Heikhalot Rabbati (The Greater Book of Palaces)

About Heikhalot Rabbati (The Greater Book of Palaces)

Heikhalot Rabbati, the Greater Book of Palaces, is the central document of the corpus of Jewish mystical literature known to scholars as the Heikhalot or Merkavah literature. Composed in Hebrew and Aramaic during a long period extending from late antiquity through the early Islamic era — most current scholarship places its core composition between the fourth and the eighth centuries CE — it presents the most elaborate and detailed account in any surviving Jewish source of the visionary practice of ascent through the seven heavens to the throne of God. Where earlier rabbinic sources allude obliquely to the dangers of contemplating the divine chariot, Heikhalot Rabbati supplies the actual maps, the actual passwords, the actual songs, and the actual rituals of preparation that the ascending mystic was supposed to need.

The book takes the form of a series of revelations attributed to two of the great rabbinic figures of the second century: Rabbi Yishmael ben Elisha, the high priest's grandson, and his teacher Rabbi Nehunya ben HaKanah. The narrative frame is artful: Rabbi Yishmael, a young scholar in the academy of Rabbi Nehunya, is granted access to the secrets of the merkavah (the divine chariot of Ezekiel's vision) through a process in which his teacher is placed in a trance state — seated on a marble bench in the temple, surrounded by the assembled scholars — from which he describes what he sees in the heavenly realms. When the questioning becomes too intense, the disciples gently bring him back by removing a strand of fine wool that has been laid against his thigh. Around this frame the book gathers a vast and heterogeneous body of material: hymns of praise sung by the angels who surround the throne, prescriptions for fasting and ritual purity, descriptions of the names and offices of the angelic gatekeepers of the seven palaces, accounts of the seals and signs that the ascending mystic must show to each gatekeeper in turn, theurgic formulas for compelling the angels to obey, and warnings about the deadly perils that await the unprepared.

The dating and provenance of Heikhalot Rabbati have been debated since the modern academic study of Jewish mysticism began. Gershom Scholem, in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) and Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition (1960), argued that the Heikhalot literature preserves traditions of mystical practice that go back to the Tannaitic period of the late first and second centuries CE — that is, that the visionary techniques described in the book were actually practiced by Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Yishmael, and their circle, not merely retrojected onto these figures by later authors. Scholem saw the Heikhalot texts as the missing link between the apocalyptic literature of the Second Temple period (with its visions of heavenly journeys) and the Kabbalah of medieval Provence and Spain, and treated them as the earliest stratum of Jewish mysticism proper. This view was contested by David Halperin, in his The Faces of the Chariot (Mohr Siebeck, 1988), who argued that the Heikhalot literature is much later than Scholem supposed — perhaps as late as the seventh or eighth century — and that it represents not a continuation of Tannaitic mysticism but the religious literature of a marginal class of synagogue cantors and ritual specialists in late-antique Babylonia. Peter Schäfer, in The Hidden and Manifest God (SUNY, 1992) and The Origins of Jewish Mysticism (Mohr Siebeck, 2009), proposed a more cautious middle position, treating the Heikhalot corpus as a multi-layered literary tradition that crystallized in writing in the early Islamic period but drew on earlier oral and ritual traditions whose ultimate roots cannot now be securely dated. Schäfer's monumental Synopse zur Hekhalot-Literatur (Mohr Siebeck, 1981), which printed the seven main Heikhalot manuscripts in parallel columns, made it possible for the first time to study the textual fluidity of these works in scholarly detail, and his subsequent monographs have shaped the field for two generations.

The Heikhalot Rabbati that survives in the manuscript tradition is itself a fluid text. The seven principal manuscripts of the Heikhalot corpus, all of them late medieval Ashkenazi codices, contain the book in different orderings and with different sections, and there is no single "original" version that can be reconstructed. Schäfer's Synopse made this fluidity visible by abandoning the attempt to produce a critical edition in the conventional sense and instead presenting the parallel manuscripts side by side. The reader of the Synopse confronts the Heikhalot literature as it actually exists: a constellation of related but distinct textual traditions whose relationships to one another are still imperfectly understood.

The relationship between Heikhalot Rabbati and the broader Heikhalot corpus — which includes Heikhalot Zutarti (the Lesser Book of Palaces), Maaseh Merkavah (the Workings of the Chariot), Merkavah Rabbah (the Greater Chariot), 3 Enoch (Sefer Heikhalot), Massekhet Heikhalot, and Shi'ur Qomah — is also unsettled. Some scholars treat these works as a unified literary corpus produced by a single school or circle of practitioners; others see them as a loose anthology of materials from different periods and milieus that happened to be transmitted together. What is not in dispute is that Heikhalot Rabbati is the longest and most elaborated of these texts, and that the visionary scenes it contains — particularly the ascent through the seven heikhalot, with its detailed descriptions of the gatekeepers, the seals, the fiery rivers, the songs of the angels, and the throne of glory — became the imaginative template for much of what later Jewish mysticism would do with the theme of heavenly ascent.

The literary character of Heikhalot Rabbati is also worth pausing over. The book is not a treatise in any ordinary sense — it does not argue, it does not systematize, it does not present a doctrine in orderly fashion. It moves between narrative, hymnody, ritual prescription, theurgic instruction, and visionary description, sometimes within the space of a single page. The hymns themselves are extraordinary as literature: long strings of synonyms for God's glory, his throne, his crown, his majesty, his kingship, piled up in cascading parallelism that reads less like ordinary Hebrew prose and more like a sustained incantation. Schäfer and other scholars have argued that the very style of the hymns was meant to induce the visionary state — that the practitioner who recited them at length would find himself, through the cumulative force of the language, drawn into the same heavenly chorus he was describing. This performative quality of the text is one of the features that distinguishes Heikhalot Rabbati from any other surviving work in the Jewish canon.

The book's reception in the medieval period was profound but often hidden. The Hasidei Ashkenaz — the German pietistic movement of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries centered on the Kalonymide family of Worms, Speyer, and Mainz — preserved, copied, and commented on the Heikhalot literature, treating it as the heritage of an authentic Jewish mystical tradition stretching back to the Talmudic period. The texts of the Heikhalot corpus that survive today are largely the work of Hasidei Ashkenaz scribes, and the entire literature would probably have vanished without their efforts. The theosophical Kabbalists of Provence and Spain knew Heikhalot Rabbati and drew on its imagery for the elaboration of their own doctrine of the divine palaces. Lurianic Kabbalah of the sixteenth century continued to make use of Heikhalot motifs in its theory of the heavenly worlds. And in the twentieth century the rediscovery of the Heikhalot literature by Scholem, Joseph Dan, Ithamar Gruenwald, Schäfer, Rachel Elior, James Davila, Michael Swartz, and others has restored the book to a central place in the academic study of Jewish mysticism.

Content

Heikhalot Rabbati is divided in modern scholarly editions into roughly thirty chapters, though the chapter divisions vary across the principal manuscripts and Schäfer's Synopse abandons them in favor of paragraph numbering. The content moves between several distinct genres of material that the redactors have woven together into a single literary fabric.

The narrative frame presents Rabbi Yishmael ben Elisha as the disciple of Rabbi Nehunya ben HaKanah, who teaches him the secrets of the descent to the chariot. Rabbi Nehunya is described as sitting on a marble bench in the temple precincts, surrounded by his disciples, and entering a visionary state in which he describes what he sees in the heavenly realms. The disciples ask questions, and Rabbi Nehunya answers as long as the trance persists; when the disciples wish to bring him back, they place against his thigh a strand of wool that has been touched by a menstruating woman, and the impurity returns him to ordinary consciousness. This narrative frame establishes the book as a record of actual visionary experience and identifies its content as a teaching to be passed from master to disciple within a closed circle.

The hymnody is the most famous and most distinctive feature of the book. Heikhalot Rabbati contains dozens of hymns of praise sung by the angels who surround the throne of glory and by the ascending mystic who joins them. These hymns use a style of escalating, repetitive, near-incantatory language — the kedushah (sanctification) is repeated in many forms, the divine name is invoked in long strings of epithets, and the throne of glory is praised in language that piles up adjective on adjective without pause. The cumulative effect is hypnotic, and several scholars (notably Schäfer) have suggested that the hymns themselves were the technique by which the visionary state was induced — that the practitioner sang the angelic hymns until the boundary between his own song and the heavenly chorus dissolved and he found himself, in imagination or in fact, ascending.

The descent to the chariot describes the journey through the seven heikhalot or palaces. At each palace the ascending mystic encounters terrifying angelic gatekeepers — armed with swords of fire, riding on chariots of flame, surrounded by hosts of subordinate angels. The mystic must show the proper seal at each gate (the seal is a divine name written on a token of metal or parchment), recite the proper formula, and demonstrate that he has prepared himself with the requisite fasting and purification. The seventh and innermost palace contains the throne of glory itself, surrounded by the four living creatures of Ezekiel's vision and the celestial hosts. Here the mystic gazes upon the divine king, joins in the angelic praise, and (in some versions) is given a vision of the cosmic secrets that govern history and creation.

The theurgic instructions describe how the practitioner can compel the angelic gatekeepers to grant passage. These instructions involve fasting (sometimes for weeks or months), abstaining from meat and wine, ritual immersions, the recitation of specific divine names, the writing of those names on amulets, and the maintenance of a state of physical and ritual purity. Some of the formulas are aimed at lower angels who can be commanded to reveal the secrets of Torah, to grant prophetic dreams, or to perform protective magic; others are aimed at the highest angels who guard the throne. The line between Heikhalot Rabbati's mystical material and the magical material of related texts like Sefer HaRazim is often thin.

The visions of judgment form a final major theme. The book contains scenes in which the ascending mystic witnesses the heavenly tribunals where the fates of nations are decreed, sees the books of life and death in which human deeds are recorded, and is shown the punishments of the wicked and the rewards of the righteous. These passages connect Heikhalot Rabbati to the apocalyptic literature of the Second Temple period and to the broader Jewish tradition of revelations of the world to come.

The Sar Torah material — the so-called "Prince of Torah" sections — describes a separate but related practice in which the practitioner invokes an angel called Sar Torah to grant him perfect memory and instantaneous mastery of the entire Torah. Where the descent to the chariot is aimed at vision of the divine king, the Sar Torah ritual is aimed at scholastic mastery: the practitioner who completes the prescribed fasts, immersions, and incantations is promised that he will know every verse of Scripture, every passage of the Mishnah, and every sugiya of the Talmud without further study. Michael Swartz's Scholastic Magic (Princeton, 1996) has argued that the Sar Torah material reveals the social location of the Heikhalot practitioners as men who longed for rabbinic learning but lacked the institutional access to acquire it through ordinary channels — a thesis that has been influential in subsequent scholarship.

Key Teachings

The central teaching of Heikhalot Rabbati is that the divine king is enthroned in glory at the summit of seven concentric heavens, and that a properly prepared human being can ascend through those heavens, gaze upon the divine king, and join in the angelic worship that surrounds the throne. This ascent is not a metaphor and not a posthumous journey: it is a present possibility for the visionary practitioner who has fasted, purified himself, learned the names and seals, and mastered the hymns. Heikhalot Rabbati is thus a book about the technology of mystical experience — about how, in concrete and practical terms, the human soul can be brought into the presence of God.

A second major teaching is the doctrine of the seven palaces (heikhalot) and their angelic guardians. Each palace is guarded by a fearsome angel or group of angels whose names the mystic must know, whose seals he must show, and whose songs he must sing in chorus with them. The names are deliberately strange and often contain sequences of letters and syllables that resemble no ordinary Hebrew words — they are evidently constructed from divine and angelic name elements according to systems whose logic was known to the practitioners but is largely lost to us. The seals are similarly esoteric: short formulas written on tokens that the mystic carries with him on the ascent. Without the proper names and seals, the mystic is destroyed by the gatekeepers; with them, he passes through the gates and is recognized as one who belongs in the heavenly palaces.

A third teaching is the centrality of hymnody. The book treats the singing of hymns as both a means of ascent and an end in itself. The angelic hosts spend eternity singing the praises of the king on the throne, and the ascending mystic joins them in that song. The hymns themselves are presented as having been heard by the visionaries and brought back to earth as part of the human liturgical heritage. Several of the hymns of Heikhalot Rabbati passed into the standard Jewish liturgy of the synagogue, where they remain to this day in the kedushah and other sections of the daily prayer service.

A fourth teaching is the dangerous and exclusive character of the practice. Heikhalot Rabbati emphasizes again and again that the descent to the chariot is not for everyone. The unprepared practitioner is destroyed by the angels; the morally unworthy is rejected at the gates; the indiscreet who reveals the secrets to outsiders forfeits his place in the world to come. The book is structured as a closely guarded teaching transmitted from master to disciple in a small circle, and its very existence as a written text was itself a kind of paradox that the redactors clearly felt — for to write down the secrets of the chariot was already to risk their being read by the wrong eyes.

A fifth teaching, less prominent but real, is the conviction that the ascending mystic gains not only a vision of God but also access to cosmic secrets that are denied to ordinary humans. The book contains passages in which the visionary is shown the books of the heavenly tribunal, the names and fates of nations, the secrets of the Torah, and the structure of creation. Mystical experience and intellectual revelation are here continuous: to see God on the throne is also to understand the cosmos.

Translations

Heikhalot Rabbati has had a complicated translation history. For most of the modern period it existed only in scholarly Hebrew editions and partial translations scattered across academic publications, and it has only recently begun to be translated into English in a form accessible to readers outside the field of Jewish studies.

Peter Schäfer's Synopse zur Hekhalot-Literatur (Mohr Siebeck, 1981) is the foundational scholarly edition. It prints the seven principal Heikhalot manuscripts in parallel columns, with paragraph numbering that has become the standard reference system for the entire field. The Synopse is in Hebrew without translation, but it made possible the systematic study of the Heikhalot literature as it actually exists in the manuscript tradition.

Schäfer's Übersetzung der Hekhalot-Literatur (Mohr Siebeck, 1987-1995, four volumes) provided a German translation of the entire corpus organized by the Synopse paragraph numbers. This is still the most complete translation in any modern language and is indispensable for serious scholarly work.

In English, James Davila's Hekhalot Literature in Translation: Major Texts of Merkavah Mysticism (Brill, 2013) is now the standard reference. Davila translates Heikhalot Rabbati along with Heikhalot Zutarti, Maaseh Merkavah, Merkavah Rabbah, the Hekhalot fragments from the Cairo Genizah, and related texts, with an extensive introduction and notes that draw on the full range of recent scholarship. The translation is based on Schäfer's Synopse and uses the standard paragraph numbering.

Earlier partial English translations include those of Morton Smith (in unpublished manuscript form, partially used by Scholem), David Halperin (in The Faces of the Chariot, 1988), and Lawrence Schiffman (in various essays). Joseph Dan included translated excerpts in his anthologies of Jewish mystical literature, and Rachel Elior's The Three Temples (Littman, 2004) translates substantial passages with commentary.

Aryeh Kaplan included sections of Heikhalot Rabbati in his Meditation and Kabbalah (Weiser, 1982), making the material available to a broader readership for the first time, though Kaplan's interest was meditative rather than philological and his translations should be checked against Davila's for accuracy.

Controversy

The dating of Heikhalot Rabbati is the most enduring controversy surrounding the text. Gershom Scholem, the founder of the modern academic study of Jewish mysticism, argued in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism and in Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition that the Heikhalot literature preserves traditions of mystical practice going back to the Tannaitic period of the late first and second centuries CE — that the visionary techniques were actually practiced by Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Yishmael, and their circle, not retrojected onto these figures by later authors. This view treats Heikhalot Rabbati as the missing link between Second Temple apocalyptic literature and medieval Kabbalah and gives it a central place in the historical development of Jewish mysticism.

David Halperin, in The Faces of the Chariot (Mohr Siebeck, 1988), challenged this view comprehensively. Halperin argued that the Heikhalot literature is much later than Scholem supposed — perhaps as late as the seventh or eighth century — and that it represents the religious literature of a marginal class of synagogue cantors and ritual specialists in late-antique Babylonia rather than the elite mystical practice of the Tannaitic rabbis. On Halperin's reading, the attribution of the text to Rabbi Yishmael and Rabbi Nehunya is a literary device of much later authors, and the book has nothing to do with the actual teachings of those figures.

Peter Schäfer's work since the 1980s has occupied a middle position. Schäfer treats the Heikhalot corpus as a multi-layered literary tradition that crystallized in writing in the early Islamic period but drew on earlier oral and ritual traditions whose ultimate roots cannot now be securely dated. His Synopse zur Hekhalot-Literatur and his subsequent monographs The Hidden and Manifest God (SUNY, 1992) and The Origins of Jewish Mysticism (Mohr Siebeck, 2009) emphasize the textual fluidity of the corpus and the impossibility of reconstructing a single original version.

A second major controversy concerns the relationship between the Heikhalot literature and other religious traditions of the late-antique and early medieval Mediterranean. James Davila, in Descenders to the Chariot (Brill, 2001), has compared the Heikhalot ascent literature with the shamanic practices documented in many traditional cultures and has argued that the Heikhalot mystics may have functioned in their communities much as shamans functioned in theirs — as ritual specialists who entered altered states on behalf of their communities to obtain healing, prophecy, and protection. Rachel Elior, in The Three Temples (Littman, 2004), has connected the Heikhalot literature to the displaced priestly class of the Second Temple, arguing that its elaborate angelology, its calendar mysticism, and its temple imagery preserve the religion of the priests after the destruction of the temple in 70 CE.

A third controversy concerns the relationship between the mystical and the magical in the Heikhalot literature. Some scholars treat the theurgic and magical elements (the use of divine names to compel angelic obedience, the elaborate purification regimens, the writing of seals on amulets) as a degenerate later layer added to a purer mystical core; others see the magical and the mystical as inseparable from the start. Michael Swartz's Scholastic Magic (Princeton, 1996) and the broader recent scholarship on ancient Jewish magic have tended toward the latter view, treating the theurgic and the mystical as two faces of a single religious practice rather than as distinct categories that the modern interpreter can cleanly separate.

Influence

The influence of Heikhalot Rabbati on the later history of Jewish mysticism is enormous and largely indirect. The book itself was never widely read outside small circles of initiates, but its motifs and techniques passed into the broader stream of Jewish religious imagination through several channels.

The most important channel was the Hasidei Ashkenaz of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Germany. The Kalonymide circle of Worms, Speyer, and Mainz preserved, copied, and commented on the Heikhalot literature, treating it as the heritage of an authentic Jewish mystical tradition reaching back to the Talmudic period. The theology of the Hasidei Ashkenaz was deeply shaped by Heikhalot motifs, particularly the doctrine of the divine glory (kavod) and the practice of theurgic invocation of divine names. The very survival of the Heikhalot literature is owed to Hasidei Ashkenaz scribes; without their efforts the entire corpus would probably have been lost.

Through the Hasidei Ashkenaz, the Heikhalot tradition passed into the theosophical Kabbalah of medieval Provence and Spain. The seven palaces of the Zohar, with their elaborate descriptions of angelic hierarchies and visionary geography, are direct descendants of the seven heikhalot of the late-antique tradition. Lurianic Kabbalah of the sixteenth century continued to make use of Heikhalot motifs in its theory of the heavenly worlds, and the Hasidic movement of the eighteenth century inherited the entire complex through the Lurianic synthesis.

The hymnody of Heikhalot Rabbati has a more direct legacy. Several of the angelic hymns described in the book passed into the standard Jewish liturgy of the synagogue, where they remain in the kedushah, the El Adon hymn, and other sections of the daily and Sabbath prayer services. The pious Jew who recites these prayers today is in some sense continuing the practice of the late-antique Heikhalot mystics, joining the angelic chorus in praise of the king on the throne.

The influence of Heikhalot Rabbati on the comparative study of religion has been considerable since the rediscovery of the text by Scholem and his successors. The book is now studied alongside Hermetic ascent literature, Christian apocalyptic literature, early Islamic Mi'raj traditions, and shamanic ascent practices from many cultures. The comparative work of James Davila, Martha Himmelfarb (Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses, Oxford 1993), and others has established Heikhalot Rabbati as a central document in the history of religious experience as such, not merely a curiosity of Jewish religious history.

Significance

Heikhalot Rabbati holds a position in the history of Jewish mysticism analogous to that of the Pyramid Texts or the Egyptian Book of the Dead in the Egyptian tradition: it is the great document of the journey of the soul through the heavenly realms, complete with its dangers, its passwords, its hymns, and its visions of the throne. Its significance lies first in its preservation of an entire universe of religious practice that would otherwise be known only by allusion. The Talmud and the early midrashim refer cryptically to mystics who "ascended on high," who "descended to the chariot," who "entered the orchard" of forbidden contemplation; without Heikhalot Rabbati and its companion texts, we would have no detailed account of what such ascents involved, what techniques were used to induce them, or what the practitioners believed they encountered. The book turns rabbinic allusion into ritual reality.

Its significance for the later history of Kabbalah is equally large. Every later Jewish mystical conception of the divine palaces — from the seven palaces of the Zohar through the elaborate hierarchies of the Lurianic Etz Chaim — descends ultimately from the architecture of Heikhalot Rabbati. The motif of the soul's ascent through successive heavens, the doctrine of angelic gatekeepers who must be appeased or deceived, the theurgic use of divine names to compel angelic obedience, the practice of preparing for visionary experience through fasting and purity — all of these themes pass from Heikhalot Rabbati through the Hasidei Ashkenaz into the mainstream of medieval Kabbalah and from there into the Hasidic movement of the eighteenth century.

The book is also significant as a window onto the social world of late-antique and early medieval Jewish religion. Whoever the actual practitioners of the Heikhalot rituals were — synagogue cantors, ritual specialists, learned ascetics, or marginal visionaries — Heikhalot Rabbati shows that the Jewish religious imagination of this period included far more than the legal and exegetical activities of the rabbinic academies. There was a parallel world of ritual ascent, theurgic invocation, hymn-singing, and angelic encounter, and that world has been brought to life by the work of scholars from Scholem to Schäfer and from Rachel Elior to James Davila. Elior's The Three Temples (Littman, 2004) has argued that the Heikhalot tradition preserves the religion of the displaced priestly class of the Second Temple, whose elaborate angelology, calendar mysticism, and visionary practice survived the destruction of the temple in 70 CE and resurfaced in the Heikhalot literature centuries later. Whether or not this thesis is correct in its strongest form, it points to the depth and antiquity of the religious impulse that Heikhalot Rabbati embodies.

Connections

Heikhalot Rabbati is the central document of Heikhalot literature and the most detailed surviving expression of the broader tradition of Merkavah mysticism. Its visionary techniques, its hierarchies of angelic gatekeepers, and its hymns to the throne of glory are the chief sources for understanding what Merkavah mystical practice actually involved.

The book is intimately connected to Rabbi Yishmael ben Elisha and Rabbi Nehunya ben HaKanah, the two Tannaitic figures around whom its narrative frame is constructed. Whether or not these historical rabbis actually practiced the visionary techniques the book describes, the literary tradition treats them as the master and disciple at the center of the Merkavah school. The third great figure of this tradition is Rabbi Akiva, whose famous account of having "entered the orchard in peace and emerged in peace" became the rabbinic warrant for the entire Heikhalot enterprise.

Heikhalot Rabbati is also closely tied to the related text Heikhalot Zutarti, the Lesser Book of Palaces, which presents an alternative account of the ascent practice and is attributed pseudonymously to Rabbi Akiva. Together with Shi'ur Qomah (the Measure of the Body) and Sefer HaRazim (the Book of Mysteries), these works form the core of the late-antique and early medieval Jewish mystical and magical corpus.

The book was preserved and transmitted by the Hasidei Ashkenaz of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Germany, whose scribes copied the Heikhalot manuscripts and whose theology was deeply shaped by their content. Without the Hasidei Ashkenaz, the Heikhalot literature would probably have been lost entirely.

Through the Hasidei Ashkenaz, Heikhalot Rabbati passed into the broader stream of medieval Kabbalah. The seven palaces of the Zohar, the angelic hierarchies of the Lurianic worlds, and the hymnody of much later Jewish mystical practice all owe a debt to Heikhalot Rabbati. The book was also a source for Abraham Abulafia, whose ecstatic Kabbalah drew on Heikhalot motifs while transforming them into a system of letter meditation and divine name combination.

Beyond Judaism, Heikhalot Rabbati has been compared by James Davila and others to the Hermetic ascent literature of late antiquity, to the Christian apocalyptic literature of the same period, and to the broader phenomenology of visionary ascent that appears across many religious traditions of the eastern Mediterranean. The connections to early Islamic Mi'raj literature — the accounts of Muhammad's night journey through the seven heavens — are particularly suggestive and have been the subject of recent scholarly attention.

Further Reading