Shem Tov ibn Shem Tov on ‘Sefer Yeṣira’

Shem Tov ibn Shem Tov’s commentary on Sefer Yeṣira examines man’s faculty of language in which he resembles and most closely approaches the deity. Language is seen as the imprint of the deity in creation. Shem Tov’s commentary sets out to distinguish and define the bounds of human knowledge, denying the illicit extension of logic beyond the limits of human understanding and attempting to delimit the respective spheres of activity of philosophical thought and traditional religious practice. His propensity to harmonise philosophical and cabalistic thought also reveals an acute awareness of the contradictions between these opposed points of view which he does not attempt to rationalise or diminish.