“They also worried about demons attacking them, attaching themselves to them.” “Things that kept them awake in the night,” Ahuvia sums up. I think where angels are useful is, you just pray to angels about events in your life that are beneath God’s worries.”įorty percent of the bowls Ahuvia examined contain pleas to the angels - either alongside or beneath requests to God - for help with diverse problems, from gossip to curses to physical illnesses to the health of a marriage.
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“Do you really want to pray to God about the issue of your in-laws? It seems a bit beneath God’s majesty. “The most popular formula we have found represented, that I see most often, has to be a prayer against the intrusion of in-laws,” Ahuvia said. Through the bowls, Jews found a way to deal with numerous sources of tsuris (troubles) in the supernatural and natural worlds, from demons to in-laws. “I wanted to foreground that - the most vivid description of where angels were, what they were doing for people.”Īn Aramaic incantation bowl from Nippur, photo taken circa 1909, shown in ‘Studies in Assyriology and Archaeology’ dedicated to Hermann V. “I found the magical bowls to be the most exciting and fascinating - and the most neglected - in the story of religion and lived experience,” she said.
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About the size of a modern-day breakfast cereal bowl, they were used to seek divine assistance from a variety of sources.
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Other Jewish traditions related to angels have long since faded away, such as incantation bowls from Babylonia, which date from the Mesopotamian region of Mesene in the fifth and sixth centuries CE. She noted that her book does not represent a comprehensive survey of angels among ancient Jewish sources, adding that this would have called for a multivolume effort.Īhuvia noted that key parts of Jewish liturgy today have centuries-old links to angels, from the Kedushah prayer to the practice of standing on Yom Kippur while dressed in white. To understand the Jewish view of angels millennia ago, Ahuvia said she plumbed “much of the available evidence,” spanning “magical-ritual, liturgical, early mystical, and from early to late rabbinic literature,” from the Hebrew Bible to the liturgical poetry of a Jew named Yannai in Byzantine Palestine.