Saul Kripke on Names, identity and the angels of the Hekhalot

What is it about?

This chapter pursues the developments present in the Hekhalot literature as it persistently blurs the boundaries of the divine and created, with an amorphous flurry of angelic and heavenly beings, many of which bear the Name of God. Angelic beings such as Metatron, Akatriel and Anafiel seem to form a heavenly retinue where the identity of God is fragmented into several distinct potencies. Scholars have stared aghast at the virtual polytheism of these texts and their vitiating of distinct entities. However, Saul Kripke’s philosophy of naming allows for a new reading whereby the ‘pleroma’ is not one of variegated divine identities, but one constituted of names as subjective, relational aspects of the singular divinity.

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