced, printable, citable reading list. Assign it, or adapt it to your term. A cross-tradition map → The Union Triangle: henosis, fana, and theosis, each corner linked to its primary text, every edge marked for transmission or parallel. A seminar in one diagram. A bilingual edition → al-Jili's al-Insan al-Kamil, the original beside English with the apparatus exposed. What every text page looks like.

The terms, stated plainly

  • Free and openly licensed. Corpus content and datasets are CC-BY-SA. Read, reproduce, adapt, and redistribute with attribution. No paywall, no account required to read.
  • Honest about status. Every translation carries its provenance and a status (verified, public-domain, machine-assisted, community, commissioned). Nothing machine-drafted ships as verified without a human editor's sign-off.
  • Nothing fabricated. Every primary-text claim traces to real source material. No invented sources, no invented reviewers, no parallels asserted in our own voice.
  • No authority claimed. Hekhal is a reference and a set of instruments, not a religious authority. It preserves disagreement rather than resolving it.

Adopt it, partner with us, or correct us

Adopt a syllabus → Send your reading list. We build it into Hekhal for your course, free. Review an edition → Credentialed scholars are invited to review and to become named reviewing contributors. Read the method → How the editions are made, evaluated, and kept honest.

Institutional partnership, a corpus your students need that we do not yet host, or a question: write to [email protected]. Hekhal is maintained by a named editor and gives before it asks.