Babylonian Witchcraft Literature: Case Studies,

Author

Abusch; I. Tzvi

Year

2020

Publisher

Brown Judaic Studies

Language

English

Pages

ISBN

978-1-94652-715-8

Link

Last Update

11-Apr-2026

Keywords

Religion ; Jewish Studies

Description

A study of all published and many unpublished Akkadian prayers and incantations containing witchcraft-related terminology reveals that most of the texts deal primarily with witchcraft and can be typed and assigned to distinct categories on structural and thematic grounds. In a number of texts, however, these terms occur as members of a much larger group of evils and stand in no causal relationship to the non-witchcraft terms. While this creates no essential difficulty for the interpreter in those instances where the text has as its object the combatting of evils of all types (as, for example, in the General Namburbi...