Avigail Manekin-Bamberger, Seder Mazikin: Law and Magic in Late Antique Jewish Society (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben Zvi, 2024). [Hebrew]
The Babylonian incantation bowls represent the only extant late antique Jewish epigraphic materials from the region of Babylonia. The collection of 2,000 bowls – 600 of which have been published – date from the fifth through the seventh centuries. Text was inscribed in a spiral around the inside of the bowl, and sometimes an image of a demon, such as Lilith, was drawn at its center. Most of these incantation bowls were written in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic with square Hebrew script, while some contain Syriac, Mandaic, Pahlavi, and pseudo-script. The size of cereal bowls, these incantation bowls were buried upside down in domestic spaces, usually at thresholds or corners of a home, and occasionally in cemeteries (they were placed upside down perhaps because that is how they kept demons trapped underneath). They were most often used to protect against demons and curses, but also sometimes for healing, love, livelihood, and harming others.
The study of Babylonian incantation bowls has occupied scholars since James Alan Montgomery’s publications of bowls from the region of Nippur in 1913. They have been of particular interest to scholars in recent years, both because the corpus contributes relatively new and unexploited sources for the study of ancient religion, and because the bowls provide access to harder-to-access and thus understudied realms of life, not least the fears and concerns of everyday people who worried about their physical safely, health, livelihoods, love interests, childbirth, and families.
Avigail Manekin-Bamberger’s new book, Seder Mezikin: Law and Magic in Rabbinic Literature and the Babylonian Incantation Bowls, offers a comprehensive study of the legal dimensions of the Babylonian incantation bowls. The book analyzes the bowl’s legal terminology, concepts, and institutions, especially as they relate to the legal landscape found in rabbinic sources, and contends that the legal language of the bowls blurs the boundaries, often taken for granted by previous scholars, between law and magic. In fact, Manekin-Bamberger argues that the bowls present themselves, through the formulae they employ and the technical language they use, as legal contracts and that they were produced by a group of professionals whose expertise lay in contract-writing. Manekin-Bamberger thus suggests that rabbinic literature and incantation bowls imagined their world through the same legal structures that bind and separate beings (human, demon, or divine): words and texts, contracts and curses, vows and oaths, exorcisms and excommunications. Manekin-Bamberger notes: “Just as there are expectations that humans will obey the human legal system and the systems of enforcement, so too one can subdue and restrain demons. Because the legal system is the central institution for dealing with infractions of the law on the human side, it is not surprising that this same system is used in the war against demons” (19). The legal system that applies to demons, moreover, is no less real than that which applies to humans, nor is it merely metaphorical or symbolic when it is evoked against demons. This is because demons are part of this world, and because law does not only apply to humans. Manekin-Bamberger thus argues that rather than imagining two separate worlds, one rabbinic (halakhic/legal) and one magical, or wondering about the “influence” that one of these corpora might have had on the other, the evidence points to a shared and intertwined world.
Following the book’s introduction, the second chapter centers on the identity of those who produced the bowls. Manekin-Bamberger focuses on the prevalence of contractual language in the bowls to identify the type of expert who would have authored them. If bowls were regarded as contracts – among them writs of divorce, in which a client divorces a demon – then they would be written by experts in such forms of contractual writing, namely professional scribes. In making this argument, Manekin-Bamberger disagrees with those who view the world in which the bowls were produced as having lay people on one end of the spectrum and rabbis on the other and then locate the bowls’ authors somewhere along that spectrum, whether among the rabbis at one end or the “uneducated masses” of “popular religion” on the other. Instead, Manekin-Bamberger argues that the authors of the incantation bowls should be considered part of the already identified class of professional scribes in late antiquity who worked with official documents. The rabbis of rabbinic literature and the professional scribes of the bowls thus represent two types of intellectual elites with two areas of expertise, each of which performed different tasks and played distinct roles in a single society, even as some might have overlapped or played multiple roles. They related to one another and to others, including non-elites, through different but not mutually exclusive means, and they operated together in a shared world.
Manekin-Bamberger cites a particular bowl in which the author refers to rival “book writers,” suggesting that those who produced these bowls considered themselves, and were considered by others, to be professional scribes who sat in markets, alleys, and street corners – and who traveled around – performing their work for clients. These scribes did not only write formal legal documents, but also sacred writings, such as Torah scrolls, tefillin, mezuzot, and even prayer books. The range of their scribal work might thus explain not only the prevalence of legal contractual terms in the bowls but also the large number of biblical quotations, translations of biblical verses into Aramaic, and liturgical phrases interwoven into the text of the bowls. (Manekin-Bamberger notes that the scribes of the bowls differed from the makers of Palestinian Aramaic amulets, which were chiseled into metal rather than written with ink on a flat surface; such artisans were likely not considered scribes but another group of craftsmen who specialized in metal writing.) Even among the professional scribal class that produced the bowls, however, individual scribes represented a range of levels of training and expertise, as would be expected, and thus the quality and content of their writing ranged considerably. So too did their level of knowledge of Jewish texts and their willingness to incorporate figures such as Jesus or pagan themes into their bowls. The diversity of members of this scribal class, including their familiarity with various corpora as well as their interest in traditions from outside Judaism, explains the differing characters of the bowls.
In this chapter, Manekin-Bamberger also clarifies her disagreement with scholars who have hypothesized that women might have been among the authors of the incantation bowls. Manekin-Bamberger regards the link that rabbinic texts draw between witchcraft and women as a broader derogatory literary trope – far more widespread than what appears in rabbinic sources – that connects women to forbidden practices. This trope functions on a rhetorical and polemical level rather than as useful historical evidence for women’s practices. Manekin-Bamberger distinguishes, moreover, between the bowls, which rabbinic texts regard as amulets, and “witchcraft.” Artifacts such as the incantation bowls are not typically characterized as witchcraft, thus questioning the very relevance of the rabbinic statements about witchcraft to the bowls. Manekin-Bamberger also remains skeptical that one specific incantation bowl, which refers to a woman in the first person and which some scholars have used as evidence for women’s authorship, indicates authorship. She notes that using the first person in incantation bowls was a literary convention of the genre, and that the author of this particular bowl wrote a second bowl for another client in the first-person masculine. Manekin-Bamberger maintains, nonetheless, that the bowls serve as rich sources of material about women (pointing, for example, to the sorts of cares and conditions that brought them to professional scribes to request a bowl), even if they were not authored by women nor that women necessarily impacted the writing of the bowls that they commissioned as clients.
The third and fourth chapters, as a pair, argue that the incantation bowls primarily incorporate contractual language associated with legal documents, while they rarely invoke terms and references to courts and jurisprudential settings. Homing in on the specific type of legal language thus illuminates what type of texts the bowls contained, how they functioned, and who produced them. The third chapter posits that the prevalence of the language of contracts suggests that the scribes of the bowls were experts in legal documents such as writs of divorce and excommunication. The chapter surveys how dates are incorporated into the beginning of bowls, the way a client’s name (or multiple names) appears, language such as “he said to us” drawn from legal sources (especially from the geonic period), the use of formulae and terms related to divorce and marriage (including the phrase “according to the law of Moses and Israel” and “according to the law of the daughters of Israel”), witnesses’ signatures (which, in the case of the bowls, are often named angels, such as Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael), and a concluding statement of the permanence of the document’s validity. The fourth chapter, in contrast, focuses on references to courts and legal proceedings. Manekin-Bamberger identifies some references to courts – mainly related to the heavenly court, angels of justice, day of judgment (including themes found in mystical and eschatological sources, perhaps those connected to liturgical traditions and Hekhalot literature) and to matters of damages (especially in bowls that seek to harm other humans) – but finds that such references are overall far less prevalent in the bowls than the language of legal contracts. One of the only references to a rabbinic court is that of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Perahia; Manekin-Bamberger demonstrates that such references probably refer to a historical-mythical court for the bowl scribes specifically associated with the preparation of documents of divorce, thus reinforcing the link between the bowls and the production of contracts, rather than the legal context of law courts and jurisprudence. The producers of these bowls were far more familiar with the details of legal documents than with the mechanisms of rabbinic courts, probably because they were experts in document writing and not legislators or judges. Thus, the bowls at the heart of Manekin-Bamberger’s study present themselves as forms of legal contracts between humans and demons – and sometimes between humans and humans – written by professional scribes and designed to protect clients from the dangers and nuisances that demons pose.
The fifth and sixth chapters present case studies about the “vow” and “decree” in the bowls, and how the bowls shed light on these concepts in rabbinic sources. The vow, though it ostensibly represents a “rational” legal institution, was often used, in practice, to curse or as a mock consecration. The decree, officially used by the rabbis to enact new laws, was in practice also employed to distance demons and influence the supernatural world. These expanded meanings and usages shed light on a range of ancient sources that employ the language of vows and decrees, including passages from the New Testament. The bowls, as Manekin-Bamberger notes in the book’s conclusion, do not only represent important sources in their own right; they also illuminate the fuller meanings of halakhic legal concepts and of the ancient Babylonian Judaism from which they emerged.
Alongside her argument about shared legal discourse in the bowls and in ancient Jewish literary and documentary sources, and the shared world to which it points, Manekin-Bamberger emphasizes, throughout the book, the diversity among the bowls, and thus among the scribes who produced them and the clients who commissioned them. The world of ancient Jewish Babylonia that Manekin-Bamberger’s book presents is thus neither homogenous nor simply binary. It is, rather, diverse, animated, and complicated, inhabited by humans and demons (and other forces and beings), with different types of experts, elites, and non-elites who served distinct if overlapping functions, often in harmony or parallel and sometimes in tension. Legal and magical discourse and action operated together in that world, and studying the two realms together illuminates both.
The book also raises many interesting questions. In her study, for example, Manekin-Bamberger identifies the liturgical passages within the bowl texts as a fruitful area for further research. Manekin-Bamberger herself is currently working on a social history of the bowls, wondering what the content of the bowls reveals about the people for whom they were written and the social structures in which the bowls operated. Others have taken an interest in the visual and artistic features of the bowls, especially the depictions of demons, and integrating them into our understanding of both ancient Jewish art as well as the world of late antiquity more generally, and scholars remain interested in the process of bowl production, the people involved in that process, the ritual dimensions of bowl use, and the unique form of the bowls themselves. Comparative approaches that place these incantation bowls in context and conversation with traditions in other religious traditions and geographical locations, or with later Jewish practices, are also fruitful avenues for further research. For example, were other incantations that employ contractual language, in other historical contexts, likewise prepared by bureaucratic personnel? In The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Press, 2020), Marina Rustow notes similar connections between bureaucratic and magical scribal practices in the medieval Middle East. She writes: “both systems run on speech acts and, in some cases, written documents in order to transform status, or to lodge requests of unseen powers. Scribes doing bureaucratic and legal work followed well-defined traditions: in the absence of control over caliphs, viziers, and any future court deciding whether a document was enforceable—unseen powers all—they tended to use what worked, and what worked is what had worked in the past” (62). The link between magic and law, and between incantations and contracts, might extend much farther into the ancient and medieval worlds.
As scholars continue to investigate the bowls from multiple angles – paleographic, onomastic, linguistic, social historical, legal, literary, ritual, visual, gendered, comparative – our understanding of Babylonian Judaism and late antique society will continue to develop. Manekin-Bamberger’s insights about the bowls’ contractual dimensions and the professional scribes who produced them – as well as about the overlap of law and magic on a broader scale – are an essential contribution to this field, and will no doubt shape, methodologically and historically, how future studies approach this corpus and its relationship to other ancient Jewish texts and artifacts and to the long history of magic, law, and religion.
Seder Mazikin is meticulously researched and generously written, such that both experts in the field and those who are just getting started will learn a tremendous amount about the bowls, their legal dimensions, and their relationship to rabbinic sources. The book takes seriously the technical aspects of the bowls while drawing far-ranging conclusions about the social, intellectual, and material world in which they were produced. The analysis compares the texts of the bowls with a wide range of texts and material artifacts from the second temple, rabbinic, and geonic periods, including Palestinian amulets, Hekhalot literature, marriage and divorce documents, and traditional sources. Though the book is written in Hebrew, some of the chapters have been published in earlier iterations as English articles, such that those who do not read Modern Hebrew can still access material in the book and its far-reaching conclusions.
Sarit Kattan Gribetz is Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Department at Yale University.