Linguistic Peculiarities in the Aramaic Magic Bowl Texts (review)

THE JEWISHQUARTERLYREVIEW,XCII,Nos. 1-2 (Jully-October, 2001) 167-173 Review Essay HANNUJUUSOLA. LinguisticPeculiarities in theAramaicMagic Bowl Texts. StudiaOrientalia86. Helsinki: Finnish OrientalSociety, 1999. Pp. 264. ELJAKIM WAJSBERG, The Academy of the Hebrew Language, Jerusalem About 150 years have elapsed since the firstincantationbowls, originating fromMesopotamia,were publishedby ThomasEllis in 1853. The most importantsingle contributionto the study of the Jewish Aramaiclanguage of the bowls until now has been William H. Rossell's 1953 work. Juusola now has enriched the field of Babylonian Jewish Aramaic by his impressive study, which endeavors to present an analysis of the salient traits of the language used in the Aramaicbowl texts. (Itdoes not attemptto present a grammar,for it is indeed impossible to present a grammar,owing to the heterogeneous characterof this language, as will be explained below.) The book has the following structure: Introduction,in which arediscussed the religious-culturalandlinguistic backgrounds. Corpus. Juusola takes into account the texts published until 1997 (see p. 9).1 His laudable aim is to base his study on reliable publications, which may be checked with the aid of photographsor facsimiles (p. 27). Juusola limits himself to bowls writtenin Hebrew squarecharacters,but this does The following abbreviationsareused in this review: BTA= BabylonianTalmudic Aramaic;Dalman = Gustaf Dalman, Grammatikdes Juedisch-Palaestinischen Aramaeisch (Leipzig 1905); Epstein = J. N. Epstein, Diqduq AramitBavlit (Jerusalem 1960); GA = Galilean Aramaic; Kara = Yechiel Kara, Kitve ha-Yadha-Teymaniim shel ha-Talmudha-Bavli, Mehqarimbi-Lshonamha-Aramit(Jerusalem 1983); Margolis = Max Margolis, Lehrbuchder AramaeischenSprachedes Babylonischen Talmuds (Munich 1910); Naveh and Shaked = Joseph Naveh and Shaul Shaked, Amulets and Magic Bowls. Aramaic Incantations of Late Antiquity (Jerusalem 1985); Noeldeke = Theodor Noeldeke, Mandaeische Grammatik (Halle 1875); Rybak = Solomon F. Rybak, The Aramaic Dialect of Nedarim (New York 1980); Wajsberg= Eljakim Wajsberg,"Ha-Lashonha-Aramitba-Bavli bi-TqufatRi'shone ha-Amora'im,"Leshonenu60 (1997) 95-156. 1The following publication should be added: Shaul Shaked, "'Peace be Upon You, Exalted Angels': On Hekhalot, Liturgy andIncantationBowls,"Jewish Studies Quarterly2 (1995) 197-219. 168 THEJEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW not guarantee their linguistic uniformity because their exact geographic and chronological provenance is mostly unknown. Even the bowls published by Montgomery,all of which were found in the excavations of Nippur ,representvarious dialects (p. 19). Phonology. This section deals with the pronunciationof consonants and vowels and contains important contributions on the diachronic development of yod and waw as counterpartsof shwa andof waw as a counterpart of la/ (qames). This chapter,whose aim is to describe the deviations of the pronunciationfromsome theoreticalframework(= grammar),includes notes on the orthography,i.e., the graphic presentationof the pronunciation.I preferto make a clearerdistinction between the presentationof these two subjects (as Noeldeke does in his grammars).Orthographyis a discipline in the realmof transmissionwhereasphonology is a discipline in the realmof spoken language, which is a component of the linguistic context. Morphology. Pronouns,Inflectionof Nouns, andVerbs.Juusoladoes not discuss the numerals.It would be useful to comparethe forms of the bowl texts, e.g., wvypin ,riV )ni (Naveh and Shaked, 12:2) with otherdialects. Conclusions. Juusola concludes that "the linguistic profile of the bowl texts appears to be conservative . .. the Aramaic in the bowl texts is clearly more archaicthanstandardBTA andMandaic"(p. 248). Bibliography. Impressive and up to date, it is missing one important study: Yechiel Kara,Kitve ha-Yadha-Teymaniimshel ha-Talmudha-Bavli, Mehqarimbi-Lshonamha-Aramit(Jerusalem, 1983). Presentation of the topics. The presentationof each topic is lucid with examples, discussion, andconclusion. I would recommendthateach discussion be dividedinto a philological part,i.e., readingandinterpretation of the bowl texts, and linguistic part,i.e., comparisonof the discussed form with otherformsin the languagesystem of the Aramaicof the bowl texts orother language systems. The problem of extraction of langue from parole exists in every language . This is even more so for the bowl texts. These texts pose two fundamental problems: first, the different bowls may represent different languages;second, even in the samebowl we meet an abundanceof equivalent forms (see p. 247), including some forms which can not be conceived as deviations from a common denominator. This abundance raises the possibility that the language of the bowls does not representparole, the linguistic presentation of the spontaneous joys and sorrows of a native speaker, but it is a constrained tool...