Ancient Jewish Magical Texts and Artifacts

Across the ancient world, people sought supernatural means of protection from the hardships that afflicted their daily lives. Jews, in their resort to amulets, spells, and various magical practices, were no different. Early scholarship on this subject often disregarded Jewish magical texts and artifacts, preferring to paint ancient Judaism as rational and nonsuperstitious and magical acts as a marginal practice limited to the uneducated. In the past few decades, as more texts and artifacts have been discovered, scholars have rejected these apologetic tendencies and recognized the central role that magic played in the ancient Jewish world more broadly. In ancient times, demons and other forces of evil were treated as genuine threats to daily life, including by Jews.

In Sasanian Mesopotamia from the fifth to the seventh century CE, one tool used to expel demons and their corresponding harm was clay incantation bowls, commonly known as magic bowls. The magic bowls were produced by professional scribes who wrote incantations, spells, divine names, and curses in ink on the surface of the bowl. Later, the bowl was buried, usually in the home of the client who commissioned it, to expel the demons and ward off future harm. The bowls may have functioned as demonic “mousetraps,” meant to capture the demons and prevent demonic aggression. They also offer rich evidence for the daily lives, concerns, and beliefs of Babylonian Jews other than the rabbis. Many have noted, for example, that the incantation bowls reveal a context in which members of different religious groups, especially Jews, Syriac Christians, and Mandaeans, interacted. This interaction helps explain the existence of incantations shared between bowls in different languages, occasionally preserving features of the original language from which they were taken. Exemplary figures of one group sometimes appear in bowls written in other languages, such as rabbis named in Syriac bowls or Christian figures in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic bowls. The bowls also reveal more prosaic aspects of daily life, such as incantations for the success of a business, and they provide crucial prosopographical information about the makeup of Jewish households. Some incantation bowls include images, typically of a demon or demoness, with chained or bound arms and legs.

Although Babylonian incantation bowls are by far the most plentiful Jewish magical artifacts from late antiquity, amulets from Roman Palestine and the diaspora have also been found. These amulets were written on thin plaques of metal and rolled up, to be worn on the body or placed in a home or synagogue.

The Book of the Mysteries (Sefer ha-razim) is a Jewish magical text dating to the late third or early fourth century CE. Purporting to have been given to Noah by the angel Raziel and eventually transmitted to Solomon, it describes the seven heavens and the angels that inhabit them, prescribing rituals for eliciting their powers. The work has close connections to Greco-Egyptian magical texts and offers more evidence of the interrelationship between Jews and their neighbors in the practice of magic.