The heart of Harba de-Moshe (the Sword of Moses) is its catalog of divine names—and the greatest of these is the Great Name, composed of 70 component names. The number 70 is not arbitrary. In Jewish tradition, there are 70 nations of the world, 70 members of the Sanhedrin (the supreme rabbinic court), 70 faces of the Torah, and 70 names of God. The Sword's 70-name structure maps divine power onto the totality of creation.
The text presents the names in a specific liturgical sequence, each one building on the last. Many are recognizable variations of known divine names—El, Elohim, Shaddai, Tzevaot—but most are complex combinations of Hebrew and Aramaic syllables whose meaning has been debated by scholars for over a century. Names like Azbogah, Zevudiel, Margiviel, and Totrosiai appear alongside names that are clearly angel names repurposed as divine epithets.
Moses Gaster, who first published the text in 1896 from a Genizah manuscript, argued that many of these names preserve very ancient traditions—possibly pre-Talmudic invocations that survived in oral form among Jewish mystics in Palestine and Babylonia. More recent scholarship by Peter Schaefer and Yuval Harari has confirmed that the language and style of the Sword is consistent with other Geonic-period (7th-8th century CE) theurgic texts found in the Cairo Genizah—the famous trove of medieval Jewish manuscripts discovered in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo.
The text instructs the practitioner to recite the 70 names in sequence, pausing between each group to direct the adjuration toward its intended purpose. Some names are designated for protection, others for healing, others for gaining wisdom or finding lost objects. The full sequence, recited from beginning to end, constitutes the complete "Sword"—a total invocation of divine power in all its manifestations.
The 70-name structure influenced later kabbalistic works, including the Zohar's discussion of divine names and the elaborate name-theology of <strong>Abraham Abulafia</strong>'s prophetic Kabbalah in the 13th century CE.