English translation of Avraham Ibn Ezra`s Sefer HaShem, 1148 CE

Rabbi Avraham Ibn Ezra’s Book of the Name Sefer HaShem סֵפֶר הַשֵּׁם is a daunting, one-of-a-kind contribution to Jewish scholarship, unmatched by anything ever written before or since. This enigmatically styled Medieval Hebrew treatise of many “secrets” says as much about the author as it does about HaShem.

At age 50, Ibn Ezra self-exiled to twelfth-century northern Europe from Judeo-Arabic Spain. For his newly acquired patrons and readers, he wrote many books, commentaries and poems in pure Biblical Hebrew, their only shared language. Nearly nine centuries later a Modern Hebrew reader is able to read, but unlikely to understand Sefer HaShem without help. A large part of Ibn Ezra’s genius was his ability to re-coin the limited Biblical Hebrew vocabulary into terminology needed to convey “new” grammatical, mathematical, geometrical, and astronomical concepts. Only the context defines these terms. When a word cum term serves more than one discipline, translation redefines the term.

Rabbi Ibn Ezra’s highly compressed volume seemingly co-opts all things known at the time. His underlying thesis holds that all knowledge is embedded in and radiates from the four letters (א,ה,ו,י) of HaShem’s first- and third-person Names, a-hyh and y-hvh. The scientist Ibn Ezra teaches that knowledge and reason work in tandem towards knowing HaShem, the referent, whose paradoxical existence is encapsulated in the word ‘be’, the only verb missing a present tense form, and ‘one’, the number that is not a number.

Two decades of patience and learning from a vast array of scholarship have rendered a first-ever English translation and annotation of Sefer HaShem. Our proposed talk will consider: 1) Avraham, son of Meir Ibn Ezra – the person, rabbi and teacher (his methodology); 2) Sefer HaShem – its translation and commentary; 3) Hebrew – its letters, grammar, numbers and arithmetic; and 4) HaShem – His names and His reality.