From these sources, and the numberless treatises and expositions thereon, the history of the subject matter and containment of Cabbalah is laid down as follows: It was first taught by God himself to a select company of angels. After the fall the angels taught it to Adam. From Adam it passed to Noah, thence to Abram, the friend of God who carried it to Egypt. Moses, who was learned in all the wisdom of Egypt, was initiated into it from the land of his birth. He covertly laid down the principles of its doctrines in the first four books of the Pentateuch, but withheld them from Deuteronomy (“this constitutes the former the ‘_man_’ and the latter the ‘_woman_’”). Moses initiated the seventy elders, and they again passed the sacred and secret doctrine down to the heads (continually imparting the same) of the Church of Israel. David and Solomon were adepts in it. No one dared to write it down till the supposititious Simon ben Jochai, who really lived and taught, as one of the most celebrated doctors, at the time of the destruction of the second temple; and his teachings are claimed to constitute the Book of Sohar, published, as already said, by Moses de Leon of Valladolid, in Spain. But Ben Jochai, or whoever worked under his name, though he wrote and published, as said, covered the true doctrine by veils, so that no one but an initiate, or, as the saying runs, “by the gift of God,” could penetrate behind them;—though the veils of the words still plainly held the secret doctrine, to those who could see. The Cabbalah, as an exposition to the Sacred Text of Holy Writ, was claimed to contain the Wisdom of God in every branch and department of His working,—and all terms and descriptions were exhausted to express the ineffable reward to him who might be permitted to penetrate behind the veil, either by initiation or “by the gift of God;” satiating every function of enjoyment, and affording an indescribable bliss, in the ultimate possessions of the Divine conceptions.