The center of the Sword is a number: seventy.
Harba de-Moshe builds its power around a Great Name made of seventy names. In Jewish memory, seventy is never just arithmetic. There are seventy nations, seventy elders, seventy faces of Torah. The number points toward fullness, as if the entire created order can be gathered into a single hidden pattern.
Moses Gaster's 1896 edition prints the names and explains their place in the manuscript, but the mythology is larger than any list. The Sword imagines language before it becomes explanation. Names are not labels here. They are gates, keys, and signs of relationship between heaven and earth. Some look close to familiar divine names. Others sound like angelic names from the borderland between prayer, Merkavah ascent, and Jewish magical tradition.
This is why the site treats the name catalog with restraint. The point is not to reproduce a usable sequence or turn the text into technique. The point is to understand a Jewish myth of sacred speech. The same tradition that warns against speaking God's name lightly also preserves stories about names that create, protect, heal, and terrify.
The Sword's seventy names reveal a world where letters are not decoration. They are charged with memory. They carry Sinai, angels, danger, and longing in the same breath.
<p>The heart of <strong>Harba de-Moshe</strong> (the Sword of Moses) is its catalog of divine names — and the greatest of these is the <strong>Great Name</strong>, 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, 70 faces of the Torah, and 70 names of <strong>God</strong>. The Sword's 70-name structure maps divine power onto the totality of creation.</p>
<p>The text presents the names in a specific liturgical sequence, each one building on the last. Many are recognizable variations of known divine names — <strong>El</strong>, <strong>Elohim</strong>, <strong>Shaddai</strong>, <strong>Tzevaot</strong> — but most are complex combinations of Hebrew and Aramaic syllables whose meaning has been debated by scholars for over a century. Names like <strong>Azbogah</strong>, <strong>Zevudiel</strong>, <strong>Margiviel</strong>, and <strong>Totrosiai</strong> appear alongside names that are clearly angel names repurposed as divine epithets.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
