(-> Kabbalah, Kingdom). Hebrew word meaning “kingdom”, from the root mlk: king or reign. One of the most used words in the Hebrew Bible, in which God appears as King* and the people of Israel are organized for centuries in the form of a Kingdom*. The Kabbalah interprets it as the tenth and last of the sefirot* or emanations of God. Just as Kether (crown), which was the first of the sefirot, Malkuth or the Kingdom, which is the last, expresses divine power, as the principle and meaning of all reality. Only at the end of the process of its manifestation, starting from Kether and passing through Holikma or founding Wisdom, through the three triads, one more in line with founding reality (Kether*, Hokhtnah* and Binali*), another of love (Hesed*, Din* and Tifereth) and another in line of cosmic order (Netzaj*, Hod, Yesod), God can present himself in his truth as divine, establishing the Malkuth or Kingdom. In this sense, the Kingdom constitutes the culmination of the process of emanation from God, being, at the same time, the sign and principle of the return: everything that has sprung from God returns to God, in a mysterious way. In this way we can speak of a divine and cosmic current, of an unfolding and a folding, of a widening and a narrowing that form the heartbeats of God, which opens to establish everything that exists from itself, in the Kingdom, and that returns to itself to include everything in its absolute mystery. In this way God returns to his divinity, including all things in himself. In this line, we can affirm that the Hebrew God of the Kabbalah expresses himself through the ten sefirot, culminating in the Kingdom and returning to himself again. Certainly, we must compare the Kabbalistic unfolding of God with the Christian revelation, according to the message of Jesus, where the Kingdom* also constitutes an essential element of the unfolding of God and of the being of creation. But Christianity conceives this deployment from a more historical perspective, through the universal mediation of the crucified and risen Jesus, who makes himself present in the poor. In addition, many Christians, as well as the Jewish rabbis, think that the Kabbalistic deployment and withdrawal of God runs the risk of pantheism, which leads to the identification of everything with God.
Cf. J. Dan, Gershom Scholem and the Mystical Mysticism, New York 1987; M. IDEL, Kabbaiah: New Perspectives, New Haven/London 1988; G. SCHOLEM, The great trends of Jewish mysticism, Siruela, Madrid 2000.
PIKAZA, Javier, Dictionary of the Bible. History and Word, Divine Word, Navarra 2007
Source: Dictionary of Bible History and Word