Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezerפִּרְקֵי דְּרַבִּי אֱלִיעֶזֶר

English

Whence were the heavens created? From the light of the garment with which He was robed. He took (of this light) and stretched it like a garment and (the heavens) began to extend continually until He caused them to hear, "It is sufficient." Therefore is He called God Almighty (El Shaddai), who said to the world: "It is sufficient," and it stood (firm). Whence do we know that the heavens were created from the light of His garment? Because it is said, "Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment; who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain" (Ps. 104:2).

Gerald Friedlander, 1916 · pd

Hebrew / Aramaic

Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer 3 · pd

Notes

The garment of Bereshit Rabbah 3:4, no longer whispered and turned into cosmogony: the heavens were made out of the light of the garment God wraps himself in, taken and stretched like a curtain until he said Dai, enough — which is why he is called El Shaddai. Ps 104:2 supplies both halves in one verse, 'who covers himself with light as with a garment, who stretches out the heavens like a curtain'. The first light is thus not merely prior to the luminaries but prior to the sky and the material of it. Nothing on the Latin bench makes the light the stuff of anything; the nearest is Augustine's report at De Gen. ad litt. I.11 that someone held the luminaries were made out of it.

Threads

• → echoes · Bereshit Rabbah
  The garment of Ps 104:2, no longer whispered: Bereshit Rabbah has the Holy One wrap himself in the light like a garment; Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer takes the next clause of the same verse — 'who stretches out the heavens like a curtain' — and makes the heavens out of that light.
• ← parallel · Alcuin
  Both make the first light derive from God himself rather than merely follow him: Alcuin adds to Bede's sentence the words a luce aeterna, so that the temporal light is made out of the eternal one, and Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer makes the heavens out of the light of the garment God wears. Neither argues for it; both state it as though it needed none.
• → parallel · Augustine
  Both make the first light the material of something later: Augustine's unnamed authority has the luminaries made out of it, and Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer has the heavens made out of it. On the Latin side this is one option among three and is not adopted; on the rabbinic side it is stated as cosmogony.
• ← parallel · Philo of Alexandria
  Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer: the light was created from the light of his garment. Philo: it is an image of the divine Reason. The two answers are the same shape, an emanation from something of God's own rather than a thing made from nothing, and they are the only two on this daf that make the first light continuous with its source. The Latin witnesses that come nearest, the angelic light of Angelomus and the Glossa's spiritual light, all make it a creature.