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A Transparent Illusion: The Dangerous Vision of Water in Hekhalot Mysticism: A Source-Critical and Tradition-Historical Inquiry, by C. R. A. Morray-Jones. JSJSup 59. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Pp. xiii +322. $104.00.
In b. fag. 14b we find a version of the story of the four who entered "paradise" (or "the garden") in which four tannaitic figures dare to enter the celestial paradise, with only one, R. Akiva, surviving unscathed. The recension of the Babli has R. Akiva warning the others that when they approach "the pure marble stones," they must on no account say "Water! Water!" It appears that none of the other three heeded his admonition, thus bringing their disastrous fates down on their own heads. In the book under review, Morray-Jones attempts to reconstruct the origin and meaning of the water warning and its relationship to the story of the four. (All references to the Hekhalot literature in this review use the section numbering of Peter Schafer's Synopse zur Hekhalot-Literatur [Tubingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1981].)
Morray-Jones begins in the first two chapters by recapitulating the convincing case he has made elsewhere that the recension of the story of the four found in the Hekhalot texts known as the Hekhalot Zutarti (338-39) and the Merkavah Rabbah (671-73), when cleared of obvious redactional elements from another, third-person version, preserves a first-person account that clearly takes "paradise" to mean the heavenly realm and which predates the versions in the rabbinic "mystical collection." It follows that we must place this recension at the latest in the early fourth century. This early Hekhalot account did not include the warning about water, although a different version of it, the "water vision episode," appears elsewhere in the Hekhalot Zutarti (secs 4078), with a parallel version appearing in the Hekhalot Rabbati (secs 258-59). In ch. 3 be argues, again convincingly, first that the latter version (in the Hekhalot Rabbati) is a garbled abbreviation of the former (in the Hekhalot Zutarti) and, second, that in manuscript New York 8128 a version of the water vision episode has been secondarily combined with the story of the four in the Hekhalot Zutarti and the Merkavah Rabbah and that it is this combined passage that is assumed by the Babli, and not the other way around, strongly implying...