Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Bowl Texts: Uncovering the Operational Mechanisms of the Practice using Digital Methods
Lead Research Organisation:
UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
Department Name: Theology and Religion
Abstract
This thesis investigates how the Jewish Aramaic bowl spells, produced in Late Antique Mesopotamia, were thought to work. These artefacts are circular bowls inscribed with a spell to combat demonic activity and were written individually according to the needs of named clients.
This research asks what patterns, trends and associations in the textual features of the spells can reveal about their lost theoretical underpinnings. Furthermore, it seeks to assess the extent to which the corpus reflects a distinct branch of Jewish scribal magic operating within a legal framework for exercising the rights of humans and enforcing the responsibilities of supernatural beings.
Disjoints in current scholarship point toward serious limitations in our current understanding. Despite growing awareness of diverse categories within Jewish magic, recent attempts to define the field reduce it to magical adjurations, depending exclusively on the power of certain words and phrases. Similarly, despite growing awareness of the specialist knowledge on display in some bowl spells, particularly knowledge of Jewish legal scribal culture, scholarship still suffers from problematic assumptions around the religious and wider social status of the practice. This evidence situates some bowl scribes much nearer to the centres of Jewish learning than the scholarly consensus generally suggests and forces fresh examination of the role that exercitive speech act theory might play in our understanding of how scribes attempted to effect change through their spells.
This research takes seriously the possibility that a complex system of specialist professional knowledge underpinned how many practitioners composed individual bowl spells. The project is the first systematic attempt to uncover aspects of these theoretical underpinnings. By using digital methods for the holistic analysis of the corpus, it will arrive at the first reliable findings on these questions, grounded in hundreds of primary sources.
This research asks what patterns, trends and associations in the textual features of the spells can reveal about their lost theoretical underpinnings. Furthermore, it seeks to assess the extent to which the corpus reflects a distinct branch of Jewish scribal magic operating within a legal framework for exercising the rights of humans and enforcing the responsibilities of supernatural beings.
Disjoints in current scholarship point toward serious limitations in our current understanding. Despite growing awareness of diverse categories within Jewish magic, recent attempts to define the field reduce it to magical adjurations, depending exclusively on the power of certain words and phrases. Similarly, despite growing awareness of the specialist knowledge on display in some bowl spells, particularly knowledge of Jewish legal scribal culture, scholarship still suffers from problematic assumptions around the religious and wider social status of the practice. This evidence situates some bowl scribes much nearer to the centres of Jewish learning than the scholarly consensus generally suggests and forces fresh examination of the role that exercitive speech act theory might play in our understanding of how scribes attempted to effect change through their spells.
This research takes seriously the possibility that a complex system of specialist professional knowledge underpinned how many practitioners composed individual bowl spells. The project is the first systematic attempt to uncover aspects of these theoretical underpinnings. By using digital methods for the holistic analysis of the corpus, it will arrive at the first reliable findings on these questions, grounded in hundreds of primary sources.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| Siam Bhayro (Primary Supervisor) | |
| Harriet Walker (Student) |