La Merkabá. El misterio del nombre de Dios

Abstract

The thesis "The Merkabah: the mystery of the Name of God" deals with one of the most complex issues within Jewish theology, that of the nature of God. Throughout the centuries the God of Israel began to mutate from an anthropomorphic God into an infinite and invisible God. This constitutes a great contradiction because at some point in Jewish history one came to the conclusion of the existence of both gods, the greater God or infinite God and the lesser God. Within this binitarian framework, Christianity was born. The greater God or infinite God does not appear in the literal text of the Torah and Kabbalists placed it outside of it in the world of Aleph, before the beginning of the first biblical verse. Thus the God of the Torah was always for Kabbalists the lesser God or the God of the Merkabah who was completely anthropomorphic and who is within the space-time universe of creation (Briyah) The proposal of this doctoral work is to explain the theological contradictions of Judaism in relation to the messianic theme, because the messianic issue was deliberately confused by the Pharisees to hide the anthropomorphisms of the God of Merkabah. For Pharisaism, the Messiah and the God of the Merkabah are really the same character. This was not the case when the idea of the Messiah was born. The Messiah had a completely political function of national redemption for the people of Israel. However, the Pharisees displaced the idea of the Messiah to hide the God of the Merkabah, and by so doing, enhanced the figure of the infinite and invisible God. The God of Israel of the literal text is the anthropomorphic God of the Merkabah, and can not be considered as the Messiah as the Pharisees later confused it. However, during the last two thousand years rabbis and above all Jewish philosophers have taken the path of the divinization of the infinite God with the name of Ein Sof. The thesis that I am presenting before the University of Murcia shows that the God of Israel is still the anthropomorphic God of the Merkabah, and that in all likelihood the strategy of concealment (with the prohibition of the images) adopted was undoubtedly adopted to achieve the abstraction of the Infinite. The Infinite can not be considered as God since God is a limited concept and God can not be limited, but the God of Israel found in the text of the Torah is undoubtedly anthropomorphic and has serious limitations. However, we can show that the transmission of the reality of the infinite energy (Ein Sof) was the true message of the literal God of the Torah: the God of the Merkabah.