NOTES - ANCIENT JEWISH MAGIC 6/24/2022

INTRODUCTION: A CONFLICT IN TERMS

• in fact, it took a complete outsider – an Indian anthropologist and novelist – to admit that a very large number of the documents in the Geniza . . . consist of magical formulae, and treatises related to esoteric rites.”
• While the deliberate neglect of Jewish magic might be characteristic especially of older scholarship, still constrained by age-old Jewish apologetics and the Enlightenment’s disdain for all forms of magic and superstition, it is in no way uncommon in contemporary scholarship as well.
• The entirety of page 10
• Why do people say theres no such thing as Jewish Magic? Well, there are 5 big reasons:
• 1) Magic is forbidden by the bible, therefore torah observant jews shun it
• 2) Magic is irrational, and therefore must be the soil of the lowest, least educated jews
• 3) Magic is non-monotheistic, and must exist outside the divine will
• 4) Magic is not a definable set of practices, simply the name given to practices of The Other
• 5) Magic is riven through jewish history, inexorable from it
• All of these claims deny the fact that there is a distinct Jewish magical tradition
• It seems like magic is generally a very conserevative thing in jewish culture
• “These distinctions notwithstanding, the biggest difference between the Jewish holy men and the magicians seems to have been that the former relied on their own innate powers, and on readily available paraphernalia, to perform their miraculous deeds. The magicians, on the other hand, relied on an acquired body of technical knowledge – whose changing contents are the main focus of the present study – and often also on specifically magical implements, materials, words, and symbols, to perform their own miracles.“27
• the Hebrew Bible displays a deep-seated conviction that many striking feats – from the cleaving of rivers to the destruction of mighty walls – could be achieved not only by men of God, but also by the correct manipulation of God’s sacred objects. Similarly, the Greek distinction between “true piety” and “superstition,” that is, religious behavior which simply made no sense to a rational (Greek) observer, was quite meaning-less to most ancient Jews. 38
• This, then, is the first answer to the question of Jewish magic and Jewish rationality in antiquity. There never was a clash between the two, for the simple reason that the second phenomenon did not yet exist. 38

Does Magic work? 41

• Sometimes
• Theres a jewish spell for killing mice that involves filling their holes with three ingredients, including arsenic.

The Manipulation of Emotions:

• “Presumably, the same was true for many other Jews, who never turned to exorcists for the solution of medical problems whose origins certainly were not demonic, or turned to them only when all other physicians failed to solve their problem.”
• Its very possible that magic was a last resort
• “Emotionalist” explanations claim that the magic has some sort of significant psychological effect on the body, but that doesn’t explain all magic
• Like teleportation.

The manipulation of symbols and cultural-specific assumptions

• “The rationality of magic mmust be sought in cultural specific terms”
• Ex. If every force has an angel administering, why not abjure that angel?
• This search for culturally specific meaning can get lost in data
• “In other words, it shows us how a ritual might “work” in the cultural sense of the word,but not how it might actually work in achieving the results it proclaims.”
• We should try to understand the notions of the past, but not without giving up on our own
• Rational: That which makes sense, and/or that which works.

Statistics and excuses

• Magicians, faced with the failure of a spell, had to come up with some reason why the spell failed, leading to their professional attitude..
• Moreover, as we shall see throughout thepresent book, there are many more interesting questions to ask when studying ancient Jewish magic than the banal question, “But did it work?” Even if we could offer a reliable analysis of the efficacy of each magical ritual employed by ancient Jews, the answer would probably not be worth the effort invested in reaching it. And even if our answer would be mostly negative, as suggested above, this would not make the study of ancient Jewish magic any less interesting – and perhaps even more so. For it is precisely when human convictions are demonstrably false yet stubbornly persistent that their study becomes most rewarding.

Magic and Monotheism

• “Monotheistic gods are immune to magic.” < wrong

THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD

Introduction

• There is an important distinction to make between Insider and Outsider views of magic
• There is a difference between Magicians, and how magicians were depicted by people who were not magicians
• Do stories of magical practicioners from fiction reflect real-world practices?
• 
  
• Theres little evidence from this period, and what we have is fragile
• We dont get solid evidence until the 5th and 6th centuries with Palestinian Amulets and Babylonian demon bowls
• 
  
• Two big Questions:
• (1)What was the Jewish attitude to magic and magicians in the Second Temple period?
• (2) What types of magical rituals were practiced by Jews at the time?

the jewish discourse of “magic” in the second temple period

• Two big things defined the second temple period:
• Social Upheaval
• Diversity, fragmentation and social division
• 
  
• “Josephus, writing in Rome in the last three decades of the first century ce, neatly divided Jewish society into three “schools” – the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes – to which he added a fourth wheel, the Zealots, who were like the Pharisees in all else but were fanatic in their rejection of Roman rule. “
• However, basically no modern scholar finds that archealogical evidence falls neatly into these schools (74)
• Bohak says that the reality is more like the three schools were sorta “bundled” into combinations kinda like cable packages.
• This period saw an explosion of development
• “It saw the rise of new institutions (a non-Davidic kingship, the synagogue, a non-priestly class of Torah-interpreters), groups (Sadducees,Pharisees, Essenes, Therapeutai, followers of Jesus, and so on), beliefs (in an afterlife, in an approaching eschaton, in the Messiah, in elaborate demonologies and angelologies), attitudes (extreme iconophobia, avoidance of intermarriage with non-Jews, sectarian and dualistic mindsets, and so on), practices (fighting on the Sabbath, the acceptance of Gentile converts, and the forced conversion of the Jews’ neighbors), and modes of biblical exegesis (allegorism, pesher, etc.), some of which were short-lived, while others are still with us today.” 75
• Also, Jews were now willing to kill and die for god
• The social turmoil only ended with the de-judaization of Israel and the defeat of the bar-kokhba revolt by physically eliminating the people causing the problems
• You would expect a period of theological diversity to be full of accusations of magic, but this isnt the case. Josephus never mentions it, and the Dead Sea Scrolls make myriad use of the term “Sons of Darkness” but never “magic” 75
• “Babylonian Talmud or the Toledoth Yeshu traditions, which gleefully describe Jesus
• as a magician,” 75
• Basically, Jews almost enver accuse other Jews of magic. Maybe being demons, or being posessed, but never magic.
• “Jewish opponents of Jesus, they pile up many nasty accusations, but never accuse their Jewish opponents of practicing magic” 76
• The Septugant, translated into greek during the 3rd century, tells us a few things: “We thus learn that not only necromancy, augury from birds, and other divinatory techniques are entirely forbidden, but also the dabbling in pharmaka (plural of pharmakon, which means both “poison” and “magical procedure,” not to mention the meaning “medicine,” whence the English word “pharmacy”) and the reciting of incantations.”
• Around

Philo:

• Around 20 BCE, Philo wrote that all the Pharmaka in his community should be executed
• “[philo] explains that there are two types of magic. On the one hand, there is true magic, which is a scientific endeavor by which the facts of nature are revealed, a revered and much sought-after discipline which is of interest even to the greatest kings, and especially those of Persia, who cannot even become kings unless they first joined the race of the Magi.”
• 
  
• On the other hand, there is a counterfeit of this, most properly called an evil art, pursued by mendicant priests and altar parasites and by the basest of the women and slave population, who make it their profession to deal in purifications and disenchantments and promise with some sort of philters and incantations to turn men’s love into deadly enmity and their hatred into profound affection
• Its important that this distinction between Good and Bad magic does not have its roots in the bible, which does not draw such a distinction.
• Originally, the term Magic came from the greek Mageia, from contact with the persian Magi, the term meaning “That which the Magi do.” The term was negative, but also a term of admiration.
• Late antiquity saw greek Magos and Latin Magus keep the terms connotations
• “In the Gospels’ world, as in that of other contemporary Jews, the Persian Magi were the carriers of a hoary oriental wisdom, not the teachers of forbidden witchcraft and sorcery.” 80
• Also in the third century we have the Book of Watchers, which says that angels had children with humans, these bastards taught humans many new arts
• “the loosening of keshaphim, the cutting of roots, and the use of plants.”
• 
  
• “ the blanket condemnation of all types of magical practice was not without its problems, since it implicitly entailed a decision to forego many types of healings which were considered highly beneficial at the time” 81

Book of Jubilees

• Heavily based on Enochic literature
• Noah’s Kids have a demon problem
• Noah prays to god, who sends angels to bind the demons
• The demon leader, Mastema, (Hatred) begs for clemency, so god lets one demon go, and the rest have to teach their healing arts to man.
• This created a new category of practice that couldn’t be classified as keshaphim
• Left the door open for other practices as long as they could prove themselves to be beneficial or apotropaic

Dead Sea Scrolls 82 - 83

• Authors were sectarian Jews, who probably read a ton of Enochic Literature
• DSS comes with two new rules on magic
• The First: No cursing The Name
• The Second: “whoever is ruled by the spirits of Belial and speaks apostasy is to be judged in accordance with the law of the ’ov and the yide‘oni.”
• Basically, the Qumran put anyone who practices magic under the purview of the existing prohibitions on divination
• However, the Qumran library has a shitload of exochistic texts, what are the implications of that? Who knows?

Josephus

• Josephus provides commentaries on Mosaic law, summarizing or subverting it neatly:
• “Let no Israelite whatsoever possess a pharmakon, neither a deadly one nor one which causes other harms. And if an Israelite is caught owning one, he should be put to death, suffering that which he would have inflicted on those against whom the pharmakon was intended.35”
• Now, all biblical prohibitions on magic are condensed into “Pharmakon”
• This would sound really similar to the Roman “Lex Cornelia de sicariis (et veneficis)”
• Or, “The Law of Assassins and Poisoners”
• Interestingly, there is no evidence that, within Josephus’s milieu, magic was forbidden for jews at all
• He reacalls that Drusilla’s marriage to a non-jew was against their customs, but had nothing today about a Jew pretending to be a Magus
• He then blames the disastrous revolt that ruined his country on fanatic rabble-rousers he calls goetes, which has a meaning more similar to sorcerer, but can also mean imposter or charlatan
• In spite of the obvious opportunity to do so, he never even implies that these goˆetes dealt in sorcery and witchcraft (or even in pharmaka), or that they should have been put to death in line with the biblical legislation on keshaphim.37
• When asked if Moses was a Goetes, he says:
• Moses didn’t invent his own laws, he got them from god
• Moses’s miracles beat the egyptian wizards, proving their superiority and difference
• Josephus also talks about sheltering two gentile noblemen in his house. A jewish lynch mob wanted to kill them, calling them pharmaka-mongers
• Josephus laughs off the accusation. Saying that the Romans had so many troops tthey didnt need Pharmaka
• Josephus clearly depicts himself as the rationalist, who does not believe in the reality of military magic, but in many other instances (for example, in discussing the feats of Pharaoh’s magicians), he clearly assumes that magic does work.
• Given Josephus’ general disinterest in magic, it seems quite clear that we cannot arrive at any clear sense of his (emic) definition of this term.

Summary

• On the one extreme, we noted Philo’s very Greek concept of magic, which distinguishes between the noble art of the Persian Magi and the base counterfeit of that art as practiced by women and slaves
• On the other hand, we saw the literary trajectory leading from 1 Enoch to Jubilees and to the Dead Sea Scrolls, with an elaborate demonological awareness, a conviction that magic is one of the evil things taught to humanity by the Fallen Angels, and a willingness in the Qumran sect to condemn any deviant member under the biblical rubric of the ’ov and the yide‘oni, as well as a willingness to use many techniques that we might see as “magic” in the daily fight against the forces of evil
• Josephus’ general disinterest in “magic” as a concept, his downplaying of the relevant biblical legislation, and his pride in such ancient Jewish practices as the exorcism of demons.
• multiplicity of views of magic and an absence of any real emic definition of magic as a legal or social concept. (87)

Jewish magical technology in the second temple period

• To avoid cataloguing evidence in a fragmentizing and tedious way,  we are going to focus on three specific spheres, analyzing their Insider and Outsider views:

Jewish Exorcisms:

• Lots of evidence here
• Also, the Insider and Outsider evidence is nice and congruent
• These mechanics seem to fall into three distinct types:
• the use of animal, vegetal, or mineral substances whose manipulation or fumigation automatically drives demons away.
  • Like in the book of tobit
  • The technique itself consists of fumigating the heart and liver of a certain fish from the Tigris river (the fish’s gall also serves to heal Tobit’s eyes, but not by way of exorcism),50 and Raphael promises the young Tobias that this will drive away any demon or evil spirit and keep them away forever (6.8, 16–17).
  • the text makes abundantly clear, it is the smell which drives the demon away, and no further actions – neither verbal nor written incantations, nor any additional implements or rituals – are needed to perform this task.
  • The ritual works via the laws of nature. Like how smoking herbs drives away mosquitos
  • Page 91, entire quote about Baaras Root
• The second depends less on the exorcistic technique than on the personality and innate powers of the exorcist himself.
• third type involves the use of elaborate incantations, as well as specific implements and rituals, by a professional exorcist who has mastered the right technique and uses the appropriate texts.48
• (A fourth type, exorcisms “in the name of Jesus,” is one of the earliest signs of the parting of the ways between Judaism and nascent Christianity, and will not be dealt with here.)
• On 4Q560 = 4QExorcism ar:
• In commenting on this text, some scholars have suggested that it is a fragment of a magical recipe book, a precursor of the Aramaic magical recipe books of late antiquity.119 If this were true, it would be the only such fragment known to us from the Second Temple period, and in fact the only evidence we have that such Jewish magical recipe-books indeed existed at this early date. (112)
• Overview of Jewish Exorcisms on 112

Jewish Amulet Magic:

• “Of all the artifacts which strike us by their apparent absence from the Jewish society of the Second Temple period, the absence of inscribed Jewish amulets is perhaps the most surprising.” (114)
• “As it happens, the earliest evidence for the Jewish use of amulets in the Second Temple period is highly polemical and condemnatory. It is found in 2 Maccabees,”

Jewish Agressive and Erotic Magic:

• When dealing with aggressive magic, we must first make an important distinction between standard curses, as uttered by an individual or a community, and those kinds of aggressive magical practices for which we must be looking here. (123)
• FIVE EXAMPLES OF AGRESSIVE MAGIC:
• Two curses from Rheneia (Delos)
  • Stone inscribed tablets, Invocations of the jewish god to kill someone (125)
• Moses whispering the Name.
  • Egyptian king mockingly asks moses the name of God who sent him. Moses whispers the Name, and the king collapses, only waking when moses picks him up. (127, not a qote)
• H. oni’s “curse”.
  • Honi refused to play the role of balaam against his fellow jews, and demanded that god not help the people who were asking him to curse the enemy (128 not a quote)
• Some priestly curses.
  • Priests praying to god to exact revenge for the stoning of Honi, god sending a fell wind
• Erotic magic in Herod’s court.
  • Josephus claiming that cleopatra only liked antony bc of a pharmakon
  • “On the one hand, they clearly show that members of Herod’s court indeed used pharmaka against each other, and we may safely assume that these pharmaka included not only poisons, but also more magical means for getting rid of kings and rivals.” (133)

When Ashmedai afflicts Sarah’s bedroom in the book of Tobit, there is no claim that some evil witch had sent him there,197 (135)

Any study of Jewish magic in the Second Temple period must come to grips

with the fact that there is relatively little evidence for the magical activities

utilized by Jews at the time, especially in comparison with the abundance

of the evidence for subsequent periods.199 (136)

And when we find a written Jewish magical text – such as the Delos curses – there is no sign at all that it was copied from a pre-existing, written recipe, again in marked contrast with some of the Jewish magical artifacts of late antiquity. It thus seems quite clear that most of Second Temple Jewish magic was transmitted orally (138)

The identity of the practitioners:

• Holy Men
• People who performed wonders ex offico, such as priests performing magic in addition to their normal duties
• Professional Magicians

The magical technologies of the Second Temple period

without the nomina barbara, the vowel permutations, the charactˆeres, and the magic signs, all of which will appear in later Jewish magic. This is yet another argument for the lack of an “authoritative tradition,” i.e., the lack of professional magicians or of written magical texts in which the technical knowledge was transmitted.

chapter 3 - Jewish magic in late antiquity – the “insider” evidence

And once again we must stress that most magicians –ancient and modern, non-Jews and Jews– prove remarkably willing to copy magical texts inaccurately, either through carelessness and ignorance, or through a desire to improve or adapt the materials at their disposal, or both. (147)

we may say that magical recipes are a bit like the DNA of a living organism, containing the information which enables the creation of a new organism, and the mechanism by which to replicate itself. Moreover, just like DNA, some of the longer spells are actually made up of smaller units or “blocks” which could be grouped together in different forms, so that a passage from one recipe or “finished product” bears close resemblance to a passage from another recipe or “finished product,” while the remaining parts of the two texts may differ.9 (148)

(magic not as recipe but literal living thing? As organism?)

Examining the amulets’ actual contents, we may note that virtually all of them were made for what might broadly be called “medical purposes” – either to exorcize demons which were deemed to be afflicting a specific patient, or to prevent any harm from such demons and from the evil eye. (152)

Aggressive and erotic spells

Aramaic-speaking magicians did not pick up the habit developed by their Greek colleagues of writing defixiones, (154)

This practice, which dates back to Classical Athens, and which can be traced all the way to the sixth or seventh century ce, has assured the survival of many hundreds of Greek curse tablets from every corner of the ancient world, including Palestine itself (154)

Etruscan, Oscan, Celtic, Punic, and Coptic defixiones

Just as you have suppressed the sea with your horses and stamped the earth with your shoe,” and “just as the sky is suppressed before God, and the earth is suppressed before human beings, and human beings are suppressed before death, and death is suppressed before God, so will the people of this town be suppressed and broken and falling down before Yose son of Zenobia.(155)

Before leaving the issue of Aramaic and Hebrew magical gems, two further notes are called for, on one type of amulet that apparently was produced by late-antique Jewish magicians and several types that apparently were not. (164)

Aramaic Magical Papyri

Literary Books of Magic

Sepher ha-Razim, in other words, is the thoughtful composition of a well-educated Jewish author – his Hebrew is extremely rich and his use of biblical idiom is quite sophisticated – who was thoroughly familiar with the vocabulary and techniques of the pagan, and especially Greco-Egyptian, magic of late antiquity. This author, however, decided to impart his knowledge to his Jewish brethren not in the form of a collection of useful recipes, but as a full-fledged “book of mysteries,” supposedly written by an angel, given to Noah, and utilized by many Jewish Patriarchs. (173)

Since it stands to reason that the author of Sepher ha-Razim used existing recipes as the building blocks for his composition, and then changed them to suit the overall structure and underlying suppositions which shaped it, dating any specific unit will only provide a post quem dating for the entire composition. (173) (Why change the building blocks? Narrative as an essential half-step towards systemization?)

spells for winning the chariot races or igniting and quenching the bathhouse fire and instructions to use metal (lead) stolen from the municipal water-pipes fit well in a late-antique urban context, but the references to reinstating kings and to slaughtering lion cubs are highly problematic, as few late-antique Jews had direct access to either species. (174)

Sword of Moses

As even this cursory description shows, this is a complex text, and there is little doubt that it underwent several stages of editing. (177) (There is a citation, how do we know it was edited?)

The Testament of solomon (The Christian one, not the parallel story from the Babylonian Talmud)

But like a fruit tree cloaking its seeds in thick layers of juicy tissue for them to achieve their ultimate goal, so our author wrapped his dry catalogue of demons and how to keep them at bay in a juicier literary flesh.99 Instead of passing on such useful knowledge in the form of magical recipes, as did the authors of Sepher ha-Razim and H. arba de-Moshe, he embedded it into a more amusing tale; in this, he was aided by the fact that the means he employed for thwarting the demons were all quite simple, be it the uttering of an angelic name or a short formula, or the writing down of a very simple name or magic word. (181)

In a way, the “literary” books underwent a certain form of “canonization” or “fossilization,” and as a result of this process they sometimes preserve older types of magical aims and technologies which are mostly absent from the “non-literary” formularies (182)

And the same is true for the presence of many “problematic” elements – such as a Greek prayer to Helios – in Sepher ha-Razim, for as we shall note in Chapter 5, when practitioners transmitted and copied their magical recipes they not only “updated” their sources (e.g., by translating the ritual instructions, and even the spells themselves, into their new vernacular, Judeo-Arabic), but also censored out those elements which they found too offensive for their, or their clients’, religious sensibilities.(183)

The fact that they were so cheap certainly helps explain their apparent popularity, including the acquisition by some clients of many bowls for a single domicile.(185)

Looking at the texts, we note five different writing systems: by far the most common is the square Aramaic script, which is found on well over half the bowls, the second most common script being Mandaic (the script of the Gnostic Mandeans).109 Syriac (both the Estrangelo and the “proto-Manichaean” scripts) is a distant third, and a cursive Pahlavi script is found on a few bowls only, none of which has yet been deciphered.110 The same is true for a handful of incantation bowls written in Arabic script and displaying Muslim elements, none of which have so far been published. (185)

Often, the spell includes an explicit reference to “thisamulet” or “this press,” and to the binding, pressing, overturning (note the bowls’ upside-down position when found in situ) and averting of the demons and evil spells which beset or might beset the clients, who are almost always named. (187)