RELIGION AND SOCIETY BEFORE 70C.E 85aprobablyrudimentaryandcertainlyeccentricfamiliaritywithGreekrhetoric
and popular philosophy. Paul may not have been alone among early Jewish
Christian apostlesin possessingthese skills;he isjust bestknown. Themagical
texts of the fourth through seventh centuries collected by Naveh and Shaked
sho wno signs of direct kno wledge of the old apocalypses.^88 However, their
angelology and demonology is clearly in part indebted to a tradition initiated
by the Book of Watchers, in that many of the divine characters invoked in the
amulets are, like those of the Enochic tradition, clearly hypostases of divine
attributes and the like, information about which was derived from biblical
exegesis, endowed with personality and volition.^89 I suspect that the angels
anddemonsintheseamulets,asalsointheHekhalotbooks,areoftenidentical
with those of the apocalypses.^90 This suggests that the angelology of the scribes
eventually became the angelology of the Palestinian countryside, or at very
least hints at a tie between the subelite formulators of the myth and the magi-
cal practicioners in the villages. We can get some idea of what the new, Jewish
angelology may have replaced from an incantation text, mentioned earlier,
from pre-Jewish or recently judaized Idumaea.^91 Here the lesser deities in-
voked are the sons and daughters of El and Shamash (just as Enoch, perhaps
following Job 1, identifies the angelic “watchers” with the sons of the gods of
Genesis); similarly, an exorcistic psalm found at Qumranmaymention Re-
shef, an old Canaanite god, here apparently demoted to demonic status.^92 We
may infer from the late amulets and incantation bowls that magical activity,
at least that of the most routine, day-to-day sort,^93 was largely in the hands of
scribes—an inference based not only on the obvious fact that amulets are
writtenbutalso onthefactthatmany ofthetextscontainevidence oflearning:
allusions to biblical verses, recherche ́puns, andthe like. No doubt this “learn-
(^88) Amulets and Magic Bowls: Aramaic Incantations of Late Antiquity(Jerusalem: Magnes,
1985);Magic Spells and Formulae: Aramaic Incantations of Late Antiquity(Jerusalem: Magnes,
1993).
(^89) See Olyan,A Thousand Thousands.
(^90) For continuities of rabbinic (which is closely related to that of the Hekhalot books) with
apocalyptic angelology, see P. Scha ̈fer,Rivalita ̈t zwischen Engeln und Menschen, Studia Judaica
8 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975), esp. pp. 41–72.
(^91) See Naveh, “Nabatean Incantation Text.”
(^92) The text is 11QPsApa, published by J. van der Ploeg,Tradition und Glaube(Go ̈ttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), p. 135. The reading is problematic; see J. Baumgarten, “On
the Nature of the Seductress in 4Q 184,”RQ15 (1991): 134. The article (133–43) contains an
instructive catalogue of demonological texts from Qumran. And see B. Nitzan,Qumran Prayer
and Religious Poetry(Leiden: Brill, 1994), pp. 227–72.
(^93) Indeed, thecontentof the amulets is unmistakably magical, closely akin to the Greek magi-
cal papyriand thespells recordedin SeferHaRazim, andelsewhere. Theusersofthe amuletsmay
however often have been no more conscious of engaging in magical activity, or of subscribing to
a particular cosmology, than a modern wearer of a “good luck charm.” The routine use of apotro-
paic amulets, as opposed to hiring an exorcist or someone to write a love or curse spell, was just
good sense.