A Curse Bowl from Mesopotamia

Although incantation bowls are not mentioned explicitly in the Talmud, the use of amulets is mentioned in several places, and the bowls refer to themselves as amulets, as can be seen from a common Aramaic formula that appears on a number of them: “This amulet” (kami‘a’ dihi). The texts written on the bowls constitute the only Jewish epigraphic material that survives from Babylonia from the time of the editing of the Talmud. (The earliest surviving talmudic manuscripts were copied centuries later.) Thus they are of considerable importance for the study of rabbinic literature and the history of the Jews in late antiquity. Some of the bowls’ incantations parallel elements of rabbinic literature and other ancient Jewish texts. The incantations employ scripture, liturgical quotations, rabbinic names, and legal formulae. It was, for example, a common technique to “divorce” demons with a Jewish divorce document (get). Many of the bowls mention R. Joshua bar Peraḥia, a tannaitic rabbi and nasi from the second century BCE who developed a mythologized reputation as an author of demonic divorces. Whereas amulets written on other media (metal or parchment) in the Palestinian west and environs were worn on a person or inserted into the walls of a home, incantation bowls were buried under the threshold of one’s house. The practice may have begun as early as the fourth century CE and appears to have ceased upon the Islamic conquest, in the mid-seventh century.