Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Bowl Texts: Uncovering the Operational Mechanisms of the Practice using Digital Methods

Abstract

The producers of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (JBA) bowl texts occupied a unique position at the intersection of religion, law, medicine and magic in late-antique Mesopotamian Jewish culture. The operational mechanisms of the artefacts they produced have critical significance for our understanding of those conceptual categories in the historical context of the practice, and therefore, for our understanding of Judaism, and what it meant to be Jewish, in what is often referred to as ‘Talmudic Babylonia’.

Growing awareness of the significance of these artefacts means that researchers in Aramaic studies, late-antique Jewish history, Biblical studies and Rabbinics are now drawing on data culled from this corpus in their exploration of these topics. Despite recent advances in the availability of primary sources, such analyses still tend to rely on small numbers of selected texts, or very select features of larger groups, meaning that only very tentative conclusions are drawn about the practice, the practitioners, and their place in late-antique Jewish society. While these limitations are widely acknowledged in the field, and there are signs that analytical approaches are beginning to shift in response to the scale of emerging data, until now, no attempt at a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the primary sources has been made.

This thesis sets out to produce a comprehensive conceptualisation of the features of JBA bowl texts that can support systematic analysis of their distribution across a sample of 255 of the most recently published primary sources. Its findings not only produce a groundbreaking new perspective on the body of professional knowledge and the operational mechanisms underpinning the corpus, but also a significant methodological contribution to the future study of magic bowls, in the form of the largest magic bowl dataset ever compiled and the development of its underlying structural framework.