The Zohar from a Reformed Perspective

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The Spanish publisher Ediciones Atalanta has released Zohar. Libro del esplendor (Zohar: Book of Splendor), a Spanish-language anthology of the central text of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. The edition has been well received in the Spanish press and is reaching readers who do not necessarily know Kabbalah. So it is worth asking what this book is and how a Christian who confesses the Reformed faith should approach it.

What the Zohar is

The Zohar (Hebrew for “splendor”) is a mystical commentary on the Torah, written mostly in Aramaic. It appeared in Castile at the end of the 13th century. Tradition attributes it to Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, a 2nd-century sage, but most scholars, following Gershom Scholem, attribute it to the Castilian kabbalist Moses de León (Scholem, 1941).

The book takes the form of a story: a group of sages travels the roads of Galilee, talking and passing on secret teachings about the hidden meaning of the biblical text. Behind those conversations stands a complete system:

• The hidden God. In his ultimate depth, God is the Ein Sof, “the Infinite,” beyond all knowledge.
• The sefirot. From that depth emanate ten divine attributes or powers, the sefirot, through which God manifests himself and acts in the world.
• The Tree of Life. This is the diagram that arranges the ten sefirot and the twenty-two paths that join them, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet (Ediciones Atalanta, 2026).
• Creative language. The Hebrew letters and their numerical values contain the codes by which God creates and reveals himself. Hence the importance of gematria, which interprets the text by adding up the values of the letters.

The Atalanta edition

The anthology is a selection, not the complete Zohar, which runs to thousands of pages. It was prepared by Lola Josa, professor of Golden Age literature at the University of Barcelona and a specialist in the mysticism of John of the Cross. It belongs to the Memoria Mundi collection and comes in hardcover, at 384 pages (Ediciones Atalanta, 2026).

As an editorial project, it is of interest. It helps us understand a work that influenced literature, philosophy and even Spanish Christian mysticism. The problem is not the edition but what the book offers to those who read it looking for spiritual guidance.

Why a Christian should not be guided by it

1. God has spoken, and he has spoken in the Son

The Reformed starting point is that God's revelation is complete in Scripture and culminates in Jesus Christ:

“Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1-2, ESV).

The Westminster Confession puts it this way: “The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man's salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men” (WCF 1.6). The Zohar presents itself as exactly what the Confession excludes: a secret tradition that completes Scripture and uncovers what the text, read without its keys, does not say.

2. Revelation is not a code for initiates

Kabbalah assumes that the true meaning of the Bible is hidden and that only a few who know the keys can reach it. Scripture teaches the opposite:

“The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law” (Deuteronomy 29:29, ESV).

Paul, before King Agrippa, insisted that the gospel is not esoteric knowledge: “this has not been done in a corner” (Acts 26:26, ESV). And he writes to the Corinthians: “we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God's word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone's conscience in the sight of God” (2 Corinthians 4:2, ESV). The gospel is preached in broad daylight, within anyone's reach.

3. The text has one meaning, not a thousand

Gematria and the symbolic reading of letters turn the text into an endless field of hidden meanings. The Reformed tradition, by contrast, holds that Scripture interprets Scripture and that the true sense of each passage “is not manifold, but one” (WCF 1.9). That is why it is read with attention to grammar, history and context, not by hunting for numerical combinations. When the meaning depends on a secret key, authority passes from the text to the interpreter who holds the key.

4. Christ is the only mediator

In Kabbalah, the infinite God communicates with the world through a chain of emanations, the sefirot. And in its later development, human beings, by their works and devotion, help restore harmony within that divine structure. The gospel announces something else:

“For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5, ESV).

There are no intermediate rungs to climb or powers to balance. In Christ “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3, ESV), and the Father is not sought by climbing a tree of attributes, but in the Son: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9, ESV). Nor does salvation depend on human beings repairing what is broken on high. It is the work of God's grace, received by faith.

5. The apostolic warning

Paul already warned the churches against religious speculation presented as higher knowledge:

“See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ” (Colossians 2:8, ESV).

He asks Titus to see that believers are “not devoting themselves to Jewish myths and the commands of people who turn away from the truth” (Titus 1:14, ESV), and Timothy, that they not “devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations rather than the stewardship from God that is by faith” (1 Timothy 1:4, ESV). The Zohar is much later than those letters, but the principle is the same: speculation that does not spring from Christ does not build up faith.

6. An old temptation

The attraction of Kabbalah for Christians is not new. In 1486, the humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola claimed in his Conclusions that no science gives more certainty of the divinity of Christ than magic and Kabbalah. That is how the so-called Christian Kabbalah of the Renaissance was born. A few decades later, the Reformation reminded the church that the certainty of faith does not rest on hidden knowledge, but on the Word of God, which the Holy Spirit confirms in the believer's heart.

Reading without being guided

This does not mean a Christian cannot read the Zohar. One can study it as history of religions or as literature, just as one reads Plato or the Qur'an without taking them as spiritual guides. Scripture commands us: “test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21, ESV). But testing is not submitting.

The difference lies in who has the last word. For the Reformed Christian, that word is not in codes hidden in the letters, but in what God has already said clearly in his Word:

“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16-17, ESV).

If Scripture is enough to make the believer “complete, equipped for every good work,” it needs no hidden splendor to complete it.

Bibliography

• Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), chapter 1, “Of the Holy Scripture,” sections 6 and 9.
• Ediciones Atalanta (2026). Zohar. Libro del esplendor. Selected and edited by L. Josa. Memoria Mundi collection. In Spanish. View online.
• Pico della Mirandola, G. (1486). Conclusiones philosophicae, cabalisticae et theologicae. Rome.
• Scholem, G. (1941). Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Jerusalem: Schocken.
• The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (2001). Wheaton, IL: Crossway.

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.