Bereshit Rabbah — the world from a plan

The great aggadic midrash on Genesis, compiled in the Land of Israel around the fifth century — verse by verse, in the associative, argumentative, story-telling register that is the opposite of legal writing.

It matters to this app for its first sentence, which is one of the most consequential openings in the literature: the Torah as the uman, the craftsman's tool, and the world built from a drawing that already existed.

Worth naming the register, as with every source in this house. This is not mystical literature and not law — it is homiletic, and it argues by parable and by wordplay. The whole reading turns on hearing amon in Proverbs 8:30 as uman, which is a pun, offered as a pun. Eight hundred years later the Zohar takes that pun and builds a cosmology on it. That is a real and traceable line of descent, and it starts with a joke about vowels. The third register of source in this part of the house: law (Berakhot, Menachot), midrash (here), and Kabbalah proper.