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Dan Levene. A Corpus of Magic Bowls: Incantation Texts in Jewish Aramaic from Late Antiquity. London: Kegan Paul, 2003. xiv, 223 pp. DOI: 10.1017/S0364009407000633
In 1888, J. P. Peters, excavating the ancient town of Nippur in southern Iraq for the University of Pennsylvania, discovered, in what he termed a "Jewish settlement," that food bowls had been buried upside down under the thresholds of houses. These bowls were inscribed on the inside in spirals with incantation texts in Babylonian Jewish Aramaic, Syriac, and Mandaic. Since James A. Montgomery published his seminal edition of forty bowls in 1913, more bowls in Jewish Aramaic have been published by Cyrus Gordon, Mark Geller, Joseph Naveh, Shaul Shaked, and several others, not to mention publications of Mandaic and Syriac bowls by Edwin Yamaguchi, Isaac Jerusalmi, and others. As of this writing, more than a thousand of these bowls are known to exist, making them the single largest inscriptional source for Judaism in late antiquity. Several hundred await publication, particularly those in the private collection of Martin Schøyen, which are to be published shortly by Shaul Shaked.
The full significance of the magical bowls has yet to be assessed. They are sources for information about individual Jews, Christians, and Mandaeans from talmudic Babylonia; allude to the Bible, Talmud, Hekhalot literature, and the New Testament; and provide essential evidence for several dialects of Aramaic. Yet the bowls have not been fully integrated into the history of religions in late antiquity. A few brief synthetic studies by Jacob Neusner, Shaul Shaked, Rebecca Lesses, Ra'anan Boustan, and others point the way to how this corpus can deepen our understanding of the social and cultural environment in which the Babylonian rabbinate, early Jewish mysticism, and Zoroastrian influences interacted. However, a thorough description of the religious phenomenon and social classes represented...