Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Bowl Texts: Uncovering the Operational Mechanisms of the Practice using Digital Methods

这篇论文调查了古美索不达米亚晚期生产的犹太亚拉姆碗咒语是如何被认为起作用的。这些手工艺品是圆形的碗，上面刻着打击恶魔活动的咒语，根据指定客户的需求单独书写。这项研究询问咒语文本特征中的哪些模式、趋势和关联可以揭示它们失去的理论基础。此外，它还试图评估语料库在多大程度上反映了犹太经文魔法的一个独特分支在法律框架内运作，以行使人类的权利和执行超自然生物的责任。目前的学术脱节指出，我们目前的理解存在严重限制。尽管人们越来越多地意识到犹太魔法中的不同类别，但最近定义该领域的尝试将其简化为神奇的裁决，完全依赖于某些单词和短语的力量。同样，尽管人们越来越多地意识到在一些碗咒语中展示的专业知识，特别是犹太法律经文文化的知识，但学术仍然受到关于宗教和更广泛的社会地位的有问题的假设的影响。这一证据使一些碗抄写员比学术共识通常所建议的更接近犹太学习的中心，并迫使我们重新审视使役言语行为理论在我们理解抄写员如何试图通过他们的咒语来影响变化方面可能发挥的作用。这项研究认真考虑了这样一种可能性，即复杂的专业专业知识系统支撑了多少从业人员组成单独的碗咒语。该项目是第一次系统地尝试揭示这些理论基础的各个方面。通过使用数字方法对语料库进行全面分析，它将在数百个主要来源的基础上得出关于这些问题的第一个可靠的结论。

This thesis investigates how the Jewish Aramaic bowl spells, produced in Late Antique Mesopotamia, were thought to work. These artefacts are circular bowls inscribed with a spell to combat demonic activity and were written individually according to the needs of named clients.This research asks what patterns, trends and associations in the textual features of the spells can reveal about their lost theoretical underpinnings. Furthermore, it seeks to assess the extent to which the corpus reflects a distinct branch of Jewish scribal magic operating within a legal framework for exercising the rights of humans and enforcing the responsibilities of supernatural beings.Disjoints in current scholarship point toward serious limitations in our current understanding. Despite growing awareness of diverse categories within Jewish magic, recent attempts to define the field reduce it to magical adjurations, depending exclusively on the power of certain words and phrases. Similarly, despite growing awareness of the specialist knowledge on display in some bowl spells, particularly knowledge of Jewish legal scribal culture, scholarship still suffers from problematic assumptions around the religious and wider social status of the practice. This evidence situates some bowl scribes much nearer to the centres of Jewish learning than the scholarly consensus generally suggests and forces fresh examination of the role that exercitive speech act theory might play in our understanding of how scribes attempted to effect change through their spells.This research takes seriously the possibility that a complex system of specialist professional knowledge underpinned how many practitioners composed individual bowl spells. The project is the first systematic attempt to uncover aspects of these theoretical underpinnings. By using digital methods for the holistic analysis of the corpus, it will arrive at the first reliable findings on these questions, grounded in hundreds of primary sources.