  The two strongest identifiable influences on Ibn Ezra’s thought are the anonymous tract known as Sefer Yesira and Sa‘adiah Gaon. The former is his acknowledged source for surveying reality according to three parallel schemes: Hebrew letters, numbers, and the cosmos. Sa‘adiah is cited very frequently, over thirty times in the commentary to the Torah alone. Some medieval writers cite from a commentary to Sefer Yesira that they ascribe to Ibn Ezra. Paul Fenton (2001) has argued that the text in question is a Hebrew condensation of the commentary by Dunash Ibn Tamîm, originally written in Arabic, and that Ibn Ezra may indeed have prepared the Hebrew version. However, Dunash was a student of Isaac Israeli, who strongly criticized Sa‘adiah’s commentary to Sefer Yesira. Thus Ibn Ezra may, unwittingly, have drawn most heavily upon two divergent streams of thought. As we have seen, this is not as shocking as it may seem. Ibn Ezra was interested in ideas, but not in putting them all together into one tight and fully coherent system.