Merkabah and Hekhalot Mystical Texts

Merkabah mysticism is the earliest documented current of Jewish mysticism, predating the medieval Kabbalah by several centuries and centered on visionary ascents through seven heavenly palaces to view the divine throne chariot described in the Book of Ezekiel. Its surviving literature, called Hekhalot literature after the Hebrew word for palaces, describes practitioners undertaking a dangerous ascent guarded by angels at each gate. Hekhalot Rabbati, the Greater Palaces, details this ascent as undertaken by Rabbi Ishmael and is one of the central surviving texts of the genre. Shiur Qomah, the Measurement of the Body, is a companion work describing the vast cosmic dimensions of the divine form in mystical, anthropomorphic terms. Gershom Scholem used both works to trace a documented mystical tradition running back before the Kabbalah proper, and this group gathers them as the record of that pre Kabbalistic mystical current in this atlas.