The word “Kabbalah” means “doctrine received by oral tradition,” and is applied to these remains to distinguish them from the canonical Hebrew Scriptures, which were written by “the Finger of Jehovah.” Hebrew speculation attempts in the Kabbalah to give a philosophical or theosophistic basis to Hebrew belief, while at the same time it supplements the doctrines of the Old Testament. For instance, it is a disputed point whether the immortality of the soul is taught in the Hebrew canon, but in the Kabbalah it is taken for granted, and a complete and consistent psychology is propounded, in which is included the Oriental theory of metempsychosis. This account of the human soul, as distinct from the human body, treats of the origin and eternal destiny of man’s immortal part. On the other hand God and Nature, and the connection between the Creator and the creation, are most exactly treated of in detail. God is the _En-Soph_, the boundless One, as in modern philosophy God is the Absolute. He manifests Himself in the ten _Sephiroth_, or intelligences. It would be easy on this point to show Dante’s indebtedness to the Kabbalah in his description of the various heavens of his Paradise. These intelligences control, in groups of three, the three worlds of intellect, of soul, and of matter. The tenth of the _Sephiroth_ is called Kingdom, _i.e._, the personal Deity, as seen in the workings of Providence, with which conception we may compare Dante’s description of Fortune, in the seventh book of the “Inferno.” This last of the _Sephiroth_ is manifested visibly in the Shekinah. This is the barest and baldest outline of the main features in this famous system. The rise of Kabbalism is not very clearly known as regards authorship and date; it is in turn, by different Jewish writers, ascribed to Adam, Abraham, Moses and Ezra; but doubtless the work is an aggregation of successive writings, and some critics believe that it was not compiled before the Middle Ages, _i.e._, in the centuries between the conquest of Gaul by the Franks and the period following the death of Dante.