Mystic Tales from the Zohar

The Zohar (the word itself means “brilliant light”) is a Jewish medieval
mystic text that appeared in late thirteenth-century Christian Spain.
Written in an artificial Aramaic, masking a medieval Hebrew, it is a
collection of mystical writings including a homiletical commentary
on the Torah. The author wrote the Zohar as a pseudepigraphical
work, claiming it to be the composition or statement of the teachings
and revelations given to Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai, a second-century
talmudic sage. For this reason, the Zohar is written in Aramaic, the
language of the greater part of the Talmud. Largely as a result of
Gershom Scholem’s monumental research on the subject, contemporary
critical scholars virtually unanimously believe the major part of
the Zohar to be the work of Moses ben Shem Tov of Leon.