The Kings Who Reigned in the Land of Edom: A Kabbalistic Metaphor of the Primeval Worlds

The anomolous list of the Kings of Edom in chapter 36 of Genesis has attracted exegetical attention for centuries. In the Hebrew Bible, Edom is associated with Esau, the first born son of Isaac and Rebecca, who preceded his twin brother Jacob in birth. In the midrash, Edom is also associated with the Roman Empire. In medieval kabbalistic texts, Edom is often used as a metaphor for Christianity

FROM ADAM TO ESAU AND ISRAEL: AN ANTI-EDOMITE IDEOLOGY IN 1 CHRONICLES 1 by Elie Assis

[I Chronicles 1:]43-54 present a list of eight kings who reigned in Edom before any king reigned in Israel. This passage is an exact quotation from Genesis xxxvi 31-43, except for one small change that appears insignificant initially. In v. 51, at the end of the list of kings, the words “And Hadad died”, which do not appear in the source in Genesis, were added. This addition is very surprising, since the lists in both books are identical. Why did the Chronicler add such a very trivial statement that was not in the source in his possession? Moreover, the death of the kings in the list in general was mentioned in order to serve the aim of the passage to establish succession: the death of one king indicates the end of his monarchy and the beginning of that of a new king. This aim becomes clear through comparison with the list of chiefs that follows, in which the death of the chiefs is not mentioned. This being the case, there is no reason to indicate the death of Hadad at the end of the list of the kings, and this would seem to be the reason that this statement is absent in the source in Genesis. If mention of the death of one king is designed to show the passage between two kings, then this mention at the end of the list is superfluous, unless the intention of the author of chapter i was to emphasise the decline of the Edomite dynasty. Just as the mention of the death of the kings is designed to indicate the change of leadership between kings in the dynasty, so this addition in Chronicles at the end of the list is designed to indicate the decline and end of the dynasty. The detailed list, immediately afterwards, of the descendants of Israel by tribes creates the impression that the author wished to convey, the rise of the Israelite monarchy as opposed to the decline of Edom.

JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis, Nahum Sarna, at 408.

This list is not genealogical like the others, but it simply details eight kings who ruled in Edom prior to the establishment of the Israelite monarchy. The register is characterized by a lack of uniformity and by an assortment of anomalies: The length of the monarch’s reign is never given; in four cases the father’s name is recorded, in four not; a place-name is attached to seven kings, but in three instances the formula is “the name of his city was X,” and in four there is simply the particle “from”; no place-name is repeated; with two kings some additional information of a personal nature is brought; remarkably, no king is succeeded by his son, yet the invariable formula “When X died, Y succeeded him as king” suggests unbroken continuity. The royal record inserted here is unique in the Hebrew Bible.

The Steinsaltz Humash, (2^nd Ed.) Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz at 198

The significance of this list of Edomite kings is unclear. There is no evident reason why this chronology is mentioned in the Torah, as it does not appear to be relevant in any way to the history of the Jewish people. In the mystical works of the Kabbala, this is interpreted as an important list of mysterious, fundamental symbols, which allude to heavenly forces that existed before the world as we know it came into being. Furthermore, the rise of a monarchy in Edom before there was an Israelite king reflects the depth of the relationship between the twin brothers, Esau and Jacob. In many aspects, Esau is the shadow of Jacob.

The Zohar (trans. and commentary by Daniel Matt, (Vol VIII) at 325 n.18.

These kings do not constitute a dynasty since none of the successors to the throne is a son of his predecessor. In seven consecutive verses Genesis records And [so and so] died, and in the Zohar these royal deaths represent the destruction of unviable emanations tainted by harsh Judgment (which is identified as Edom). Only of the final, eighth king is a wife mentioned and no death recorded.

FROM ADAM TO ESAU AND ISRAEL: AN ANTI-EDOMITE IDEOLOGY IN 1 CHRONICLES 1, ELIE ASSIS, Vetus Testamentum LVI,3 (2006)

The reason for inclusion of this list does not appear to be comparison of the leadership in Edom to David’s leadership, but to set Edom against Israel. The list commences with granting of initial precedence to Edom, since the monarchy there was prior to the monarchy in Israel. As part of the intention to present initial precedence to Edom, Esau was placed before Jacob in verse 34. Thus the impression is received that Esau is the elected one. This dramatic impression was stressed only in order to eradicate it at the end of the list, in order to emphasize the rejection of Edom. The list at its end indicates the end of the dynasty, as opposed to the continuity received in relation to Jacob’s descendants. I Chronicles i, is therefore part of the postexilic anti-Edomite polemic. The intention in chapter i is not to present the superiority of David’s monarchy over the Edomite monarchy, but to present the inferiority of Edom in relation to Israel. The anti-Edomite polemic sought to present the election of Israel as opposed to the rejection of Esau.

In the Hebrew Bible, Edom has a rich series of associations, from sibling rivalry, to warring opponent, treacherous kindred and perhaps, finally, to reconciled brothers. Edom is associated with Esau, who forfeited his birthright (Gen 25:32), with the kingdom that refused to let the Israelites pass through their territory on the Exodus from Egypt (Numbers 20:14-21), with the color red (Gen. 25:25), with the uncircumcised (Jer. 9:25) and with those who rejoiced at the destruction of Judah (Eze. 35:15). The Kabbalists, always close readers of the Hebrew Bible, used all these associations in their discussion of the "Kings of Edom."

Elliot R. Wolfson, Martydom, Eroticism, and Asceticism, in Jews and Christians in Twelfth Century Europe, Michael A. Singer and Jon Van Engen (eds.) at 195-96.

The circumcision of the flesh signals the abrogation of carnal lust, which is localized in the foreskin, and as a consequence of this act the Jewish male is transformed into an angelic being. The angelification is occasioned by ascetic denial, for only as a consequence of this ontological transformation is one capable of apprehending the epiphany of the divine glory....Esau, who is described as removing the sign of his covenant...rebelling against God, and having intercourse with a woman engaged to another man...., is set in contrast to the Jews who attain the higher spiritual state through circumcision. The defiant behavior, which is manifest principally in the rejection of circumcision, is linked to Esau's forfeiting his birthright (Gen. 25:32)....The inferior spiritual status of Christianity is signified by the fact that Esau relinquished his privileged position by repudiating the covenant of circumcision.

Papyrus Anastasi, 13th Century B.C.E., reign of Merneptah

“Another piece of information for my Lord is that we have just let the Shasu [Bedouin] tribes of Edom pass the Fortress of Merneptah-hetephermaat, LPH, of Tjeku, to the lakes of Pithom of Merneptah-hetephermaat, of Tjeku, in order to revive themselves and revive their flocks from the great life force of Pharaoh” (Papyrus Anastasi VI, COS 3.5)

Papyrus Harris I, 12th century B.C.E., reign of Ramses III

"I destroyed the people of Seir among the nomadic tribes, I razed their tents; their people, their property, and their cattle as well, without number, pinioned and carried away in captivity, as the tribute of Egypt."

In the Zohar, the list of the Kings of Edom in the Book of Genesis becomes a metaphor for an initial stage of divine activity in which stern judgment without compassion, and masculine without feminine, was insufficient to sustain creation. In this metaphor, only the last and final king, who alone is named along with a wife, represents a sustainable harmony between different aspects of the interior world of divinity.

The Death of Rachel and the Kingdom of Heaven:: Jewish Engagement with Christian Themes in Sefer ha-Zohar, Ellen Haskell, Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures , Vol. 38, No. 1 (2012), at 11-12

Elsewhere, the Zoharic authors make this connection even more explicit
by drawing on traditional rabbinic connections among Esau, Edom, Rome,
and Christianity, which the Zohar also associates with idolatry. (From the
medieval Jewish perspective, the oppressive pagan Roman Empire had
transformed over time into the oppressive Christian Roman Church.) Just
as the phrase “Kingdom of Idolatry” represents an allusive reference to
Christianity in these texts, the idolatrous people who “worship the stars
and planets” represent Christians. Drawing on such allusive textual tradi-
tions allowed Jewish authors to critique the majority religion by “writing
between the lines,” a technique that helped to obscure their messages from
the Christian censors who worked with Jewish texts during this period. In the following passages the Zohar returns the Kingdom of Heaven to Jews for eternity and identifies the Kingdom of Idolatry as an oppressive ruler whose dominion may encompass the present but will not extend into the future. As the gospels’ Kingdom of Heaven excludes Jews, so the kabbalists’ Kingdom of Heaven excludes Christians. These texts use the Kingdom of Heaven to represent God’s idealized relationship with Jews both in previous eras and in a time to come:

Come and see: “And these are the kings who reigned in the land of

Edom.” (Genesis 36:1) . . . As it is written: “Esau—that is Edom.”

(Genesis 36:1) . . . For the time had not yet arrived for the Kingdom

of Heaven to rule and to unite with the children of Israel. . . . And

when it settled, it settled on the smallest of all the tribes, which was

Benjamin. . . . Afterward the Kingdom came to its place and was established

with itself, never to be removed. (Sefer ha-Zohar 1:177b)

These Zoharic texts provide an effective counterargument to Christian claims about Jewish exclusion from salvation by establishing Israel in a position of holiness and literally “Othering” Christianity, which is associated with Esau, Edom, idolatry, and the forces of evil that the Zohar refers to as the Other Side (sitra’ ahra’).

The Wisdom of the Zohar, Isaiah Tishby, (Vol II) at 458

But how were [the kabbalists] to explain the emergence of “the other side,” the enemy of the Godhead, from the Godhead itself? How could they possibly conceive evil as being rooted in the world of the sefirot, which is all good. One of the solutions that the Zohar offers to this question, although it is expressed in an obscure and unsystematic way, is that evil was produced by earlier, imperfect emanations, which emanated from the first sefirah before the whole structure of emanation from Hokhmah downward had been completed. These emanations were abortive, and were destroyed, because they consisted of harsh, untampered judgments. They are called “the worlds that were destroyed” or “the kings that died.” Before the Atika Atikin (i.e., Keter) prepared His attributes, He constructed kings, inscribed kings, and conjectured kings, and they could not survive; so that after a time He concealed them. These early judgments, which existed in the depth of the divine thought before they were emanated, contained the root of evil in the form, as it were, of refuse. And the properly ordered system of emanation could not be established until the refuse had been removed from the divine realm. This removal was effected when the worlds were destroyed. The holy lights that were extinguished during this destruction were then rekindled and included among the sefirot, while the fragments of the destroyed worlds that were beyond repair were left mutilated and covered in darkness outside the divine system. It is from these fragments that the system of sitra ahra were constructed.

The Zohar, translation and commentary by Daniel Matt, 1:223b at 344 n. 232

Rabbi Shim’on reads the verse: The verse of Solomon increased by means of the wisdom of all the children of the East and by all the wisdom of Egypt (reading 1 Kings 5:10 to support his argument). The fullness of Shekinah and of Solomon’s wisdom of Her included wisdom of the demonic realm, which is known as wisdom of all בני קדם (benei qedem), the children of the East. The word קדם (qedem), the East is understood here as “primordial time,” and linked with the verse in Genesis 36:31: These are the kings who reigned in the land of Edom before any king reigned over the Children of Israel. According to the Zohar, this verse refers to primordial worlds dominated by harsh judgment, which were created and destroyed prior to our world. Later this conception was elaborated by Isaac Luria in his theory of “the breaking of the vessels.”

The Wisdom of the Zohar, Isaiah Tishby, at 289. A mythical note can be detected in the very idea that, before the world of emanation was established in its present form, the Emanator had tried unsuccessfully to emanate other beings which had not survived. Of course, one could try to avoid this difficulty by saying that the images of death and destruction are only symbols for a spiritual movement in the divine thought. That is to say that the kings that died, and the worlds that were destroyed were not actual, existing things that were first emanated and then dispensed with, but only the possibilities of being, which entered the divine thought but never emerged into actuality because they could not be utilized in constructing and establishing the worlds. Most of the passages in the Zohar that deal with this subject, however, show, either by their style or through content, that this is not something that can explained merely in a symbolic-speculative way. On the contrary, when we put together various hints and allusions, we see their obviously mythical character, and that in the most crucial passages the author tried to conceal the fact.

It is said at one point that the worlds that were destroyed consisted of three hundred and twenty sparks that came from the bozina di-kardinuta (spark of blackness), and they "flared and shone, and went our immediately." Elsewhere, it says, without any reference to destruction of the worlds, that by these sparks the divine thought was cleansed of dross. This means that at the very beginning there was in the divine thought a kind of dross, so to speak--that is, the root of evil nestling there and producing blemished worlds. It was only after these worlds had been destroyed and the evil had been rooted out from the divine thought that it could establish worlds that would be well-ordered. One must assume that the strange and mysterious passage dealing with the image of man in emanation, constructed by three hundred and twenty-five sparks from the bozina di-kardinuta, also refers to the mystery of the destruction of earlier worlds. There it is said that the man had the character of stern judgments, and that the forces of uncleanness streamed from the hairs of his head, where the sparks of the bozina di-kardinuta were to be found, and this image could by purified only by the removal of the hairs....So we see that, hidden in the idea of the destruction of the worlds, there are grains of a daring myth about the way in which the Godhead is cleansed of the root of evil that it contains, before the system of the sefirot can be established. This idea became the basis of the more elaborate and far-reaching myth of the mystery of zimzum [contraction] and the breaking of the vessels in Lurianic kabbalah.

Light through Darkness: The Ideal of Human Perfection in the Zohar, Elliot Wolfson, The Harvard Theological Review Jan., 1988, Vol. 81, No. 1 (Jan., 1988) at 80-82

The gnostic theme of competing cosmic forces is likewise one of the essential doctrines of the Zohar. Like his Castilian predecessors, the author of the Zohar posits a demonic realm, Sitra Ahra, the "Other Side," which parallels the divine. Moreover, the author of the Zohar similarly was concerned with the problem of the origin of evil. Elsewhere I have discussed the two basic approaches to this problem in the Zohar, which I have termed respectively the cathartic and the emanative views. According to the former, evil is the waste eliminated from divine Thought, a process that occurs during the first stages activity before the emanative process. The primary act is conceived of as excretion of the unbalanced forces of judgment, referred to as the "glowing sparks in divine Thought" or mythically as the "primordial kings of Edom who died" (based on Gen 36:31) or the "worlds created and destroyed."' As a result of the divine catharsis two sides emerged: the side of happiness (the holy realm) and the side of sadness (the demonic). The source of evil, then, is in the dross contained in divine Thought. For the purposes of this analysis it is important to bear in mind that the sphere of untempered judgment precedes that of the balanced and harmonious cosmos, the "Edomite" kings before "Israelite" kings³⁴, the destroyed worlds before the worlds that are sustained.

[*Note: 34 It should be pointed out that in one passage the Zohar (2.108b) tries to uphold the ontological priority of Israel as against the chronological priority of Esau: "Israel is the upper kernel [literally, brain] of the world. Israel arose in the [divine] Thought first [cf. Bereshit Rab. 1.4, 6]. The idolatrous nations, which are the shell, preceded [Israel], as it is written, 'And there are the kings who reigned in the land of Edom before any king reigned over the Israelites.' " It is quite possible that the Zoharic interpretation of Gen 36:31ff. is a symbolic depiction of the historical relationship between the Church and the Synagogue, i.e., Christianity, which is symbolically Edom or the demonic power, reigns before Judaism.]

The Zohar, translation and commentary by Daniel Matt, (Vol 5) 2:108b at 131 n.371

Just as the kernel precedes the shell in divine thought, so Israel arose in God's mind before all other nations. And just as the shell precedes the kernel in formation, so the rulers of Edom reigned before any king reigned over the Children of Israel. However, in the time of Redemption, Israel (the kernel) will precede all other nations (the shell) and yet be fully protected.

The Zohar, translation and commentary by Daniel Matt, 2:111a at 98-9 n. 283" These are the kings who reigned in the land of Edom....Since Esau acquired this world first, the kings of his nation (Edom) reigned before any king reigned over the Children of Israel

The Zohar, translation and commentary by Daniel Matt, 2:176b at 544-5 n. 546. [Sifra Di-Tsni'uta] "the primordial kings died...Earlier worlds or emanations (pictured as "primordial kings") were dominated by harsh Judgment, so after existing only momentarily they perished. Finally, the invisible, primal divine configuration clothed itself in sefirot that displayed balance and harmony.

The Zohar, translation and commentary by Daniel Matt (Vol. VIII) 3:128a at 325 n. 18.

Rabbi Shimon is about to to reveal the secret meaning of a passage in Genesis (36:31-39), which begins: These are the kings who reigned in the land of Edom before a king reigned over the Children of Israel. These kings do not constitute a dynasty since none of the successors to the throne is a son of his predecessor. In seven consecutive verses Genesis records And [so and so] died and in the Zohar these royal deaths represent the destruction of unviable emanations tainted by harsh judgment (which is as Edom). Only of the final, eighth king is a wife mentioned and no death recorded.

The notion of earlier emanations that were destroyed recalls the rabbinic description of worlds that were previously destroyed.

The Guide to the Zohar, Arthur Green, at 88-9.

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[T]he Zohar may viewed as a grand defense of Judaism, a poetic demonstration of the truth and superiority of Jewish faith. Its authors knew a great deal about Christianity, mostly from observing it at close hand but also from reading certain Christian works, including the New Testament, which Dominicans and other eager seekers of converts were only too happy to place in the hands of literate and inquisitive Jews. The Kabbalists' attitude toward the religion of their Christian neighbors was a complex one, and it has come down to us through a veil of self-censorship....The Zohar is filled with disdain and sometimes even outright hatred for the Gentile world. Continuing in the old midrashic tradition of repainting the subtle shadings of biblical narrative in moralistic black and white, the Zohar pours endless heaps of wrath and malediction on Israel's enemies. In the context of biblical commentary, these are always such ancient figures as Esau, Pharaoh, Amalek, Balaam, and the mixed multitude of runaway slaves who left Egypt with Israel, a group treated by the Zohar with special venom. All of these were rather safe objects to attack, but it does not take much imagination to realize that the true addressee of this resentment was the oppressor in whose midst the authors lived....All of this is said, of course, without a single negative word about Christianity. But Rabbi Shim'on and his second-century companions lived in a time when the enemies of biblical Israel had long ago disappeared from the earth. They had been replaced by the Roman Empire--pagan in the days of Rabbi Shim'on to be sure, but by the Zohar's time, long associated with Christendom. The reader of the Zohar living in medieval Christian Spain was being firmly admonished to join the battle against those ancient enemies, who strengthened the evil forces, wounded or captured the Shekinah, and thus kept the divine light from shining into this world.

The Wisdom of the Zohar, Isaiah Tishby, at 276-7. "[There is] another version, which is based on the old midrashic idea that the Holy One, blessed be He, 'used to create worlds and destroy them, until He created those we have.' The worlds that were destroyed were, according to the Zohar, earlier emanations that were emanated from the Holy, Ancient One (Keter) before the system of the sefirot from Hokhmah downward was established. These earlier emanations, which were not viable and were therefore annulled, are called "kings," referring to 'the kings of Edom that died,' to which an allusion is found in Genesis 36:31: 'And these are the kings that reigned in the land of Edom, before there reigned any king over the children of Israel.' They are depicted as designs that were woven into a curtain that the Holy, Ancient One spread out before him, and which became indistinct; or as sparks that fly off the blacksmith's hammer and immediately become extinguished. The reason for the destruction of the worlds, or for the death of the kings, is put like this: judgments at that time were severe, because they had not yet been constituted into that perfectly balanced system in which love, judgment, and mercy are intermingled. The balanced system is symbolized by a pair of scales (matkala) or by an image of man, constructed in the form of perfect harmony, which holds opposite forces in balance through the union of male and female. "....And all the worlds were destroyed. For what reason? Because Man has not yet been prepared; for the preparation of Man in his image comprises all, and all can live in him. And since this preparation did not exist, there were not able to survive or live, and were annulled" It was only after the unsuccessful emanations had been annulled and hidden that the process of permanent emanation began, and in the system from Hokhmah down to Malchut, a balanced equilibrium was established, and the complete, perfect image of man was designed.

Studies in the Zohar, Yehuda Liebes, at 65-6.

The tikkun, then, is completed with that of Jerusalem and the Sanctuary. Moreover, the defect it rectifies, too, has a historical aspect. The discussion of this defect in the Idrot (III, 128a; 135a; 142a; 292a) is founded upon the verse: “And these are the kings that reigned in the land of Edom before there reigned any king over the children of Israel (Gen. xxxxvi:31). Not for naught was precisely this verse singled out, for the defective situation manifested itself in history in the exile of the Jews; during that time the kings of Edom (who are identified with the kings of Rome and the Christian lands) rule the world, and the Jews, who still have no king of their own, are subject to them. In such a situation the kings of Edom themselves are “flawed” and destroyed for their natural state is one of subordination to the King of Israel, the Messiah who is to come after the tikkun. On their own, the kings of Edom function as the agents of harsh judgment (just as the judgment of Ze’er Anpin is harsh when he is separated from Arikh Anpin), and that is the reason for their severity toward the Jews. To be sure, the kings of Edom are symbolic here of the worlds that were destroyed before the Holy One created our world. It is in the nature of the kabbalistic symbol, however, to allude to supernal worlds while speaking of terrestrial (and perhaps the converse as well). This is also the case in the Idra, which would seem to speak only of catastrophes that occurred prior to the creation of the world, but in fact simultaneously alludes to current historical disasters and how they may be overcome. Indeed, there is a profound link between the two realms; the sitra ahra, which has its origin in the heavenly kings of Edom, is the source of the power of the terrestrial kings of Edom (i.e., the Christians). When the heavenly kings are overcome—or undergo tikkun—the earthly monarchs, too, will be defeated—or undergo tikkun. This idea is heavily reminiscent of a rabbinic saying to which the Zohar often alludes. “The Holy One blessed be He does not strike down a nation before He strikes down its (heavenly) prince.

A Guide to the Zohar, Arthur Green, at 118-9

[T]he Zohar presents two distinct pictures of the Sitra Ahara's [the "Other Side"] origins, Most prevalent is the image of the Other Side as the fiery dross emitted by Gevurah at the moment of its emanation. Some passages describe this in terms of the tension between Hesed and Gevurah discussed earlier. Other texts see it as an act of purgation, as God casting the roots of anger and harshness out of the emergent divine self. Having been forcibly, even violently, removed from the realm of divinity, this dross reconstitutes itself as the forces of the demonic Other. This vision was derived from the teachings of Rabbi Moses of Burgos. A second vision, enunciated in hints and veiled allusions, goes beyond even the teachings of Rabbi Isaac in its radicality. It uses the Torah's account of the genealogy of the Edomite kings (Gen. 36:31 ff.), who "reigned and died before there was a king in Israel." These "kings that died" are taken by the Zohar to allude to a set of primordial, purgative expulsions of negative energy from the depths of Keter, preceding even the very beginning of the ordered sefirotic emanation. Only this removal of the dross at the highest level cleared the way for the proper revelation of the sefirotic potencies. Its origin in this highest and most recondite divine realm accounts for the great and mysterious power the Zohar attributes to the demonic.

Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem, at 266.

This idea of the "breaking of the vessels" was developed by Luria in a highly original manner from a suggestion made in the Zohar. In a midrash to which I have referred already in the first Lecture (set forth above), mention is made of the destruction of worlds before the creation of the now existing cosmos. The Zohar's interpretation of this Aggadah is that it refers to the creation of worlds in which only the forces of Gevurah, the Sefirah of stern judgment were active, and which were therefore destroyed by this excess of sternness. This event in turn is placed in relation to the list of the Kings of Edom in chapter 36 of Genesis, of whom nothing is said but that they built a town and died. "And these are the Kings that reigned in the land of Edom,"--Edom signifying the realm of stern judgment untempered by compassion. But the world is maintain through harmony of grace and strict judgment, of the masculine and the feminine, a harmony that the Zohar calls the "balance." The death of the "primordial kings," of which more is said in the Idra Rabba and the Idra Zutta in the Zohar, now re-appears in Luria's system as the "breaking of the vessels."

Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship, Lawrence Fine at 135-6

The image of the seven kings of Edom in the above passage plays an exceedingly important role in Lurianic teachings. The image derives from Genesis 36:31, "These are the kings who reigned in the land of Edom before any king ruled over the Israelites." In the Idra Rabba of the Zohar, the seven kings signify the forces of strict Judgment with which the divine originally sought to initiate the process of emanation. Seeing as how they consisted of Judgment, however, "they could not survive, so that after a time He concealed them. This is [the meaning] of the verse 'And these are the kings who reigned in the land of Edom." 'In the land of Edom'--in the place where all the Judgments exist" that is, God had to abandon His attempt to create the world using the forces of Din alone and turned instead to combining the attributes of Hesed (Compassion), Din (Judgment), and Rahamim (Mercy). The Zohar further connects this theme to a well-known midrashic motif according to which the Holy One, blessed be He, "created worlds and destroyed them, before He created these."

Drawing precisely upon such older mythic themes from rabbinic and Zoharic literature, Luria identified the Breaking of the Vessels with these images of stern judgment and wicked kings, that is, flawed worlds that had been created and destroyed. Here, then, we have a principal explanation for this catastrophic cosmic rupture. The effect of the Breaking of the Vessels and the death of the kings of Edom was to conceal or separate the forces of Judgment from some of the pure elements of divinity, for the vessels (though not the sefirotic light within them) were formed out the roots of Judgment in the first place. As mentioned, their rupture resulted in the reascent of most of the pure light that the vessels had contained.