Chaim Vital · 1866 (first printing of the work; this copy is far earlier — see **Date** below)
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R. Chaim Vital (1542–1620) is remembered as the foremost disciple of R. Isaac Luria and the man through whom Lurianic Kabbalah reached the world. Sefer HaTechunah is the other side of that mind: a treatise on the astronomy of the spheres, worked out in the ordinary technical vocabulary of the science.
The book treats the standard subjects of pre-telescopic mathematical astronomy — the sphere and its circles, the motions of the sun and moon, the order and periods of the planets, and the computations by which positions in the heavens are found.
Vital’s own preface promises four parts: the premises of the science, the making of the tables, the manner of making them, and the molads, tekufot and fixings derived from those tables. What the manuscript delivers is a complete first part, not a complete book — the later parts were to be tabular and drawn from an earlier astronomer rather than computed afresh.
The division between kabbalist and astronomer is one the period did not recognize as sharply as later readers have. Vital’s cosmology of emanation and his cosmology of spheres belong to one person and one century, and the technical astronomy was not a youthful diversion he outgrew.
For the corpus, the book stands with the other Hebrew astronomical texts — Gersonides, Yesod Olam, Nechmad VeNa’im — as evidence of how thoroughly the science of the heavens was pursued inside the Jewish learned tradition.
This is a critical edition, though not in the strict academic sense of a recension drawn from every surviving witness.
The base text is Chester Beatty Ms. Heb. 762, written in a rabbinic hand in Damascus in the early seventeenth century — the city where Vital spent his last two decades, within a generation of his death, and the earliest known witness to the text. Its seventeen astronomical diagrams are executed in gold, red and blue; two eighteenth-century Damascus kabbalists signed the opening leaf.
Every reading in the body is the manuscript’s. Collated into the apparatus is the printed tradition — a modern resetting of the first printing (Jerusalem, 1866) — together with the notes its own editors and annotators left at hard places. The print has nowhere been allowed to alter the manuscript’s text: where the two differ, both readings stand.
This work is citation grade: read complete against the manuscript rather than sampled.