Imrei Shefer · אמרי שפר

A treatise on the knowledge of the Explicit Name alone — its power, its workings and its properties, and that no other name has any share in it — written by an author who calls himself Zechariah, to revive, he says, the souls of the few who will understand it. He explains its name, Imrei Shefer, "goodly words": in it he sets a burning fire in the hearts of fools and kindles the hearts of the enlightened. He divides it into three discourses on the opinions of the sages of his generation, three gates on the opinion of the ancient sages of Israel, and three parts on what all the prophets hold; after them comes the general knowledge, the mainstay, he says, of the whole book: what the knowledge of the Name is and the reward and punishment for remembering and forgetting it, why man was created and why the Torah was given, then the ten sefirot in world, year and soul, and the ways of permuting the letters of Sefer Yetsirah — the way that brings the soul to prophecy. He writes, he says, in the year 51, after twenty-one years of composing books on this knowledge, among them Or ha-Sekhel, Gan Na'ul, Sefer ha-Hesheq and Pardes ha-Sefer.