| Sumario: | This article explores poetic aspects of narrating creation in the Zoharic literature, focusing specifically on the ʿad lo formula and its coupling with hysteron proteron (from later to earlier). It first provides a description of the genealogy of the ʿʿad lo formula in the Aramaic Palestinian piyyut and midrash literature and traces its renaissance in the Zohar. It then explores the unique features of the Zoharic stage. While earlier sources use ʿad lo to denote the temporal framing of the primordium, the Zohar employs it to present chaos, disorder, and demiurgical failure and struggle. The Zohar also uses ʿad lo in a novel way, flipping the temporal arrow of the cosmogonical timeline. The poetics of beginning as ending used in conjunction with ʿad lo produces textual disruptions that echo temporal and cosmological disruption.
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