Saturday, February 20, 2016

Divorcing demons

EPIGRAPHY: Naming Demons: The Aramaic Incantation Bowls and Gittin. What the unique corpus of magical texts inscribed on bowls can teach us about the diffusion of the rabbinic laws of divorce in late antique Babylonia. (Avigail Manekin Bamberger, Gemara.com).
Thinking of the bowl scribes as such can help recover the incantation bowls from what may have seen as an obscure corner of Jewish society. Locating the Aramaic incantation bowls firmly within the ancient Babylonian Jewish community opens up new lines of inquiry into the study of Aramaic incantation bowls which can help illuminate late antique Jewish culture and Jewish law.
There are many past PaleoJudaica posts on the ancient Babylonian Aramaic incantation bowls. See here and here and links or, for more, run "incantation bowls" through the search engine. And for more on divorce law in tractate b. Gittin (currently being read in the Daf Yomi cycle), see here.