The Bible in the Bowls

On the very day the Lenovo update bricked this machine, I was sticking comments upon Daniel James Waller's The Bible in the Bowls in PDF which Davila found at the AWOL blog. Here Waller presented the magickal tradition of Jewish Babylonia. Waller notes that some Bible citations in the 'Iraq were not picked up back home in Judaea-then-Palaestina. So they represent the first Hebrew (or Jewish-Aramaic) witness to many passages in the Masoretic Text.

I may as well post what I'd found, tonight; as I'm on topic of the early Bible. For this blog Late-Antique Near East takes precedence but... these bowls are VERY late-antique . . .

As to modern controversy the JBA bowls are Schøyen bowls which Iraq has claimed were stolen. I hold the opinion that these bowls belong to Israel's Mizrahi community. Political Iraqis (like Greeks and like Egyptians) might own a claim to what archaeology they would "take back"; but not to Jewish treasures, Iraqis having over the generations stolen rather a lot from them.

The Jewish language of the Mesopotamia in preIslamic generations was Eastern Aramaic, something like Hatrene and (at a remove) Syriac. Some bowls do their thing in both this downstream Aramaic and in Hebrew. Mostly Hebrew was preferred because, hey: magick. Where it's Aramaic there's hint at a Targum tradition as Psalm 115.

Where I might speculate on when and how, exactly, Exodus 14:31-15:7 and 4Q365 duked it out (and we gotta ask about the LXX); Nehemiah 9:32 (which is just Deuteronomy 10:17) is, I think, kosher Qumranian as well as Iraqi. I wonder if the Temple Scroll parallels any of it. Also although the Priestly Benediction is absent from Qumran's Biblical texts I expect it will be everywhere in quotation and allusion. The Jerusalem Targum called "pseudo-Jonathan" uses this Benediction, to ward against demons.