SEFER MEGALLEH AMUKOT (KABBALISTIC COMMENTARY ON PARASHAT VA-ETHANAN), RABBI NATHAN NOTE SHAPIRO, KRAKOW: MENAHEM NAHUM BEN MOSES MEISELS, 1637

The first edition of a classic of Ashkenazic Kabbalah.

Rabbi Nathan Note Shapiro (ca. 1585-1633), grandson and namesake of the author of Sefer imrei shefer (see lot 165), was a respected yeshiva dean and head of the rabbinic court of Krakow. An early Polish adherent of Lurianic Kabbalah as transmitted by Rabbi Israel Sarug (late sixteenth-early seventeenth centuries), he composed the present work as a kabbalistic-numerological commentary on a single passage in the Torah, Moses’ plea to God to allow him to enter the Land of Canaan in Deut. 3:23ff. (the beginning of Parashat va-ethanan). The work as published by the author’s son Rabbi Solomon, who also served as its editor, contains 252 interpretations of this pericope. We are told that Shapiro had actually composed one thousand different explanations of the passage but decided rav lakh (it was sufficient; Deut. 3:26) to publish only 252 of them (the numerological value of rav lakh being 252).