About Sefer ha-Bahir §§ 17-20 -- the order of the letters and the gimel that is a channel of grace

Sefer ha-Bahir §§ 17-20 continue the Bahir's meditation on the Hebrew alphabet, moving from the shape of the letters to their order, and arriving at the book's single clearest image of divine emanation. Having asked in §§1-3 why the Torah begins with bet, and unfolded blessing as an overflowing spring in §§4-6, the book now reads the first three letters as a sequence of first principles.

Section 17 asks why aleph stands first, and answers that it preceded everything, even the Torah. Section 18 sets bet beside it as "the beginning," and reads the letter's tail as a mark of where it came from -- the place from which the world is sustained. Sections 19 and 20 turn to gimel through a dense play on its root: gimel is gomelet ḥasadim, it "bestows kindnesses," and the homily braids together gomel (bestow), gamal (wean, from Genesis 21:8's "the child grew and was weaned"), and gadel (grow great): the letter grows great precisely by bestowing on its neighbor. Then the marquee image -- gimel is shaped like a tzinor, a channel: it draws plenty from above through its head and pours it out below through its tail.

That channel is the proto-form of the whole later Kabbalistic vocabulary of tzinorot, the conduits of shefa (overflow) through which the higher sefirot feed the lower and, through them, the world. As ever, the standard modern English (Kaplan, 1979) is under copyright; this is a fresh, openly-licensed rendering of the Hebrew (public-domain by age; transcription from Hebrew Wikisource, CC-BY-SA), with the wordplay kept visible rather than smoothed away.