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14* Gideon Bohak and Matthew Morgenstern

recipe book whose recipes are not embedded into any “literary” structure
and display no thematic unity should make a major contribution to the
study of this branch of the Jewish magical tradition. This is all the more
important since this branch more or less died out in a subsequent period, as
may be seen from the very few parallels between the incantation bowls and
the magical recipes from the Cairo Genizah (or from non-Genizah Jewish
manuscripts, including “Oriental” ones).10 In this respect, we may note that
our recipes too find very few close parallels among the published and
unpublished magical texts from the Cairo Genizah and that when such
parallels emerge, they are found in Cairo Genizah recipe books which
display some telltale signs of the Babylonian Jewish origin of at least some
of their recipes (see our notes to 2b:4–6 and 5a:4-7).

One final feature of our booklet that may be highlighted here is that
while the structure of the individual recipes is not always clear, in many
cases the incantations, including long stretches of voces magicae, seem to
precede the ritual instructions, which often are quite short. In this respect,
these recipes seem to differ from most magical recipes from the Cairo
Genizah, which usually provide the ritual instructions first and then cite the
incantations that are to be inscribed or recited. Whether this is a mere
coincidence or a more typical feature of Babylonian Jewish magic is an
issue that will have to be dealt with elsewhere, and only after more such
texts are discovered and analyzed.11

10 For these parallels, see especially D. Levene and G. Bohak, “Divorcing Lilith: From
the Babylonian Incantation Bowls to the Cairo Genizah,” Journal of Jewish Studies 63
(2012): 197–217. Two more parallels will be discussed in a forthcoming publication
by James Nathan Ford, but given the availability of hundreds of Genizah fragments
and hundreds of bowls, such parallels clearly are the exception rather than the rule.

11 We note, for example, the occurrence of this phenomenon in the magical recipes of
T-S Misc. 34.22, which displays many other signs of its Babylonian Jewish
provenance (and cf. below, n. 84). The instructions similarly follow the incantations in
Mandaic spells. See M. Morgenstern and T. Alfia, “Arabic Magic Texts in Mandaic
Script: A Forgotten Chapter in Near-Eastern Magic,” in R. Voigt (ed.), „Durch Dein