THE MYSTERY OF THE GR EEK LETTERS :  

A BYZA NTINE K A BBA LA H ?  

Gu y G. Stroumsa

B eing able to talk with the divine powers, through the invention of a perfect lan-
guage, is an old dream of humankind, and a theme well charted by Paolo Rossi
and Umberto Eco, at least in the modern Western tradition. 1 This urge took a new  

turn with the invention of writing. Since then, the ambivalence between written and
oral language, in particular in religious contexts, has been a feature of culture so con-
stant that it is hard to imagine that it can be overcome.
The Biblical God may have created the world through a speech act, but it is through
a text that He made His words known to us, and it is through texts that we know how
to approach Him. The paradox inherent to pure prayer, a major theme of the Christian
mystical tradition, for instance, is well expressed in the Hassidic story of the simple
man who, being unable to read the text of the prayer book, recited the letters of the
alphabet, hoping that God would know how to put the letters in the right order and
create meaningful words out of his own meaningless succession of characters.
I should like to offer here some reflections on the problem of the religious signifi-
cance of letters in late antiquity, at the confluence of Christian, Greek, and Jewish tra-
ditions. It would seem that only some progress has been done on this topic since the
pioneering work of Franz Dornseiff. 2  

I shall begin by briefly presenting a puzzling Greek text, to which little attention
had been devoted until the recent exemplary editio princeps, including a very thorough
introduction and copious notes, by Cordula Bandt, and will then make some sugges-
tions about both its immediate context and its broader background. 3 The following  

pages, then, are intended as a small contribution to the broad discussion permitted by
Bandt’s publication – a publication to which one is referred for a general introduction
to the text and its context in late ancient Christianity. Until Bandt’s edition, this text
was known only in a Coptic version preserved in a Coptic-Arabic manuscript from
the fourteenth century in the Bodleian Library, and published in 1900-1901 by A. Heb-
belinck, under the title Les mystères des lettres grecques. 4 Both the Coptic-Arabic and the
 

Greek manuscripts include various drawings, meant to explain the significance of the
letters, as developed in the text. The text claims to have been redacted by Saint Sabas,
the fifth-century founder of the Mar Saba monastery in the Judean wilderness. The

1  Paolo Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory : the Quest for a Universal Language, Chicago, Chicago University
 

Press, 2000, and Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language in European Culture, Oxford-Cambridge, Mass.,
Blackwell, 1995. The original Italian edition of Rossi’s book, from 1960, much antedates that of Eco, first pub-
lished in 1993. The title of my essay was inspired by that of a seminar given on the Mystery of the Greek Letters by
the late Jospeh Paramelle, S. J., at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, in the early 1990s.
2  Franz Dornseiff, Das Alphabet in Mystik und Magie, Leipzig, Teubner, 1925 [1922].
3  Cordula Bandt, Der Traktat „Vom Mysterium der Buchstaben“. Kritischer Text mit Einführung, Übersetzung und
Anmerkungen, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2007.
4  Adolphus Hebbelynck, Les mystères des lettres grecques. Texte copte, traduction, notes, « Le Muséon », 19, 1900,
   

pp. 5-36, 105-136. 269-300 ; 20, 1901, pp. 5-33, 369-414.

 
36 guy g. stroumsa
Coptic version starts : « In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, one
   

single God. Speech pronounced by Apa Seba, the priest, the hermit, about the divine
mystery contained in the letters of the alphabet, a mystery which none among he an-
cient philosophers has been able to explain ». Bandt’s careful analysis concludes that the
 

text is pseudo-epigraphic, and must have been written by a follower of Sabas, a Melkite
(and anti-Origenist) monk in sixth-century Palestine. 1  

The mysterion hidden in the letters (stoicheia) was revealed to Sabas by a Power (kra-
tos) « as in ecstasy ». (Chapter 1). It is with the Greek letters (or characters) that our text
   

deals. These letters were given (by God) « before idolatry » in order to bring humankind
   

to the true cult of God. There are, however, only twenty-two letters in this alphabet,
rather than twenty-four of the Greek alphabet ! C and Y were added later, by the ‘phi-
 

losophers,’ i. e., by the Hellenic pagan thinkers. The mystery of these letters, we are
told, is « hidden since the beginning of the world » (Ch. 2). There are twenty-two letters,
   

like the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, just as there are twenty-two books
of the Bible « according to the Jews », twenty-two works of God in the creation of the
   

world, and twenty-two « marvelous works in the economy of Christ ». Among these
   

letters, there are seven vocal (Ch. 4) and fifteen ‘non vocal’ letters (Ch. 5). The seven
vocal letters represent the seven hypostaseis of creation : heaven, water, firmament, air,  

earth, water between the two earths, and inferior earth. Elsewhere in the text, they also
represent the seven creatures in possession of a voice. I have dealt elsewhere with the
number of seven essential elements, or hypostaseis of creation, arguing that it reflects
the seven Iranian Amesha Spenta, later reflected in the first seven Kabbalistic Sefirot. 2  

Here, I shall focus on the meanings of the shapes of the letters themselves.
D, as a triangle, is the figure of creation. It is also the figure of the holy Trinity, al-
luding to the three hypostases. It is not only in metaphysical fashion that the Trinity is
present in the whole universe, but also in its very physical structure. The cosmology of
our text is neither rigorous, not presented in a systematic fashion. The four elements,
air, fire, earth and water are seen in parallel to the four cardinal points of the universe,
the four directions of the wind, the four seasons, and the four great rivers : the Pishon,  

the Gehon, the Tigris and the Euphrates. T is presented as a divine ray shining upon
the earth. It also announces the cross of Christ « by its Hebrew name », as this name is    

« saddi ». This obviously refers to the Hebew letter tsadi, ‫צ‬, which is the first letter of the
   

Hebrew tslav (‫צלב‬, cross), and also alludes to the tsaddik, (‫)צדיק‬, the Just One. It inter-
esting to note that the same description of the letter tav (‫ )ת‬is found in a rather late mi-
drash, Ottiyot de-Rabbi Akiva (i.e., The Letters of Rabbi Akiva). 3 Π means arch, or temple,  

and refers to « eight », while S is a figure of the world and of light.

   

Various signs in our text point to Jewish traditions. The most important of these
signs, of course, is the number of the letters, which points to the Hebrew – or to the
Syriac – alphabet. The number seven alludes to the Sabbath, and to « the observation  

of the Law ». Or (‫ )אור‬does not mean « light » in Syriac, as mentioned in the text, but in
     

Hebrew (the confusion between Aramaic and Hebrew is rather common in ancient

1  See Cordula Bandt, The Alphabet as « Henotikon ». The tract ‘On the Mystery of the Letters’ against the back-
   

ground of the Origenist Controversies of the Fourth and Sixth Centuries, in this voume.
2  A Zoroastrian Origin to the Sefirot ?, in Shaul Shaked, Ammon Netzer, eds., « Irano-Judaica » 3, 1994, pp. 17-33
     

( Jerusalem, Ben Zvi, 1994).

3  On this text, see the doctoral thesis of Eliane Ketterer, Otiyyot de-Rabbi Akiva, Jerusalem, Hebrew Uni-
versity, 2005.
 the mystery of the greek letters 37
Christian Greek literature). This rather clearly points to a Hebrew context of at least
the Urtext, or the origin of the exegetical traditions on the letters as they are preserved
in our text. To be sure, the text retains a clearly polemical tone against the Jews, who
belong to Satan from the beginning and are called Deicide. Syriac was Adam’s lan-
guage. The Syriac letters God Himself engraved on a stone tablet, like the Law, with
His hand and finger. This tablet, upon which the theosophy was inscribed, was found
after the flood by Cadmus, « the Greek philosopher », and was at the source of science
   

in Palestine and Phoenicia, before the letters reached Greece. The Mystery of the Greek
Letters appears then, to be a pot pourri of early Christian speculation, both on the letters
and on cosmology. 1 While it shows some knowledge of great names of Greek classical
 

culture, such as Plato, Homer, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Pythagoras, Socrates, Hesiod,

Democritus, Chrysippus and Menander, it claims to reflect the victory of « the Church  

of the illiterates » upon the pagan philosophers, whom it instructs. In a sense, the text
 

presents the victory of the Christianized Greek letters over Greek idolatry. The letters
are not only the elements of Greek paganism, but also of a culture that permitted the
evolution toward true religion. The cosmogonical and cosmological status of the Greek
letters permits them to accomplish, as it were, a deconstruction of Greek pagan cul-
ture. In a sense, we have here a testimony to early Christianity as a cultural revolution :  

destroying the books, mistaken and/or perverse structures built of divine elements.
On various occasions, the reader is under the clear impression that our text retains
Jewish or Jewish-Christian traditions. The hexahemeron, together with the Sabbath and
the Trinity, makes up « the mystery of the decade »). Taken together, the twenty-two
   

letters and the « mystery of the decade » are equivalent in number to the « thirty-two
     

wondrous ways of wisdom » mentioned in the Sefer Yezira (literally, « Book of Cre-
   

ation »), a very important late antique Hebrew composition, dealing with cosmogony
 

and cosmology through speculation on the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet
(otiot yesod) and the ten mysterious sefirot belimah. 2 These ‘ways of wisdom’, composed
 

of the ten sefirot together with the twenty-two letters, are mentioned already in the
first paragraphs of the Sefer Yezira. 3 These parallels suggest the possibility that both
 

the Greek and the Hebrew texts reflect an earlier tradition, probably stemming from
Jewish-Christian milieus. Similar close parallelisms have been identified between the
Sefer Yezira and the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies. 4  

A major point in the text is the fact that the shape of the letters represents, or figures,
the form of the elements of the created world (22). We shall come back to this later,
but it should be pointed out right away that the word for ‘letters’, stoicheia, is also, since

1  For a similar cosmogonic role of the letters of the alphabet, see an important Syriac text from the late sixth
century, The Cause of the Foundation of the Schools, for which God, « the eternal teacher », arranged the letters of
   

the alphabet in the firmament. I used Adam H. Becker’s translation, in his Sources for the History of the School of
Nisibis, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, pp. 118-119. I owe this reference to Tsahi Weiss, whom I should like
to thank. See further Y. Paz, T. Weiss, From encoding to Decoding : The atbash of R. Hiyya in Light of a Syriac,
 

Greek and Coptic Cipher, « Journal of Near Eastern Studies », forthcoming.

   

2  See A. Peter Hayman, ed., transl., Sefer Yezira, Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 2004.
3  See Shlomo Pines, Points of Similarity between the Doctrine of the Sefirot in the « Sefer Yezirah » and the « Pseudo-
     

Clementine Homilies » : the Implications of this Resemblance, in Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humani-
   

ties, Jerusalem, 1989, esp. pp. 80-81. On the tradition in Otiot de-Rabbi Akiva, see Yehuda Liebes, Christian Influences
on the « Zohar », « Mehkerei Yerushalaim be-Mahshevet Israel » 2, 1983, pp. 43-74 (Hebrew) ; cf. Gershom Scholem,
         

Les origines de la Kabbale, Paris, Aubier-Montaigne, 1966, p. 164ff.

4  See Pines, Points of Similarity, cit. ; cf. Guy G. Stroumsa, A Zoroastrian Origin to the Sefirot ?, « Irano-Judaica »,
       

3, 1994, pp. 17-33.

38 guy g. stroumsa
Plato at least, the word for ‘elements’, i.e., the four elements of all cosmology : water,  

earth, fire and air. Plato, as we shall see, launched the intellectual reflection on connec-
tions between the elementary particles of language and of the world.
What is the immediate context of the theosophy preserved in The Mystery of the
Greek letters ? There is little doubt that our text is quite unique in early Christian litera-
 

ture, and that it reflects rather uncommon patterns of thought in this literature. Yet,
in order to grasp the central message of this text, namely the parallelism between the
letters of the alphabet and cosmology, one should first seek to identify similar or con-
nected discussions in Patristic literature.
The first scholar to call attention to our text seems to have been the classicist and
historian of religion Albrecht Dieterich, in his abc Denkma¯ler. 1 Dieterich refered to Je-
 

rome's Preface to his translation of the Rules of Pachomius, where he mentions the « mys-  

tical alphabet » permitting to the monks speak to the angels. They spoke, then, a secret
 

language, which simple human beings could not understand. The Letters of Pachomius
and Theodore, which Jerome also translated, also attest to an esoteric language used
by at least some Egyptian monks. The addressee of Pachomius’s Letter vi understands
« quomodo oporteat omnia spiritali Alphabeti elementa cognoscere ». 2 Similarly, in the
     

De viris illustribus attributed to Gennadius of Marseilles, abbots are said to use ciphers
made from the letters of the alphabet. 3 Elsewhere in these letters, reference is made to
 

the language that was revealed to both Pachomius and Cornelius by an angel. While
others hear the sounds, they are unable to understand its meaning. Jerome also tells
us that Pachomius organized the monks of his monastery in twenty-four groups, to
reflect the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet. In his first letter to Cornelius,
Pachomius offers a list of the meanings of the letters : I stands for Jesus, 4 U for God, R
   

(numerical value 100) for Christos, O for God the Judge, H for the ogdoad, i.e., Christos,
or Jesus, 5 T for the cross (stauros), S for Sabaoth (i.e. Jesus), D for the Trinity (as it in-
 

cludes the first three letters), and A for arche¯, ie., Jesus. 6  

We are then dealing here with an Egyptian tradition that may have reached Pales-
tine around (or before) the turn of the fifth century. Jerome may provide a convincing
link with the monastic milieu of the Judean wilderness. But Jerome’s own preoccupa-
tion with the individual letters is presented in his famous Letter 30 to Paula, where he
reveals to Paula, at her insistent request, the meaning of the Hebrew letters. Like the
significance of the Biblical text, that attached to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet is
multiple, at both the literal and the spiritual level. The literal level has to do with the
name of each letter : « Aleph interpretatur ‘doctrina’, beth ‘domus’, gimel ‘plenitudo’,
   

deleth ‘tabularum’ … ».  

1  Albrecht Dieterich, Kleine Schriften, Leipzig-Berlin, Teubner, 1911, pp. 224-225

2  Patrologia Latina 23, 68, 91-106. 3  Patrologia Latina 23, 87.
4  On the symbolic significance of the Greek letter episemon and of the Hebrew letter vav, see André Dupont-
Sommer, La doctrine gnostique de la lettre “waw” d’après une lamelle araméenne inédite, Paris, Geuthner, 1946. On Jesus
as the episemon, see Irenaeus, Adv. Haer., i. 14. 1, and commentary in Niclas Förster, Marcus Magus (ref. n. 21
below), 232. On the symbolic significance of numbers in early Christianity, see Joel Kalvesmaki, The Theology
of Arithmetic : Number symbolism in Platonism and Early Christianity, Washington, d.c., Center for Hellenic Studies,
 

2013 (« Hellenic Studies », 59).

   

5  Same play on Christos/Chreistos (pronounced in the same way, due to ioticization) the Sophia of Jesus Christ,
a Coptic text from Nag Hammadi (Cairoensis Gnosticus iii, 100 : 19-20).
 

6  See further Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony, Aryeh Kofsky, The Monastic School of Gaza, Leiden-Boston, Brill,
2006, Ch. 5 : Counseling through Enigmas, esp. 107-110, with references to the monks’ alphabetic codes and cryptic
 

language, as well as to the « Alphabet of the mind » from the Apophtegmata Patrum.
   
 the mystery of the greek letters 39
In order to discuss, then, their spiritual meaning, Jerome notes that there are seven
groups of letters (pointing out that this is a mystical number !). He then asks Paula :    

« Oro te, quid hoc sacratius sacramento ? » (« What is more sacred, I ask you, than this
       

mystery ? ») Here again, then, we find the mystery of the twenty-two letters.
   

Jerome was not the first Christian intellectual to speculate on the Hebrew language.
Eusebius, in his Praeparatio Evangelica, had offered a sustained discussion on language
in general, and on Hebrew in particular. 1 As the first philosopher, long before the
 

Greeks, Moses had taught a realist, anti-nominalist theory of language : « names are    

given to things by nature and not conventionally ». According to Eusebius, Plato, in his
 

Cratylus, only follows his predecessor Moses. Hence names, such as ‘Adam,’ ‘Ish,’ have
a signification of their own, linked to the meaning of their sound : ‘earth’ and ‘red’ for  

the former, ‘fire’ for the second. ‘Isaac’, similarly, means ‘laughter’. Hebrew, continues
Eusebius, retains etymologies much more clearly than Greek. Hence, A, (aleph in He-
brew), means ‘learning’ (√‫ אלפ‬means ‘learn’ in Aramaic), beth, a house (‫)בית‬, etc… Eu-
sebius then quotes a few verses from the Greek Anthology, which reveal that the name
of « the everlasting Father of mankind » is composed of seven vowels.
   

In Praeparatio Evangelica x,5, Eusebius had given the background for such a concep-
tion : it is the Phoenician Cadmus, probably, who introduced the letters to the Greeks.
 

The letters were first devised, it seems, by the Syrians, i.e., perhaps, the Hebrews living
in Syria, the country neighboring to Phoenicia. Eusebius adds that the Hebrew letters
have each a signification, a fact which cannot be said about the Greek letters. Toward
the end of this chapter, he repeats that while the Hebrew letters have a meaning, the
same cannot be said about the Greek letters.
A similar perception of Greek (and Latin) letters as stemming from the Hebrew let-
ters is found in the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (i,3), an encyclopedic writer summa-
rizing the world of knowledge of late antique Christianity in the early seventh century.
The origin of Hebrew letters is the Law of Moses – a fact reflecting their relative be-
latedness. Indeed, Syriac and Chaldaean letters are older, as they stem from Abraham.
Queen Isis, when she came from Greece to Egypt, discovered the Egyptian letters and
brought them to her country. Cadmus brought to Greece the first seventeen letters of
the alphabet, while the others were added later, during the Trojan war and by the poet
Simonides. Isidore adds that there are five ‘mystical’ letters in the Greek alphabet : 2 U    

represents human life, Q represents death (thanatos), T figures the cross of the Lord. A
and W signify the beginning and end of things, i.e., cosmology, the very topic of our
text. 3 The Greeks – in contradistinction with the Romans – also used letters in order
 

to represent numbers.
The Gospel of the Egyptians is a puzzling text found in two slightly different Coptic
versions at Nag Hammadi after the Second World War. This text, traditionally dubbed
« Gnostic » retains various traditions which strike the reader as echoing Jewish or Jew-
   

ish-Christian traditions. The Father of all comes from Silence, and His name is an in-
visible symbol, a hidden mystery. 4 Then come the vowels O, I, H, O, U, E, A, W each
 

repeated twenty-two times. This series of vowels seems, then, to represent the esoteric
divine name.

1  Eusebius Caesariensis, Praeparatio Evangelica xi. 6,

2  « Quinque autem esse apud Graecos mysticas litteras » ; i, 3,8.
     

3  See E. Lohmeyer, A und W, Reallexikon der Antike und Christentum i (1950), 1-4.
4  Cairoensis Gnosticus iii. 2, 43 :22-44 :2.
   
40 guy g. stroumsa
Now there is a long history to the Jewish traditions about the secret or unpronounce-
able name of God, the Tetragrammaton. I have argued elsewhere that these traditions
were retained, and developed, among the first Jewish Christians, and then passed into
the Gnostic traditions. 1 Esoteric conceptions of language, and speculations about the
 

divine names, were common in various ancient cultures. What was specific to the Jews
was their insistence upon the uniqueness of their God and the hidden nature of His
name. The Nag Hammadi codices are usually described as « a Gnostic Library ». We    

know now, however, that in all probability the codices were used in Pachomian mon-
asteries. It seems that these texts were copied to serve as edifying reading material, as
postulated by Frederik Wisse. 2 Hence, we seem to have here a possible link between
 

The Mystery of the Greek Letters, probably stemming from Palestinian monasteries, and
the traditions on esoteric language from early Egyptian monasticism, where the secret
alphabet seems to have focused on the esoteric name of God.
The Jewish tradition about the Hidden Name of God was reflected in early Jewish-
Christian and Gnostic traditions. This Jewish origin explains both the number of the
letters and various traits in our text. The core of these traditions is the esoteric name
of God. Probably the most striking among these traditions is that of Marcus Gnosti-
cus, the Valentinian teacher whose conceptions were retained by Irenaeus : 3 the Divine    

feminine emanation, Truth (Aletheia) is a cosmic figure whose body is uniquely made
of the letters of the alphabet. Her head is A and W, her neck is B and Y, her hands G
and C, her breast D and F, etc…« This is, according to Mark, the body of Truth, this is
 

the scheme of the Element, this is the character of the Letter ! This element he calls An-  

thropos : he is, says he, the source of all Logos, the principle of all Voice, the expression
 

of everything inexpressible, the mouth of silent Silence. » 4 This last text has received
   

much attention, perhaps more by scholars of early Jewish mysticism – who have point-
ed out, since the late nineteenth century, the striking similarities between the figure of
Aletheia and the idea of Shi’ur Qomah, the cosmic Divine body – than by students of
early Christianity. We see now how such conceptions must be directly related to early
monastic practice, both in Egypt and in Palestine.
Rabbinic literature retains various discussions on the importance of the letters in
general and of those in the Divine name (ha-shem ha-mephorash) in particular. In this
context, the most topical discussion is a long passage in the tractate Shabbat of the
Babylonian Talmud (103b-104a). A passage from the tractate Berachot of the Babylonian
Talmud (56a) refers to the letters from which the world was created.
By far the most important text for our current investigation, however, is the Sefer
Yezira. This apocryphal text (its redaction is attributed to Abraham) would become one
of the foundational texts of medieval mystical and theosophical Jewish speculation, at
least since the times of Saadya al-Fayummi (Saadya Gaon) in the tenth century. 5 One  

1  A Nameless God : Judaeo-Christian and Gnostic Theologies of the Name, in The Image of the Judaeo-Christians in
 

Ancient Jewish and Christian Literature, edited by Peter J. Tomson, Doris Lambers-Petry, Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck,
2003, pp. 230-243.
2  Frederick Wisse, Gnosticism and Early Monasticism in Egypt, in Gnosis. Festschrift für Hans Jonas, herausgege-
ben von Barbara Aland, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978, p. 431-440 ; Idem, Language Mysticism in the Nag
 

Hammadi Texts and in Early Coptic Monasticism i : Cryptography, « Enchoria » 9, 1979, p. 101-120.
     

3  Adversus Haereses i, 13-20. On Marcus, see Niclas Förster, Marcus Magus : Kult, Lehre unde Gemeindeleben einer
 

valentinianischen Gnostikergruppe. Sammlung der Quellen und Kommentar, Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 1999.
4  Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. i,14.3, pp. 216-217 (ed. by Rousseau-Doutreleau).
5  See Hyman’s edition and translation, p. 37, n. 2.
 the mystery of the greek letters 41
of the vexed questions about Sefer Yezira is the date of its composition. In the most
recent monograph on this text, Yehuda Liebes has made a strong case for a very early
dating. 1 Liebes shows that the text was known in the Rabbinic period, and argues that
 

it must stem from the Second Temple period. I have no intention to discuss anew the
dating of Sefer Yezira. What I claim is that the argument developed here, about prob-
able Jewish (or Jewish-Christian) origins of the Christian speculation on the letters of
the alphabet supports Liebes’s argument, if not about the redaction of the book itself,
then at least about the early date of its main underlying conceptions. Such a provisional
conclusion is also supported by the close similarities between the Sefer Yezira and the
Pseudo-Clementine Homilies demonstrated by Shlomo Pines. 2  

The remaining question, however, is that of the origin of the Jewish conceptions
themselves. As far as I know, this question has not been asked. It is usually assumed
that the rather original pattern of thought represented by the Jewish texts reflects con-
ceptions that are sui generis, endogenous to the Jewish tradition. Such an attitude is not
probable, and is certainly not very useful from a heuristic point of view.
First, one should call attention to the fact that in the late antique Near East, the dis-
cussion on the power of the letters was by no means limited to Jewish and Christian
milieus. A similar importance devoted to the letters is found in Iran, where the Iranian
heretic Mazdak is supposed to have said that « the King of the upper world rules by
 

means of the letters of the alphabet, whose sum yields the highest name. Whoever can
form a conception of these letters, to him is revealed the greatest mystery. But whoever
is excluded remains in the blindness of ignorance, forgetfulness, dullness and sorrow
with respect to the four spiritual powers ». Werner Mueller, who has called attention
 

to this tradition, links it (and also Mani’s Great Gospel, written in twenty-two chapters
arranged according to the letters of the alphabet) to the monastic speculations on the
letters that we have surveyed (but he does not mention the Jewish conceptions). 3  

As mentioned above, there had been a long tradition of discussion on the letters of
the alphabet in the ancient world. In the Semitic world, the Book of Ahiqar reflects the
common knowledge on the significance of the letters. The longest and most detailed
intellectual tradition, however, is in the Greek world. In his Histories (ii.36), Herodotus
says that the Egyptians, who are « the most religious nation in the world », write form
   

right to left, in contradistinction with the Greeks, and have two sorts of writing, « the  

sacred and the common ». Diodorus Siculus (Bibl. i,74) develops Herodotus’s brief note :
   

« And the priests teach the boys two kinds of letters, those called sacred by the Egyp-
 

tians and those containing the more common sort of learning… Of the two kinds of
Egyptians letters, the demotic are taught to all, but those called sacred by the Egyptians
are known to the priests alone ». The Egyptian hieroglyphs remained a point of great
 

intellectual curiosity throughout the history of Greek culture, up to Horapollo’s Hiero-

glyphica, the only surviving work (from fifth-century c.e. Alexandria) to deal at length
with the significance of a large number of hieroglyphs. 4  

1  See Yehuda Liebes, The Doctrine of Creation of the Sefer Yezira, Jerusalem, Schoken, 2000 (in Hebrew).
2  See p. 37, n. 4.
3  See Werner Müller, Mazdak and the Alphabet Mysticism of the East, « History of Religions » 3, 1963, pp. 72-82. See
   

further Franz Altheim, Mazdak and Porphyrios, ibi, pp. 1-20. For Altheim, Mazdak’s letter speculation is of Greek
origin. See Patricia Crone, The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012,
for a sustained argument on the late antique Jewish Christian and Gnostic roots of a number of early Islamic heresies.
4  See George Boas, transl., The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993.
42 guy g. stroumsa
Plato, who so impressed by the age and cultural primacy of Egypt, also devoted
much effort, in various dialogues, such as the Cratylus, the Theetetus, the Timeaus, to a
proper understanding ot language and its nature. In Theetetus, 202c ff. and in Timeaus
48b, Plato extends metaphorically the word for ‘letter’, stoicheion, to refer also to the el-
ements of the universe. The letter, there, are not conceived as writing signs, but rather
as the fundamental sounds composing the syllables. More precisley it seems that sto-
icheion refers mainly to the sound of the letter, while gramma refers to the written sign. 1  

The doctrine of the four elements of the universe was first put forward by Empedocles,
as we know from the testimony of Aristotle : « Empledocles was the first to speak of the
   

four material elements ». 2 Although this doctrine was soon rejected by Anaxagoras and
   

the atomists, Aristotle proponed a revised version of this theory, which in this way re-
tained it authority throughout antiquity and the middle ages. 3 Aristotle followed Plato
 

in substituting stoicheia for archai for referring to the elements. Democritus of Abdera,
who was born in 460, thirty-three years before Plato, compared the atoms from which
the world was made to the letters of the alphabet. Before him, Pythagoras, as is well
known, had compared the numbers to the letters and tot the world at large. In Cratylus
393c, Plato reflects on the names of the letters. The most important passage for our
present purpose, however, is probably Timeaus 47e-48b, where Plato, discussing the cre-
ation of the world, compares the elements of the universe to the letters of the alpha-
bet. This text, then, which was promised to a long Nachleben and was to become one of
the topical texts in Christian references to Plato’s writings, states in so many words the
connection of the stoicheia to cosmogony.
The word stoicheion and its semantic evolution, up to the Byzantine time, when it
came to mean ‘heavenly body’ (star, constellation) and ‘spirit’ or ‘demon’, moving from
the infinitely small to the infinitely large, is well chartered. So is its Latin counterpart,
elementum. In Christian literature, the reference of the stoicheia tou kosmou in Colossians
2,8 remains constantly echoed. What seems to be ignored by most studies, however, is
the polysemic nature of the word itself. As we just say stoicheion referred, since Plato,
to both element and letter. The kind of thought developed in The Mystery of the Greek
Letters is obviously established upon this polysemic character. It is also, however, clearly
colored by a strong Jewish background. The obvious place to look for a solution, then,
would be Hellenistic Judaism, where Greek traditions about the letters of the alphabet
could have been reinterpreted to fit Jewish conceptions.
Such a link can be found, I think, in a text where Philo, speaking about the edu-
cation of the young Moses, states : « The Egyptian men of learning taught Moses
   

the philosophy which is expressed in symbol which is exemplified in the so-called

sacred letters (en tois legomenos hierois grammasin) ». 4 The learned Egyptians « further
     

instructed him in the philosophy conveyed in symbols, as displayed in the so-called

holy inscriptions »…. what we seem to have here is the following : Hellenistic Jews
   

were aware, of course, of the Greek traditions about the sacred letters of the Egyp-
tian priests, and its esoteric character. For them, however, Hebrew was the sacred
language. For Philo, who might well reflect a Hellenistic Jewish tradition, Moses,
who had as a child been initiated into the esoteric tradition of the Egyptian hiero-

1  See for instance Philebos 18b-c. 2  Aristotle, Metaphysics 985a31.

3  See William Keith C. Guthrie, A history of Greek Philosophy, ii, p. 143.
4  Philo, De Vita Mosis, i, v, 23 (« Loeb Classical Library », Philo, Works, vi, 286-289).
   
 the mystery of the greek letters 43
glyphs, could later apply to the Hebrew letters the traditional Greek understanding
of the Egyptian ‘letters’. 1  

What has been presented here is only a suggestion, which only further research can
prove of disprove. It would be misleading, moreover, to claim that Hellenistic Jewish
traditions about Moses and the esoteric character of Egyptian priestly language was
the only source of Jewish and Christian (including Jewish-Christian and Gnostic) specu-
lation about the letters of the alphabet, their esoteric (or ‘mystical’) meaning, and their
cosmogonic connection. It stands to reason that in the Western Semitic world, other
traditions about the letters of the alphabet were also in existence, which would too
have influenced Jewish speculation. But the probability is great that Hellenistic Jew-
ish speculation, branching out on Greek traditions, was a major proximate channel
through which this speculation reached Palestine.
The Mystery of the Greek Letters has not revealed all its mysteries to us. But we under-
stand now slightly better how « the Church of the Illiterate » came to instruct « the pagan
     

wise men ». What our strange text reflects is, in a sense, the deconstruction of a culture,
 

the Hellenic literary culture, through its own alphabet. What counts is not anymore
what is written, but the very elements of this culture, deprived of the sense that was
given to them through their aggregation. The books of Hellenic culture, which remain
ineluctably linked to idolatry, can disappear. The letters will stay, invested with the eso-
teric power of God’s creation. The Mystery of the Greek Letters is a text at the intersec-
tion, at once, of Judaism and Christianity, of the Hebrew and the Greek cultures, of
the exoteric and the esoteric hermeneutical traditions, of East and West, and of oral
and written traditions.
Christian paideia, then, or at least the monastic paideia as reflected in this text, is
Greek in form and Hebrew in content. It shows how the Christians had to reinvent pai-
deia, as there was for them only one really true and meaningful book. The creation of
the world with and through the letters of the (Hellenized and Christianized Hebrew)
alphabet represents the true mystery and power of the letters, from A to W, from
creation to salvation, through revelation by Scripture. The world and the script must
be deciphered through one another. We have here, in a nutshell, the idea of the two
revelations, one by the revealed Book of God, the other by the Great Book of nature,
which would fare as far as Newton, and beyond. 2 The traces of God can be found both
 

in nature, and in the letters of the alphabet.

What remains puzzling is the fact that the cultural revolution of early Christianity
(as it is nothing less than that) was the fruit of a religious outlook established upon a
book. As if the idea of a revealed book militates against the legitimacy of a literary
culture.

1  The Infancy Gospel of Thomas and other apocryphal texts present the child Jesus being taught the alphabet.
The teacher cannot go beyond the first two letters, Jesus demands that he first explain the meaning of A. In most
versions, Jesus then expounds the mystical meaning of the alphabet. In this story, the child Jesus seems to be per-
ceived as a Moses redivivus.
2  See Pierre Hadot, Le voile d’Isis. Essai sur l’histoire de l’idée de nature, Paris, Gallimard, 2004.