RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIESterminology of the Jewish divorce formula that is used to drive off the
Lilith occur in the Mandaic texts.m However, the absence of Biblical
quotations on Mandaic bowls, although such quotations occur on the
Jewish Aramaic bowls from Nippur, seems to indicate that in a mixed
town such as late Sasanian Nippur some sort of communal boundary
existed between Jews and the people who were becoming Mandaeans.
Sometime in the seventh century this passed over into a formal de-
nunciation of other religions in the Ginza.12^2
The doctrines and liturgy in the Ginza seem to have been written
down shortly after the conquest. The Ginza contains a list of Sasanian
rulers that ends with Shiroe in 628, and in an apocalyptic context, it
contains the "prophecy" that Arab kings would follow the Persian
kings and rule for seventy-one years. Mandaeans, like Messianic Jews,
associated the events at the end of the Sasanian period with the end
of the world. They believed a great flood would occur on the Euphrates
and Tigris rivers and the land of Babel and Gawkai (Jukha) would be
laid waste for fifty years. Babel would be invaded from the west and
the east and twelve thousand captives would be taken from Gawkai.
A false Messiah would come and rule the entire world. Sea water
would spread inland. This apocalypse "predicts" the breakdown and
overturning of the social order in the last days in terms resembling
Magian apocalyptic literature. Fathers would have no authority over
their sons, mothers over their daughters, or masters over their servants;
the master would become a servant and the servant would become
noble; the rich would become poor and the poor rich; temples would
be destroyed; houses would become fields and fields would become
houses.^123
However, the Ginza is mostly liturgy and doctrine. Creation is a
matter of successive emanations of beings of light, except that the
planets and the signs of the zodiac are created by incestuous sexual
generation. Humans contain a particle of divine light in their material
bodies; salvation is gnosis of its celestial origin, and redemption is its
escape at death to rejoin the world of light.12^4 The planetary deities
survived among Mandaeans as forces governing the days of the week.12S
121 Ibid., pp. 46-47, 64, 155, 295.
122 Ibid., pp. 33-34, 45.
123 Lidzbarski, Ginza, pp. 411-16.
124 Ibid., p. 99; Drower, Mandaeans, pp. 197-99; Yamauchi, Incantation Texts, pp.
39-40.
125 For the modern Mandaean signs of the zodiac and qualities of the planets, see
Drower, Mandaeans, pp. 74-81.