Sefer Yetzirah — The Book of Creation, 3rd - 6th Century CEHere is the document. Everything this section describes, Sefer Yetzirah says outright, and says it first.Creation proceeds through thirty-two paths of wisdom: the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, plus ten sefirot. At this stage the sefirot are not yet a Tree of Life with named attributes — they are dimensions, a coordinate system for reality:• six directions of space — north, south, east, west, up, down
• beginning and end — time
• good and evil — the moral axis
Ten numbers and three axes. That is a description of spacetime with a value dimension bolted on, written no later than the 6th century.The letters are engraved, hewn, weighed and combined through 231 gates — every two-letter pairing of the alphabet. Three mother letters, aleph mem shin, carry air, water and fire. A cube of space is sealed at its extremities by letter combinations.Letter, number, direction, element — one system, already complete. Everything in this section and the next is an attempt to recover what it meant.Dating is contested and I will not pretend otherwise. Linguistic analysis lands it between the 3rd and 6th centuries; proposals across scholarship run from the 1st to the 9th; three different recensions survive. Tradition ascribes it to Abraham, and later to Rabbi Akiva. Most scholars now think it had several authors.