Shekhinah
Rabbinic Presence, Medieval Bride
- First attested
- 2nd centuryThe noun exists first as a translator's device. Exodus 25:8 reads ve-shakhanti be-tokham, 'and I shall dwell among them'; Targum Onkelos renders it ve-ashrei Shekhinti beineihon, 'and I shall cause my Shekhinah to dwell among them', turning a verb about God into a noun that can be put in a place instead of him. The word is standard in tannaitic Hebrew by the redaction of the Mishnah, c. 200 CE — Avot 3:2 and 3:6 have the Shekhinah resting between two, or among ten, who study Torah — and appears in no pre-rabbinic text. Elliot Wolfson, in the Encyclopedia of Religion (2005), states the rabbinic position as a weighed judgement rather than a flat one: 'On balance, there is little evidence in classical rabbinic literature that Shekhinah denotes a hypostatic entity ontically distinct from God, a secondary or demiurgical being.' The feminine hypostasis arrives with the Bahir, placed by Scholem in Provence in the last quarter of the twelfth century, a dating Idel, Abrams and Verman have all revised; its earliest dated manuscript is Munich Cod. hebr. 209, copied 1298. In the printed text at §171 the Shekhinah is 'the light emanated from the first light, which is Ḥokhmah', and at §181 a king invites his beautiful bride for one day in every week. Daniel Abrams, who edited the Bahir from the manuscripts in 1994, argued in 2007 that the Shekhinah symbol is less consolidated in those manuscripts than the printed vulgate suggests. The Zohar, Castile in the 1280s, completes it: Matt's Pritzker diagram of the sefirot lists Malkhut's names as Shekhinah, Assembly of Israel, Earth, Moon, Queen, King David, Rachel. WHY THIS HAPPENED IS CONTESTED. Arthur Green argued in 2002 that 'the unequivocal feminization of shekhinah in the Kabbalah of the thirteenth century is a Jewish response to and adaptation of the revival of devotion to Mary in the twelfth century Western church'; Peter Schäfer's Mirror of His Beauty, the same year, makes a parallel case from the Bahir. Yehuda Liebes answered in Pe'amim in 2005 that what the Zohar prizes in the Shekhinah is not virginity but coupling with her husband, so Mary is the wrong Christian figure to set beside her; he derives the Shekhinah mainly from midrash, and where he grants Christian borrowing he points to Ecclesia, the Church as Christ's bride, and to the Holy Spirit. Moshe Idel argues for internal Jewish development. Judith Weiss (2022) proposes a third position — that both figures reflect wider medieval Western thinking about women and female divinity rather than one borrowing from the other.
- Claimed
- around 1200 BCEasserted by Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess (KTAV, 1967), whose eight chapters run Asherah, Astarte-Anath, the Cherubim, the Shekhina, the Kabbalistic Tetrad, 'Matronit — the Goddess of the Kabbala', Lilith and the Sabbath, as phases of one figure. In the introduction Patai writes that after the death of the spirit of idolatry in the days of Nehemiah 'the Hebrew goddess succeeded in surviving', and that in one of her metamorphoses 'she became the manifestation of God's presence, the Shekhina'. Patai's book is the source most modern 'Hebrew goddess' and Divine Feminine writing rests on for the claim that the Shekhinah is an ancient survival. The documents do not supply that chain: the word itself is rabbinic and the feminine hypostasis is medieval. The road to it is not empty, though — Liebes derives the figure mainly from midrash, and Scholem points to the late midrash on Proverbs 22:29, where for the first time 'the Shekhinah stood before the Holy One, blessed be He, and spoke to Him'.
The claim runs about 1.4 thousand years ahead of the evidence.
The Shekhinah's exile with Israel is already Talmudic, at Megillah 29a; what thirteenth-century Castile added was her exile from her husband — a rupture inside God, not a memory of an ancient goddess.
An impersonal presence in the Talmud, and a bride exiled from her husband only in the Zohar, c. 1280.
The noun is absent from the Hebrew Bible and from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Exodus 25:8 has God say 'I shall dwell among them'; Targum Onkelos converts the verb into a thing — 'I shall cause my Shekhinah to dwell among them' — a device for not saying that God is in a place. Rabbinic use keeps it impersonal: at Mishnah Avot 3:2 the Shekhinah rests between two people studying Torah, and at Megillah 29a it goes with Israel into every exile. Elliot Wolfson finds little evidence in rabbinic literature of a being distinct from God. The Bahir, which scholarship since Scholem has placed in Provence in the late twelfth century, calls her a light emanated from Ḥokhmah; the Castilian Zohar of the 1280s makes her the tenth rung, the Moon, the Assembly of Israel, a bride. The Talmud had already given the Shekhinah exile with Israel — the exile from her husband is the new part.
Light
At Megillah 29a, in Rabbi Shimon ben Yoḥai's name, the presence goes wherever the exiled go — down into Egypt, out to Babylon, and back again at the redemption. It puts God among the defeated rather than above them.
Shadow
Her Zoharic image is the Moon, lit only by what is sent down to her. Elliot Wolfson argued in 1994 that this feminine is reabsorbed into the masculine — Mopsik and Hellner-Eshed dispute it — and every kabbalist who wrote her was a man.
