Orḥot Ḥayyim
ORḤOT ḤAYYIM
ORḤOT ḤAYYIM (Heb. אׁרְחוֹת חַיִּים; "Ways of Life"), or Zavva'at Rabbi Eliezer (Heb. צַוָּאַת רבִּי אֱלִיעזֶר; "The Ethical Will of Rabbi Eliezer"), one of the most popular and best-known short treatises on ethics and moralistic behavior in medieval Hebrew literature. Orḥot Ḥayyim is arranged in the form of an ethical will (*Wills, Ethical), and owing to the fact that it begins with the talmudic story about the illness of Rabbi *Eliezer b. Hyrcanus, was conventionally attributed to him. However, as early as the Middle Ages, doubts arose as to whether he was in fact the author, and Menahem b. Judah de *Lonzano and other scholars after him ascribed the work to *Eliezer b. Isaac Ashkenazi of the 11th century. Orḥot Ḥayyim was first printed, together with other works, in Venice in 1544; and it has been reprinted many times. There are two commentaries to it–one by Abraham Mordecai Virnikowski (1888), and one by Gershon Hanoch Leiner of Radzyn (1891).
There are several bibliographical problems in connection with Orḥot Ḥayyim which have been studied by Israel Abrahams and Gershom Scholem. The work consists of two parts: the first is the ethical will, comprising short paragraphs of moralistic advice given by a father to his son; and the second, called "Seder Gan Eden," is a treatise on the structure of and the different palaces (heikhalot) in the garden of Eden. The two parts were printed as a single entity and are found together in early manuscripts; Scholem noted that the work as a whole usually appears in manuscript collections of kabbalistic material, often in close proximity to works written by *Moses b. Shem Tov de Leon, the reputed author of the Zohar.
There is virtually no doubt about the date of the second part of Orḥot Ḥayyim; its descriptions of the heikhalot of the garden of Eden bear a close resemblance to the descriptions found in the Zohar, and various other motifs are common to both works. Scholem has suggested that if the author of the Zohar had written his work in Hebrew, the result would have been very similar in style to the "Seder Gan Eden." Hence it must have been written by a member of the kabbalistic circles of the end of the 13th century, very probably by Moses de Leon himself.
The problem is whether the same can be said about the first part of Orḥot Ḥayyim, the ethical will attributed to Rabbi Eliezer. Scholem believes that it is impossible to make any distinction between the two parts; nonetheless, there are great differences in style between them, and it is difficult to discover any hint of mystical speculation in the first part. It is possible that the first part is in fact an Ashkenazi work dating from the 11th century or later, whereas the second part was added at a later period. However, the question must be regarded as an open one.
bibliography:
I. Abrahams, Hebrew Ethical Wills, 1 (1926), 30–49; A. Jellinek, Beit ha-Midrash, 3 (19382), xxvi–xxviii, 131–40; G. Scholem, in: Le-Agnon Shai (1959), 293ff.
[Joseph Dan]