This article focuses on the social and professional contexts of the producers of Jewish Aramaic incantation bowls. Based on the vast amount of legal terminology deployed in the bowls, as well as a reference to bowl writers as 'writers of... more
This article focuses on the social and professional contexts of the producers of Jewish Aramaic incantation bowls. Based on the vast amount of legal terminology deployed in the bowls, as well as a reference to bowl writers as 'writers of books' in bowl AMB6, I argue that bowl scribes were part of a professional guild of scribes (soferim) that engaged in a variety of forms of Jewish writing. Furthermore, I suggest that the scribal context of the practitioners of the magic bowls was different from the professional context of the contemporaneous corpus of Jewish metal amulets. Identifying the unique Sitz im Leben of the bowls reveals that for Jews in Sasanian Babylonia the line between magic, law and religion was not rigid, and perhaps non-existent. Further work on the context of ancient Jewish magic may therefore lead to new perceptions of ancient Jewish society.
A Modern Jewish amulet from the Gross Family Collection, written in Morocco in 1930, contains the text of the Pishra de-Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa (“The witchcraft-loosening spell of Rabbi hanina, son of Dosa”), which goes back to Jewish... more
A Modern Jewish amulet from the Gross Family Collection, written in Morocco in 1930, contains the text of the Pishra de-Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa (“The witchcraft-loosening spell of Rabbi hanina, son of Dosa”), which goes back to Jewish Babylonia of the rabbinic period, and is based on much older Akkadian anti-witchcraft texts such as the Maqlû-spells. The paper describes the amulet and its textual history, and points to other amulets produced by the same scribe or in the same milieu.
The present work aims at reexamining the evidence related to a group of entities usually known as mārāt Ani " daughters of Anu " , who act frequently in second and first-millennium Mesopotamian magical texts. On the basis of a new... more
The present work aims at reexamining the evidence related to a group of entities usually known as mārāt Ani " daughters of Anu " , who act frequently in second and first-millennium Mesopotamian magical texts. On the basis of a new analysis of their action in a recently published witness, CUSAS 10.11, and by means of the typological organization of their occurrence in magical cuneiform literature, it is intended to both shed light on the motive's variability throughout the times and to propose a reconstruction of the evolution of the features of this group of divine beings.
