Lurianic and earlier Kabbalistic cosmology developed a structurally similar emanationist scheme with no direct line of philosophical descent from Plotinus, describing the ten sefirot, divine attributes or vessels, as emanating in ordered sequence from the utterly hidden and unknowable Ein Sof, the Infinite, each sefirah a further, more differentiated stage through which the divine unfolds toward the created world; the tzimtzum doctrine, Isaac Luria's distinctive later contribution, complicates the picture further by introducing a divine contraction prior to emanation itself, making Kabbalistic emanation more layered and more theologically fraught than Plotinus's comparatively serene philosophical scheme.
Gnostic cosmology offers a third independent version, describing a Pleroma, a fullness, from which successive pairs of Aeons emanate, with the material world in some Gnostic systems arising from a flawed or fallen emanation rather than a smooth, graduated descent, giving Gnostic emanationism a far darker cast than either its Neoplatonic or Kabbalistic cousins. Theistic personalism stands as emanationism's sharpest rival across all three traditions, insisting that a God worth calling personal must create freely, by deliberate will, rather than automatically overflow by metaphysical necessity, a disagreement with real consequences for whether the world's existence is, in the end, an act of love and choice or simply what an infinite source could not help producing.