About Sefer ha-Bahir §§ 4-6 -- the bowing knee, the spring of living water, and the king's garden

Sefer ha-Bahir §§ 4-6 continue directly from the opening sections of the earliest work of the classical Kabbalah, pressing further into the single word berakhah, "blessing," that the third section reached. Where §3 climbed from the letter bet through blessing to Wisdom, these three sections ask what blessing actually is, and answer with the Bahir's first sustained images of divine overflow.

Section 4 turns on a triple pun: berakhah (blessing), barukh (blessed), and berekh (knee), reading Isaiah's "to Me every knee shall bow" as a place -- the locus to which all bend, sought (in the parable) the way pilgrims first ask where the king's house is before they ask where the king is. Section 5 gives the marquee image: a king hews his palace from hard rock and strikes a spring of living water (mayim ḥayyim), and, having an inexhaustible source, plants a garden "for myself and all the world to delight in" -- with the pre-existent Torah as the delight playing before him, read out of Proverbs 8. Section 6 sharpens it to a single picture: even when the rains fall and the soil drinks, the king must still water his trees from the spring; the source never runs dry, "His praise endures forever."

Read forward, this is the Bahir's earliest sketch of what later Kabbalah calls shefa, the ceaseless overflow that irrigates the structure of the divine powers (the sefirot) and, through them, the world: the trees of the garden are the first faint outline of the cosmic tree, the spring the unfailing plenitude that feeds it. As ever, the readings are contested 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 rather than smoothed away.