About Sefer ha-Bahir §§ 1-3 -- the brilliant light, tohu and bohu, and the bet of blessing

Sefer ha-Bahir (ספר הבהיר, "The Book of Brilliance") is the earliest work of the classical Kabbalah, surfacing in Provence in the late twelfth century and pseudepigraphically ascribed to the first-century sage Rabbi Neḥunya ben ha-Kanah. Its broken, midrashic style reads less as argument than as a chain of luminous fragments, and it is the first text to present the divine powers as a living structure, a cosmic tree.

These opening three sections are programmatic. The first takes its key word from Job 37:21 -- the light that is bahir, brilliant, in the skies -- and gives the book its name: a hidden brilliance, set against the verses that make darkness God's hiding-place, and reconciled by the verse in which "even the darkness is not dark to You." The second reads the tohu and bohu of Genesis 1:2 through a play on the words: tohu, the formless, "astonishes" (mat'ha), while bohu is "bo hu," that which has substance. The third asks why the Torah begins with the letter bet, and answers through a chain -- bet begins blessing (berakhah), and "beginning" (reshit) is Wisdom (Ḥokhmah) -- ending in the parable of the king who gives his daughter in marriage to his son: the first stirring of the sefirotic imagination, Wisdom as the bride.

Because the Bahir is a compilation with no single authorial voice, its readings are contested, and Hekhal's apparatus surfaces the wordplay and the cruces rather than smoothing them. The standard modern English (Kaplan, 1979) is under copyright; this is a fresh, openly-licensed rendering of the Hebrew.