The Fifty Gates of Binah
forty-nine were opened to Moses. The fiftieth to no oneThe fifty gates stand where they stand. Switching the reading, you change not the gates but what stands behind them.
The same fifty gates in four readings. In all four the fiftieth stays apart, and shut.
The verse everything begins from
Everything the tradition says about the fifty gates grew out of one short passage in the Talmud. It holds no list, no description of the gates, not even the name of the one who said it.
רַב וּשְׁמוּאֵל. חַד אָמַר: חֲמִשִּים שַׁעֲרֵי בִינָה נִבְרְאוּ בָּעוֹלָם, וְכוּלָּן נִיתְּנוּ לְמֹשֶׁה, חָסֵר אֶחָד, שֶׁנֶּאֶמַר: „וַתְּחַסְּרֵהוּ מְעַט מֵאֱלֹהִים”.
«Fifty gates of understanding were created in the world, and all of them were given to Moses save one, for it is said: „Thou hast made him but little lower than God”».
Babylonian Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 21b · the same in Nedarim 38a · the verse — Ps. 8:6
The attribution is anonymous: “Rav and Shmuel, one of them said”, and even the Talmud does not name which of the two spoke first. The number forty-nine is drawn from another verse, which Rashi explains as seven sevens, seven by seven, and so the gates are fifty, while only forty-nine stand open to a man.
Four lists that do not agree
Since the Talmud names a number but not its content, every school filled that number with its own. What came of it is four lists that cannot be reduced to one another either in content or in construction. This is not a flaw in the subject; this is the subject.
Questions out of the whirlwind
איפה היית ביסדי ארץFifty rhetorical questions that God puts to Job out of the whirlwind, reaching from “where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth” down to what clothes the neck of the horse. No groups divide the list: it runs straight from א to נ.
The commentary on “Sefer Yetzirah” attributed to Rabad · R. Joseph ben Shalom Ashkenazi, c. 1280–1340Mentions of the Exodus
שער השעריםThe fifty times the Torah mentions the going out of Egypt. The logic is simple: to break the fifty gates of the impurity of Egypt, an outpouring from all fifty gates of holiness was required.
Moses Cordovero, “Pardes Rimonim” (1592), sha'ar 13 — “The Gate of Gates”Seven by seven
שבע שביעיותThe seven lower qualities, from Chesed to Malkuth, and each of them holds all seven within itself, which gives forty-nine cells. The fiftieth stands above them, belonging to none of the qualities.
Rashi on Rosh Hashanah 21b · unfolded in the Hasidic textsSix orders
—A ladder from chaos up to Ein Sof: ten elemental gates, ten of evolution, ten of humanity, ten of the spheres, nine angelic orders, and one. The only list of Christian Kabbalah.
Athanasius Kircher, “Oedipus Aegyptiacus” (1652–54) → Westcott (1911) → Hall (1928)The fiftieth
The Talmud does not say which gate exactly is withheld. Nachmanides unfolds this in the introduction to his commentary on the Torah, where the gates are called a ladder of apprehension: from the inanimate to plants, to trees, to cattle, to birds, to creeping things, to fishes, to the rational soul, to the heavens and their hosts. Everything that passed through these forty-nine gates, Moses set down in the Torah, openly or by hint, in words, in the numerical value of the letters or in their shape.
And the fiftieth is the knowledge of the Creator himself, and it has been given to no created being.
The ladder of Nachmanides and the six orders of Kircher are built alike: mineral → plant → animal → man → angel → God. It looks as though Kircher did not invent the scheme from nothing but unfolded the Jewish one in a Christian key. The observation belongs to the archive, not to the source.
The reverse: the fifty gates of impurity
In Cordovero this structure has a mirror: to the fifty gates of holiness answer fifty gates of impurity, טומאה, in which Egypt was sunk, and to lead the people out from there, an outpouring from all fifty gates above was needed.
This is the case where the reverse structure is not surmised by a later tradition but named in the source itself. And it has an address upon the Tree: the gates belong to Binah, and the reverse of Binah is Sathariel, whose name means “the Concealment of God”.
The gates that did not open even to Moses, and the shell whose work is to hide, stand at one and the same point of the Tree, only on different sides of it. This is no stretch made for the sake of beauty: it is one and the same sephirah seen from two sides.
How the gates became “gates of light”
The list that shows up most frequently in popular sources is Kircher's six orders. Its road down to us is worth tracing, because it explains the name itself.
In Kircher, in “Oedipus Aegyptiacus”, it is a Latin list. In 1911 William Westcott appends it to the third edition of his translation of “Sefer Yetzirah” under the heading The Fifty Gates of Intelligence. And in 1928 Manly P. Hall, retelling Westcott almost word for word, calls them The Fifty Gates of Light.
The renaming is neither explained nor grounded in anything. But it is in exactly this shape that the gates went out into popular esotericism, because that is how transmission works: at every link something is refined in the direction of beauty.
Hall is honest in the main thing: he names both Westcott and Kircher outright as his source. That is why the chain can be recovered entire. The archive cites Cordovero and pseudo-Rabad where they are the primary sources, and Hall only where the matter is Hall himself.
The wording of Kircher's list is Westcott's own English. The Hebrew of the gates of Job is given without vowel points, as it stands in the source: the pointing of the individual gates is nowhere attested. The English verses are the King James Version; the attachment of each fragment to its verse has been checked against the Masoretic text.
Two holes in Cordovero's list. In the printed “Pardes” there stands a publisher's remark: חסר השער הכ"ז והמ' — «gates 27 and 40 are wanting». That is, he has in fact forty-eight entries and two holes in the numbering. The verses for those two places were supplied by a later editor, and they cannot be ascribed to Cordovero. Gate 23 is not resolved at all: its wording matches Num. 20:5, while the order of the list points to Num. 21:5. It has been left empty.