Magic and Divination
“There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer or a charmer or a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead.”
-Deuteronomy 18:10–11
These verses and others like them in the Hebrew Bible are doubtless familiar to many readers. Perhaps most famously, they’ve been quoted countless times throughout history in connection with witch trials. But what did it mean to engage in these forbidden practices?
From the modern perspective, the presence and even romanticization of magic and witchcraft in pop culture has likely distorted and muddied our understanding of what it meant to undertake such practices in ancient times. Most practitioners of “magic” in antiquity did not boil potions in cauldrons, make soul-binding pacts with demons, or bake children into pies. Instead, often their primary goalwas rather simple: to employ a variety of different methods to seek out answers to questions. This is what it means to practice “divination.”
In ancient times, divination took many forms some of which have survived up to the present day. Perhaps the most famous of these is astrology—reading the stars for hidden knowledge. Many ancient cultures practiced astrology, including the Egyptians and the Greeks, but it was the Babylonians who were most famous for it. By the Roman period, the magi of Babylonia had a reputation throughout the empire as the wisest of the wise. Their renown was so great that they even found their way into the Nativity story in the Gospel of Luke.
Ancient magic wasn’t just about asking questions, however. There were those who sought out spiritual forces for aid in achieving whatever they desired, be it a love charm, protection for newborns, or cursing their enemies with sickness and death. Such practices frequently involved the preparation of amulets, curse tablets, or incantation bowls; sometimes, magical texts would even be inscribed on human skulls.
Although mediums and sorcerers were explicitly outlawed in the Law of Moses, the authors of the Bible were no strangers to practitioners of all sorts of magic. In this special collection, read about these forbidden (and some not-so-forbidden) practices employed by ancient peoples to solve problems when ordinary methods proved unsatisfactory.
Articles
In 992 and 1993, at Sepphoris (in Hebrew, Tzippori) in the lower Galilee, we uncovered two inscribed amulets designed to invoke magical powers.1 It’s not abracadabra; it’s WHYHAW and AWAAA. See if that will cure your fever!
Not long ago, the well-known collector Shlomo Moussaieff acquired two earthenware bowls, the open ends of which were adjoined to form a kind of case—inside the case was an ancient human skull. A magic incantation, written in Aramaic, was inscribed on the skull. BAR readers already know about the more than two thousand magic […]
According to Dan Levene, an expert in Jewish magic incantation bowls, more than 2,000 of these fascinating vessels have survived.1 The vast majority bear inscriptions written in a dialect known as Jewish Aramaic and were produced in Jewish communities in Babylonia between the third and seventh centuries C.E. Precisely how they functioned, however, is […]
Babylonian Liver Omens: The Chapters Manzazu, Padanu and Pan Takalti of the Babylonian Extispicy Series Mainly from Aššurbanipal’s Library (Ulla Koch-Westenholz CNI Publications 25) (Copenhagen: Carsten Niebuhr Institute of Near Eastern Studies, University of Copenhagen, Museum Tusculam Press, 2000), 543 pp. + 49 plates, $100 The administration was determined to go to war, but it […]
Departments
For the Greeks and Romans of the first century B.C., the term “Chaldean” had two meanings: It was the name of the inhabitants of Chaldea, a district of southern Babylonia, and it was the title given to professional diviners who used the heavens to predict the future. This second group got its name from the […]
In the third century CE, the renowned Roman lawyer known as Paul the Jurist elaborated upon a first-century BCE law regarding murderers and poisoners: Those who perform, or have performed for them, impious or nocturnal rites for the purpose of enchanting, bewitching, or binding someone are either crucified or thrown to the beasts … The […]
Magic rituals for soothing crying babies have survived from ancient Mesopotamia. Walter Farber has edited two Old Babylonian baby incantations of uncertain provenance and several Neo-Assyrian magical rituals on a tablet found at Nineveh.1 All the texts are in Akkadian dialects, and the tablet from Nineveh was part of the learning of the magical […]
Famously buried by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 C.E., Pompeii was frozen in time until its rediscovery in the 18th century. Since then, archaeologists have periodically excavated the site.