Endnote 5 – Earliest Appearance of Abbreviation for the Israelite God

For much of the information in this paragraph, I am indebted to the world expert on magic incantation bowls, Shaul Shaked of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is preparing a catalog of nearly 800 of these bowls, now in private collections. One bowl with two YY’s as an abbreviation, from Joseph Naveh and Shaul Shaked, Amulets and Magic Bowls: Aramaic Incantations of Late Antiquity (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1987), bowl 2, pp. 134–135, is reprinted more accessibly in John G. Gager, Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 231–232. Gager notes that “the original location” of the bowl is not known. Therefore it could date anytime from the fourth to the sixth century C.E.