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A Babylonian Jewish Aramaic Magical Booklet from the Damascus Genizah 23*

3 the gloom of gloominess47F48 you came ‫חבר חבריריה נפקתון מן‬
out, from the great ‫אתרא‬

4 place of darkness; the evil spirit ‫רבא דיחשוכא אנפרי דרוחא‬
49‫בי ֿשת ֿא‬
Anpharid,
F84
5 which is sent by charms;49F50 you shall 51
50 F ‫דמישתדר בחרשי כי טביא‬
‫רה]ט[ית‬
ru[n] like a deer, 52
1F5 ‫כי זיקא פרחית ונפלית עליה‬
‫ֿדפֿ ב פ‬
6 you shall fly like a wind, 53 and you
5F2

shall fall upon NN;

48 We interpret ‫ חברא‬as equivalent to ‫הברא‬, “darkness,” which is sometimes written
with etymological ‫ ח‬in JBA (Sokoloff, DJBA, 361). ‫( חבריריה‬plural emphatic)
appears to be an antonym of ‫שברירא‬, “radiance of sun, sunlight”. For the sentence
structure, compare umn škinatun ḏ-hiia qadmaiia atit mn atra rba ḏ-nhura, “you came
from the dwellings of the Primordial Life, from the great place of light” (Pašar Mihla,
DC 51: 14–16).

49 Lege: ‫אנפריד רוחא בישא‬. Compare ‫אנפרת רוחא בישתא‬, “Infarat, the evil spirt” (BM
91767:2), also written ‫( אינפרת‬ibid:7), who is similarly sent against an opponent by
means of witchcraft. See M. Morgenstern, “The Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Magic
Bowl BM 91767 Reconsidered,” Le Muséon 120 (2007): 5–27. Professor Shaul
Shaked has drawn our attention to the discussion of Arabic ,‫ ﻋﻔﺭﻳﺕ‬ʕifrīt, in A. Jeffery,
The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur’an (Baroda: Oriental Institute), 215, and adds:
“The Aramaic form suggests a Persian antecedent word such as *an-āfrīd,
῾uncreated,’ and the Arabic word may be regarded as an abbreviated form.”

50 Formulae like ‫ דמשתדר)ין( בחרשי‬are common in the bowls’ descriptions of demons,
e.g., ‫מן סטני דמישתדרי בחרשי‬, “from satans that are sent by charms” (Moussaeiff
121:4, published in D. Levene, A Corpus of Magic Bowls: Incantation Texts in Jewish
Aramaic from Late Antiquity [London, 2003], 81). See also C. Isbell, Corpus of the
Aramaic Incantation Bowls (Missoula, Montana: Society of Biblical Literature and
Scholars Press, 1975), 63:7.

51 For the qṭlyt pattern of the 2 f.s. participles, see the linguistic introduction.

52 For this simile, cf. below, 6a:6–7: ‫ואירוץ בהון כצבי שהוא רץ במדבר‬, “I will run in
them like a deer that runs in the desert.”

53 Cf. the anti-witchcraft spell of b. Pes 110a–b: ‫קרח קרחייכי פרח פרחייכי איבדור‬
‫פרחא זיקא למוריקא חדתא דנקטיתו נשים כשפניות‬, ‫תבלונייכי‬, “may your heads grow
bald(?), may your capers flutter, may your spices be scattered, may a wind flutter the
new saffron that you are holding, you female witches.”