Saturday, March 25, 2017

A Geniza magical fragment

GENIZA FRAGMENT OF THE MONTH: ‘Destroy the life of N.N.!’: A magical recipe: T-S AS 162.51. This is an old FOTM, from September 2007. I recently went back through the list and found a number of entries that seem worth mentioning but which I have not mentioned before. I'll be posting them from time to time. This one is a fragmentary magical text in Aramaic/Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic. The Cairo Geniza contains a great many magical texts. These often incorporate traditions that go back to late antiquity, or even, occasionally, the Second Temple period. It is very difficult to be sure how old the contents of this one are, but the themes in it go back to late antiquity.