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Dan Levene, Jewish Aramaic Curse Texts from Late-Antique Mesopotamia: “May
These Curses Go Out and Flee” (Magical and Religious Literature of Late Antiquity
2). Brill, Leiden 2013. Pp. xiv + 164. Price: €98.00 hardback. ISBN: 978-90-0425092-5.
The present volume is the author’s second monograph on the subject of the Aramaic
incantation texts from Late Antique Mesopotamia inscribed upon terracotta bowls,1
and the very first volume by any scholar on a specific sub-genre within those texts:
curse texts or aggressive incantations, which stand out from a genre (namely, bowl
magic) that is otherwise defensive.2 Levene has assembled 30 exemplars of this subgenre, including 12 from the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin and the Samir
Abu Dehays Collection that had never been published before, and an additional two
from the Vorderasiatisches Museum that had been published in the late nineteenth
century but for which Levene was able to dramatically improve upon the original
readings and translations. These new texts are undoubtedly the most exciting thing
about this offering, but scholars will also benefit from his improved readings of the
sixteen other texts that have been assembled in this volume. The volume concludes
with a bibliography of relevant literature, a synopsis of seven formulae that are
characteristic of these aggressive incantations, glossaries of vocabulary and different
classes of proper nouns, and an index of seventeen biblical quotations found within
this corpus.
Each publication of such texts brings with it a wealth of new data, and the potential for disagreement over their interpretation. The language of these incantation
texts differs from that of the classical texts, and they present their own challenges
to interpretation that reflect their independence from those texts. Even some of the
most common terms encountered in the bowl corpus are problematic cruces, and
in some cases Levene has supplied idiosyncratic translations without further commentary (although in fn. 31 on p. 8 he suggests that he might take up the thorny
question of terminology again in a future publication). This is the case, for example,
with the common terms rāzā ‘secret; mystery,’ which he regularly glosses as ‘spell,’
milləṯā ‘word,’ which he glosses as ‘incantation’, and the problematic term disqā,
which Segal3 derives from Greek δίσκος, Müller-Kessler4 considers to be a corruption of dastaḇīrā ‘written deterrent’ based on the parallels,5 and which Levene glosses
simply as ‘document.’
1 The first is D. Levene, A Corpus of Magic Bowls: Incantation Texts in Jewish
Aramaic from Late Antiquity (London and New York 2003).
2 Another important publication in the same series is S. Shaked, J.N. Ford and
S. Bhayro, Aramaic Bowl Spells — Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Bowls — Volume One
(Magical and Religious Literature of Late Antiquity 1, Leiden, 2013). The largest
corpus of incantation bowls to be published in recent years is J.B. Segal, Catalogue
of the Aramaic and Mandaic Incantation Bowls in the British Museum (London
2000).
3 Segal, Catalogue, 66.
4 C. Müller-Kessler, ‘Die Zauberschalensammlung des British Museum’, Archiv
Für Orientforschung 48–49 (2001), 115–45 (122).
5 See also R.G. Kent, ‘The Etymology of Syriac Dastabīrā’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 31:4 (1911), 359–64.
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The presentation of the data is thorough, professional, and succinct. Only two
minor omissions detract from the utility of the publication, namely the lack of references to the provenance and script of the bowls.
The vast majority of the published corpus of incantation texts was acquired
through purchases from antiquities dealers and therefore lacks any clear provenance.
The texts published in this volume are no different in this regard. Of the bowls
published for the very first time in this volume, those from the Vorderasiatisches
Museum were acquired from a Baghdad dealer in 1886, and one is from the personal collection of Jordanian financier Samir Abu Dehays. The six bowls from the
British Museum collection are also of unknown provenance. Bowls N&Sh 6 and 7,
originally published by Joseph Naveh and Shaul Shaked and currently in the Israel
Museum, both come from the personal collection of an Iranian businessman,
Mr Alqanayan.6 Bowl N&Sh 9, likewise from the collection of an unnamed private
collector, was in the possession of Victor Barakat at the time of its original publication. Mr Barakat attributed it to ‘the Bethany area in the vicinity of Jerusalem’, a
provenance which the two scholars regarded with scepticism.7 N&Sh 21 comes
from another private collection, the Einhorn Collection in Tel Aviv, as does N&Sh
23, from the Alexander L. Wolfe Collection in Jerusalem.8 The one bowl from the
Royal Ontario Museum, 907.1.1, was originally published without any indication
of provenance,9 and the final bowl, Yale Babylonian Collection 2393, was acquired
for that collection by Albert Clay and allegedly comes from Nippur.10 Thus, of this
entire collection of texts, only two have vague provenances, of which one is extremely
dubious.
Therefore, the author can be certainly excused for omitting any information
about the provenance of these bowls, as there is not much to say in that regard.
Unfortunately, the lack of any provenance makes the inclusion of a script chart all
the more critical. Without knowing the precise geographic origins of the bowls, or
the likely time periods during which the bowls were deposited, deduced from the
stratigraphic context within which they would have been recovered under the controlled conditions of a proper archaeological excavation, the only way that we can
recover this crucial information is by establishing a typology of the script used in
the bowls and classifying them through reference to the script of those bowls that
have been recovered from archaeological excavations. James A. Montgomery encouraged this as a best practice in his publication of the Aramaic incantation texts from
Nippur,11 but he has admittedly seldom been followed in this regard. For
these reasons, I have drafted a script chart of the newly published texts in this
collection.
6 J. Naveh and S. Shaked, Amulets and Magic Bowls: Aramaic Incantations of
Late Antiquity3 (Jerusalem, 1998), 160.
7 Naveh and Shaked, Amulets and Magic Bowls, 178.
8 J. Naveh and S. Shaked, Magic Spells and Formulae: Aramaic Incantations of
Late Antiquity (Jerusalem, 1993), 127–32.
9 W.S. McCullough, Jewish and Mandaean Incantation Bowls in the Royal
Ontario Museum (Toronto 1967), 3–5.
10 J. Obermann, ‘Two Magic Bowls: New Incantation Texts from Mesopotamia’, American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 57:1 (1941), 1–31 (2).
11 J.A. Montgomery, Aramaic Incantation Texts from Nippur (Philadelphia
1913), pls XXXIX and XL.
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Table 1. Comparison of Scripts
Inadvertently demonstrating the utility of such a chart, Levene draws attention
to the script of the bowls at several points throughout his work, such as when he
notes the similarity between the hands of two incantations in the British Museum
on p. 10, and the peculiarity of the script of va 2417 on p. 90. For the non-­
specialist, it is extremely useful to have examples of the letter forms organized in
one place to illustrate these claims.
The latter text, va 2417, stands out even against the unusual backdrop composed
by these texts. He draws our attention to what he considers several Mandaeisms in
the language of the bowl, such as ʼəlāḵ for ‛ălāḵ ‘to/for you’ (passim) and ʼap̄rā for
‛ap̄rā ‘dust’ (l. 8). In his translation, he glosses (l. 7) the name <ʼḤWRBH> as ‘at/
on the ruin’ and the accompanying epithet <ʼWTRʼ> as ‘place’, but in light of the
other Mandaeisms in the text it might be possible to analyse the name as a compound along the same lines as Mandaic iurba Yurbā, ‘the great Yāhû/Iao’ who is
identified with the supreme deity of the Jews in the Mandaean Book of John. Hence
ʼAḥūrbā/ʼAḥū rabbā would mean something like ‘Big Brother’, and his epithet could
be cognate with Mandaic eutra ʼuṯrā ‘excellency.’ I would also like to suggest that
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the words that follow be read, ʼuṯrā də-Samqī ‘the excellency of Samqi’12 w-ʼuṯra
d-ileḏ ʼaḥdī ‘and the excellency who brought joy to a child’ (or possibly even yalḏ[ī]
‘children.’)
This text is also noteworthy for the reappearance (in l. 5) of the genius ʼAbīṭūr,
who first appeared in a bowl excavated by Layard at Tell Amran ibn Ali, bm 91710,
the very first of the incantation bowls to attract scholarly attention.13 In his edition
of the British Museum’s collection, Segal identifies this being with the Mandaean
‘Third Life,’ abatur ʼAḇāṯūr, albeit without merit. To my knowledge, this being
appears nowhere else within the corpus, so his reappearance here is certainly welcome, as it provides an additional clue to a central Mesopotamian provenance. The
incantation itself, for raising a pack of ‘zombies’ to invade a victim’s home, consume
all the food and beverages, and generally raise mayhem, is also unique within the
corpus of incantation texts.
It would be difficult to improve upon Levene’s fine readings, which are cautious
and well-substantiated. For this last text, va 2417, I might only tender the following
alternative suggestions:
l. 7 yleḏ ʼaḥdī ‘he delighted a child’ for ṣad ʼərāḏī ‘hunting wild asses’
l. 9 kursēhon ‘their thrones’
for kursēḵon
‘your thrones’
l. 10 ʼuḏnā
‘ear’
for ʼīḏ{ḏ}ā ‘hand (?)’
In closing, this volume serves as a useful reference for researchers interested specifically in curse texts, but daunted by the prospect of rummaging through the
disconnected and at times contradictory scholarship that has accumulated over the
course of over a century and a half on the thousand or so bowl texts that have thus
far been uncovered, searching for the few that are directly relevant to their interests.14
Levene should be commended for bringing these texts to scholarly attention and
making them accessible to a broader audience.
doi: 10.1093/jss/fgw004
charles g. häberl
rutgers, the state university of new jersey
12 Wohlstein (‘Ueber einige aramäische Inschriften auf Thongefassen des
Königlichen Museums zu Berlin’, Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 9 (1894), 11–41 (41))
identifies Samqi as a Babylonian place name, citing a swamp of that name mentioned in Tractate Yebamoth, ch. 16.4, 121a (‘Once a man drowned in the swamp
of Samqi (ʼaḡmā də-Samqī), and Rav Shela permitted his wife to marry again’). In
this he is followed by Montgomery, Aramaic Incantation Texts, 296. The description
of Samqi as a ‘swamp’ and the reference to Rav Shela likely place it somewhere in
the vicinity of Nehardea. Drower (Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran [Oxford, 1937],
94–5) hypothesizes that the ʼuṯrī were originally ‘originally life-spirits bringing fertility and wealth in the shape of rain and springs’, which would certainly be consonant
with this identification.
13 Segal, Catalogue, 55.
14 The first such texts were published in A.H. Layard, Discoveries in the Ruins of
Nineveh and Babylon (London 1853), 434–48, 150 years prior to the publication
of this volume. Since that point, there has been a nearly continuous stream of publications on the corpus. The interpretation of these texts has been the occasion for
a not inconsiderable amount of polemic between the scholars engaged in this task,
which further complicates the efforts of non-specialists to make sense of the corpus
and apply it to their own research.
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