Third of Ten, and the Thrones Problem

Maimonides places the erelim third of ten in the Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah 2:7, and the Golden Dawn table assigns them to Binah, the third sephirah. On rank the two agree.

The friction is with the Christian scheme. Western reference works very often equate the erelim with the Thrones, the third choir of the Dionysian hierarchy, on the strength of the shared position and nothing else. The equation is a matching made across two systems rather than a claim either system makes, and it competes with a second identification that assigns the Thrones to the ophanim, the wheels of Ezekiel, which this collection records on its own Thrones row. Both cannot be the primary reading, and neither Pseudo-Dionysius nor Maimonides was writing with the other list in view.

The practical warning is for anyone reading a correspondence table. A table that prints Thrones beside Aralim is reporting an alignment made by a later compiler, and a table that prints Thrones beside Auphanim is reporting a different one. Neither table usually says which it is doing. Treating either as the meaning of the rank imports a whole scheme of Christian angelology into a Hebrew list that developed without it, and the reverse import happens just as readily in the other direction, which is why the atlas records the position and the equation as separate claims.