e occupies a large place in the Zoharic
treatise, Idra Raba.[45]

According to the Cabala, every letter in the Scriptures contains a
mystery only to be solved by the initiated.[46] By means of this system
of interpretation passages of the Old Testament are shown to bear
meanings totally unapparent to the ordinary reader. Thus the Zohar
explains that Noah was lamed for life by the bite of a lion whilst he
was in the ark,[47] the adventures of Jonah inside the whale are related
with an extraordinary wealth of imagination,[48] whilst the beautiful
story of Elisha and the Shunnamite woman is travestied in the most
grotesque manner.[49]

In the practical Cabala this method of "decoding" is reduced to a
theurgic or magical system in which the healing of diseases plays an
important part and is effected by means of the mystical arrangement of
numbers and letters, by the pronunciation of the Ineffable Name, by the
use of amulets and talismans, or by compounds supposed to contain
certain occult properties.

All these ideas derived from very ancient cults; even the art of working
miracles by the use of the Divine Name, which after the appropriation of
the Cabala by the Jews became the particular practice of Jewish
miracle-workers, appears to have originated in Chaldea.[50] Nor can the
insistence on the Chosen People theory, which forms the basis of all
Talmudic and Cabalistic writings, be regarded as of purely Jewish
origin; the ancient Egyptians likewise believed themselves to be "the
peculiar people specially loved by the gods."[51] But in the hands of
the Jews this belief became a pretension to the exclusive enjoyment of
divine favour. According to the Zohar, "all Israelites will have a part
in the future world,"[52] and on arrival there will not be handed over
like the _goyim_ (or non-Jewish races) to the hands of the angel Douma
and sent down to Hell.[53] Indeed the _goyim_ are even denied human
attributes. Thus the Zohar again explains that the words of the
Scripture "Jehovah Elohim made man" mean that He made Israel.[54] The
seventeenth-century Rabbinical treatise Emek ha Melek observes: "Our
Rabbis of blessed memory have said: 'Ye Jews are men because of the soul
ye have from the Supreme Man (i.e. God). But the nations of the world
are not styled men because they have not, from the Holy and Supreme Man,
the Neschama (or glorious soul), but they have the Nephesch (soul) from
Adam Belial, that is the malicious and unneces