Matthew Morgenstern

Linguistic notes on magic bowls in the Moussaieff Collection

The study of Aramaic magic bowls has undergone something of a renaissance in recent years owing to a wave of new publications which has considerably enriched the corpus of texts now at the readers disposal.1 While hundreds of texts remain to be published, Dr Dan Levene has made a considerable contri bution to this field in his 2003 volume of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic magic bowls from the Moussaieff Collection. In the present article, I hope to make an additional contribution to the study of these texts on the basis of Levenes exemplary edition. These notes focus specifically on linguistic matters, and draw upon my own ongoing research into the Rabbinic Babylonian Aramaic of the Talmud and post-Talmudic (Geonic) Babylonian literature (RBA).2 No surviving manuscripts of Babylonian Rabbinic literature predate the ninth century, and few of these were copied in Babylonia?in other words, we possess few manuscripts of RBA copied by native speakers. However, since the publication of Epsteins Grammar in 1960, significant progress has been made in the identification, publication and study of accurate manuscripts of Babylonian Rabbinic literature.3 These manuscripts emanate primarily, though not exclusively, from the Cairo Geniza, and reflect the earlier stages of trans mission of this body of literature and, accordingly, of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. These early sources?dating mostly from before the thirteenth century have led to the rediscovery of Eastern textual traditions that differ qualita tively from the Spanish (Sephardic) and middle-European (Ashkenazic) manuscripts.4 The Yemenite Talmud manuscripts, dating from the seventeenth century onwards, reflect a later stage of the Eastern textual tradition.5 The Aramaic language preserved in these manuscripts differs considerably from that found in both the European manuscripts and in the printed editions. In this article, I shall make frequent reference to such manuscripts, which I refer to respectively as the early Eastern manuscripts and the Yemenite manuscripts. Not all of this material has been published.6 The evidence provided by the magic texts is thus particularly valuable for the study of the RBA manuscripts. The linguistic distance?both geographic and temporal?of the earliest sources of RBA from the Talmud has led some scholars to conclude that we cannot conclusively describe the Babylonian Aramaic language of the talmudic period, unlike that of the later Geonic

THE APOSTROPHE TO ZION—A PHILOLOGICAL AND STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS

Dead Sea Discoveries 14, 2 Also available online – www.brill.nl 1 J.A. Sanders, The Psalms Scroll of Qumrân Cave 11 (DJD 4; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). 2 J. Starcky, “Psaumes apocryphes de la grotte 4 de Qumrân (4QPs VII–X),” RB 73 (1966) 353–71. 3 J.A. Sanders, The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll (Icatha, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 123–27. 4 P.W. Skehan, E. Ulrich and P.W. Flint, “Psalms,” Qumran Cave 4: XI, Psalms to Chronicles (eds. E. Ulrich, et al.; DJD 16, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). This edition, published after the death of both Starcky and Skehan, occasionally contains divergent views on matters of reading and interpretation. I have occasionally cited these alternative opinions as they are reported in the DJD volume. 5 This genre has been dealt with comprehensively in D. Flusser, “Jerusalem in the Literature of the Second Temple,” Vehim Bigvurot, Fourscore Years, A Tribute to Rubin and Hannah Mass on their Eightieth Birthdays (eds. A. Eben-Shushan, et al., Jerusalem: Yedidim, 1974), 263–94. The connections with the biblical sources were already noted by Sanders, DJD 4.85. THE APOSTROPHE TO ZION—A PHILOLOGICAL AND STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS

Notes on a Recently Published Magic Bowl

This article presents a new transcription and translation of the Aramaic magic bowl BM 135563, and suggests an interpretation that differs considerably from the previous editions. It is argued that the bowl presents a narrative is that more coherent than has been suggested, and that it is the product of carefully considered literary activity.

Neo-Mandaic in Early Mandaean Colophons. Part 1: Linguistic Features

Neo-Mandaic [ NM ] is a direct descendant of a dialect very close to its classical predecessor. By the time the earliest surviving Mandaean manuscripts were copied, spoken Mandaic already showed many of the developments that distinguish the modern vernaculars from the classical language. This article, the first of two, identifies those features. The second article presents the texts and a brief assessment of the sources of change.

The Literary Use of Biblical Language in the Works of the Tannaim

This volume offers a multi-disciplinary examination into the Hebrew of the Second Temple period as reflected in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Ben Sira, inscriptions, Greek and Latin transcriptions, the Samaritan oral and reading traditions of the Pentateuch, and Mishnaic Hebrew.

The Present State of Mandaic Lexicography I: The Mandaic Dictionary

The Mandaic language has been used since Late Antiquity by the Mandaean community of Iraq and Iran as a spoken and literary idiom. The presently available Mandaic Dictionary, published in 1963, is a valuable reference tool that greatly advanced research into this much neglected Eastern Aramaic dialect. However, as the article seeks to highlight, both in terms of the scope of its corpus and its analysis, it does not conform to the current needs and achievements of Aramaic lexicography, and is in need of replacement. The first of two studies, the article discusses the dictionarys analysis and presentation of the linguistic data that was available to the authors at the time of its publication, indicates its weaknesses in various areas, and proposes criteria for better lexicographical analysis of the source material.