About Sefer ha-Bahir §§ 27-30 -- the ten kings, the two heh's, and the vav of the six directions

Sefer ha-Bahir §§ 27-30 continue the Bahir's passage through the alphabet into the letters dalet, heh, and vav, and in doing so set down three of the images the later Kabbalah builds the doctrine of the sefirot on. Where §§17-20 read gimel as the channel that gives, these sections turn to what receives, what pairs, and what extends.

Section 27 answers "what is dalet?" with the parable of ten kings in one place: all are rich, but one is "poor" (dal, the name of the letter) relative to the rest -- rich, yet possessing nothing of its own. Read forward, the ten kings are the ten powers and the poor tenth is Malkhut, the lowest, which has nothing in itself and receives the overflow of all the others. Section 28 -- a recognized textual crux, flagged as such -- turns on the written forms of the letters and their interchange (gimel, dalet, heh sharing a head and a point); its syntax is broken and its meaning unsettled. Section 29 compresses a whole doctrine into one line: "a lower heh and an upper heh" -- the two heh's of the divine name, later read as Binah above and the indwelling presence below. Section 30 reads vav (numerically six) as the six extremities with which the world is sealed, the same six directions that structure Sefer Yetzirah's cosmogony.

As ever, the readings are contested -- here unusually so -- and 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 and the hard places marked rather than smoothed.