The Archaeology of the Zohar: Sifra Ditseniʽuta as a Sample Text

The authorship of the Zohar has long been an open and often disputed question. Opinions are divided between those who believe that it was written by a single author, and others who see it as the product of multiple authors who each contributed to what must be recognized as a collaborative work. Those who argue for a single author fall into one of two groups: some uphold the tradition whereby the entire work was written in the Land of Israel by the second-century tannaitic Sage Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, while others – among them both rabbinic and academic scholars – claim that the author was the thirteenth-century Spanish kabbalist Moses de Leon. As for those who argue for multiple authors – they, too, can be divided into groups: some attribute the Zohar to several discrete thirteenth-century authors, some to a coherent thirteenth-century kabbalistic circle ( ḥ avurah ), while others stipulate multiple groups of thirteenth-century authors, whose work was subjected to a continuous process of redaction by subsequent generations of kabbalists My own position on this question has changed over time. Originally I subscribed to the view that the Zohar was composed by multiple authors during the relatively short period from the end of the thirteenth century to the beginning of the fourteenth. I now believe that the process of composition was much more protracted, stretching from the eleventh century to approximately the third decade of the fourteenth.