Sefer Hashi'ur on the Divine Body - The Use of the Word "Gubah" as the Height of the Body

Sefer Hashi'ur begins with a description of the divine body.  The Hebrew word for the height of the body is "gubah" (גובה).

This word was also used in the Babylonial Talmud as the word for "log", but specifically as the log of the palm tree in Bava Kamma 96a:


"If one stole a palm tree and made it into logs, he does not acquire it.  For even now, at any rate, they are still called 'palm-tree logs'.  Their name, then remains essentially the same.  If however, he stole logs and made them into beams, he does acquire them."

The reason is that the logs are called 'palm tree logs', while the beams are simply called 'beams', not 'palm tree beams'.  This indicates that a change of name effects the ruling.  This reveals a similarity in the concept of names between the halakhic ruling and the names of the parts of the divine body. 

The word is also used in tractate Shabbat 109a as the word for the pieces of a snake, in the following sense:

"One who swallowed a snake should be fed hops with salt, and be made to run for three mils.  There are those who report that Rav Shimi bar Ashi swallwed a snake. The prophet Elijah came and appeared to him as a horseman. He made him eat hops with salt, and he made him run in front of him for three mils. The snake came out of him in pieces."

The idea behind the word "pieces" means that the parts that came out were still intact to the point of being called 'pieces' of snake, and not as an amorphous decomposed matter.  This indicates that the word can represent the concept of a system being divided into pieces that all retain their ordered relationship to the whole, both in terms of the part-to-whole and part-to-part connections.

The teaching is that the names are the secret codes used by the divine intelligence to map words onto body parts with a mathematical precision that is a function of the sequence of Hebrew letters that make up the word.