1
R. Eleazar began here with the verse, “Ask thee a sign1The Hebrew word is oth, which in Talmudic Hebrew commonly means “letter”. of the Lord thy God, ask it either in the depth or in the height above” (Isa. 7, 11). He said: ‘We have compared the former with the latter generations, and found that the former were conversant with a higher wisdom by which they knew how to combine the letters that were given to Moses on Mount Sinai, and even the sinners of Israel knew a deep wisdom contained in the letters and the difference between higher and lower letters, and how to do things with them in this world.
2
For every letter that was transmitted to Moses used to ascend as a crown upon the heads of the holy celestial Hayyoth, who with them flitted through the ether which is under the refined and unknowable supernal ether.
3
There were large letters and small letters; the large letters came from the most high and hidden Temple (hekhal) and the smaller letters from another lower Temple; and both kinds were transmitted to Moses on Sinai,
4
along with their occult combinations.1The rest of this passage up to 3b [“And he called…”] deals mainly with the occult powers of various letters. The whole is omitted from the editiones majores of Mantua, Cremona, and Lublin.2The last fifteen lines of the Hebrew text do not appear in the translation as explained in the previous translator’s note.