Raziel Brought Adam a Book From God's Throne

The First Morning Outside Eden

Adam stood in the ungardenized world and understood several things immediately. The ground under his feet was the same ground from which God had made him, but it no longer recognized him the way it had before. In Eden, the plants had bent toward his hand. Out here they would require persuasion, effort, the kind of relationship built through labor rather than given at creation. The sun had already gone down once, and he had believed it was dying. He had sat next to Eve in the darkness convinced that the first night was the permanent end of light.

The morning told him otherwise. The light returned. But the morning also told him that he was in a world he did not understand, with a body that would eventually stop working, in a story whose future he could not read.

Raziel Comes Down

God sent Raziel. The name means secret of God, and the angel carried a book whose contents matched the name. The Zohar preserves the tradition: God wanted to show Adam all the generations that would descend from him, all the events that would unfold in human history, the names and acts of every soul that would be born into the world Adam was now responsible for continuing.

Raziel descended to where Adam sat and gave him the book. It had been held at the divine throne before the world was made. Its leaves were sapphire. Its letters were written in fire. When Adam opened it, a light came out that could be seen from one end of the world to the other, and the angels gathered at the edge of the firmament to look down at what was happening.

The Angels Steal the Book

The angels had objections to what they saw. A man who had already failed the first test of his existence, who had listened to a serpent and eaten the fruit that cost him Paradise, was being given access to all knowledge, all futures, all secrets. It seemed backwards. If Adam with the limited information of Eden had made the choices that led to his expulsion, what would he do with everything?

Two of the angels, the tradition names Azza and Aza'el, took the book from Adam while he slept and threw it into the sea.

God retrieved it. He sent the angel of the sea to bring it back from the depths. The book was returned to Adam. He studied it for the remainder of his life. When he felt death approaching, he passed it to his son Seth.

The Book's Journey Through History

Seth passed it down. Enoch received it and from it drew the knowledge that allowed him to walk with God without dying, the only human in the genealogies of Genesis to exit history without death. Noah received the book and from it learned what to build and how to read the signs of what was coming. Abraham received it and from it understood the nature of the God he had found without instruction. Joseph kept it with him in Egypt. Moses had it on Sinai and from it received what no ordinary human reading could have produced.

Solomon received it and from it built the Temple, the healing practices, the knowledge of plants and stones and the nature of created things. The tradition held that the Book of Raziel was the source behind every significant human achievement in the history of Israel: not magic in the debased sense but gnosis in the original sense, the knowledge of what things are and how they fit together.

What the Book Contained

The tradition is specific about the contents. Every secret of the world, but structured. The movements of the sun, moon, and stars, the names and natures of the angels, the structure of the divine throne, the seals that govern the years and the seasons and the days, the prayers that open what is closed and the names that have power over what is otherwise resistant. And the futures: the line of every generation, their actions and their consequences, the shapes of history before history made those shapes.

What Adam could not do with this knowledge was undo what he had done. The exile stood. The knowledge came after the expulsion, not before it. The mercy was real: God did not leave Adam in total darkness about the world he had entered. But the mercy came after the consequence, not instead of it.