Despite some progress in recent decades, the study of Jewish magic is still in its infancy. The few monographs devoted to this subject – most notably the classic treatments of Ludwig Blau and Joshua Trachtenberg – cover only small segments of the Jewish magical tradition, which spans at least from the Second Temple period all the way to the twenty-first century. And more recent work, including both the publication of numerous Jewish magical texts and some attempts at broader syntheses, has not yet grappled enough with the diachronic aspect of the Jewish magical texts, and with their diffusion and transformation over space and time. It is as a contribution to this important yet neglected topic that the following discussion of the Genizah magical texts and their transmission of some late antique Jewish magical recipes should be read. The significance of this contribution does not lie in the novelty of its main argument – that some of the magical texts from the Cairo Genizah are copies of magical texts from late antique Palestine and Egypt – for this point has already been made by others, but in the attempt to provide sound methodological guidelines which could supplement existing scholarly intuitions. It is for this reason that I shall begin with a brief general survey of the magical texts from the Cairo Genizah, move on to discussing the methods for distinguishing late antique materials in the Genizah magical texts and illustrating these methods with a concrete example, and end with some reflections on the wider implications of this claim for the study of late antique Jewish magic and its transmission history.

My on-going study of θρ∈πτός (threptos) and related categories in Greek narrative and documentary sources began as a study in terminology, but it inevitably grew into a study of legal, social and economic structures of Hellenistic Greece and the Roman east from 200 BCE to 300 CE. This study will include discussions about the origin and the legal and social status of children whose natural parents were unable or unwilling to raise them as their own, and the legal and social status of those who raised them. With nearly 1,200 inscriptions and papyri and a small sample of literary texts at our disposal, this project seems long overdue, especially in view of the growing number of important studies on the Roman family and the Latin correlative of Greek θρ∈πτοί (threptoi) – Roman and Italian alumni/nutriti.

Prior to A. Cameron's study, ‘ΘPEΠTOΣ and Related Terms in the Inscriptions of Asia Minor’, published in 1939, only sporadic references to this social group were to be found in modern literature. As Cameron himself put it, ‘no very systematic attempt has been made to determine their status or the nature of their relationships to other persons’ (p. 27). Teresa Giulia Nani took up the problem of θρ∈πτοί anew in a lengthy article published in 1944. She enlarged her field of study by including all the sources available at that time. She collected about 230 inscriptions featuring θρ∈πτοί, their natural families and their nurturers. Since the publication of these two studies, the question of θρ∈πτοί has been strangely neglected, although the amount of documentary evidence has more than doubled in the meantime.

The aim of this paper is to examine the epigraphic use of Greek in the last period of Byzantine rule and in the early Islamic period in the region nowadays divided among the State of Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan and Syria, once a patchwork of provinces and parts of provinces of the Byzantine Empire: the three Palaestinae, Arabia and southern Phoenice. This region shared a common cultural and political history in the period indicated, albeit with some chronological variations in its development. I shall endeavour, first, to follow the career of Greek as the main vehicle of expression in epigraphic form, and second, to trace changes in its usage, and in the language itself, if any can be discovered.

The peak of Greek inscriptions in this region, throughout the period of currency of this tongue, was in the sixth and the early seventh centuries. By the end of the eighth century, Greek as an epigraphic medium had ceased to be relevant, though it was still occasionally used in the ecclesiastical milieu, especially in Jerusalem. Ostensibly, what brought about the decline is clear – the impact of the Islamic conquest and the formation of a dominant culture supported by an Arabic-speaking Muslim elite that superseded the former Greek-speaking Christian leading class. Not surprisingly, Greek did not go down without a fight. It survived in private use – namely, in epitaphs – until the eighties of the seventh century (in isolated cases even later, including early medieval occurrences in Jerusalem), and in public inscriptions until the late eighth century (and in Jerusalem and its vicinity even as late as the Crusader period).

This book is devoted to processes of continuity and change over the thousand years which separate Alexander the Great from Muhammad the Prophet – two men perceived as instrumental in changing the linguistic and cultural map of the Middle East, the former responsible for the spread of Greek, the latter for the demise of Greek and the rise of Arabic. Obviously the reality is not so simple, and the main purpose of this book is to examine the finer details and complexities of the relationship between languages and cultures during this period, and also to offer some account of the variety of responses that Greek, and other languages, evoked in the peoples of that area from Greece (and Rome) eastwards to Iran.

Like many other collective works, this book too has its own history. It grew out of the success of a conference, and the conference itself out of the experience of the editors as leaders and participants in a yearlong research group at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2002–3. The group was led by Hannah M. Cotton (of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Jonathan J. Price (of Tel Aviv University) and David J. Wasserstein (then of Tel Aviv University, now of Vanderbilt University); the other members were Leah Di Segni and Shlomo Naeh (of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Robert G. Hoyland (then of Oxford University, now of the University of St Andrews), E. Axel Knauf (of Bern University), Marijana Ricl (of the University of Belgrade) and Seth Schwartz (of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York).

INTRODUCTION

Functional domains of languages and the difference between spoken and written language

In bi- or multilingual societies, the use of one or another language depends on a few basic parameters and a number of social variables which have been put together in the sociolinguistic concept of ‘functional domains’. Speakers can use, for example, one language within their families, another one in business affairs, etc. Empirical studies have brought to light typical clusters of functional domains, resulting from common speaker attitudes towards their languages, which can frequently be classified within a binary scheme as ‘Dominant’ vs. ‘Minority’ languages (see Table 17.1). These assumptions, reasonable as they are, have not yet been fully applied to the field of ancient bilingualism, where the use of a certain language is often simply taken as a shibboleth of a correlative personal identity. Although in some circumstances language use may indeed function as a claim of belonging to a societal group, or express a sense of identity with that group, we cannot draw conclusions from occasionally attested connections between persons and languages without taking the full range of their language options into account, including their spoken medium(s) too, which usually have to be guessed, or reconstructed.

In everyday bi- or multilingual spoken communication, it is the speakers' social competence, their acquired knowledge of language behaviour, which serves as an ‘intrinsic’ guide to more or less appropriate language choices, similar to the way in which they would choose certain lexical and/or phraseological means belonging to different registers of a single language in order to form stylistically different utterances, simply depending on actual circumstances of speech.

The following story told by Cassius Dio is often repeated. In AD 43, after the emperor Claudius provincialised the territory of the Lycian Koinon on account of internal unrest, an embassy of Lycians appeared before the Senate in Rome. In the course of the discussion it happened that one of the ambassadors did not understand the question posed by Claudius in Latin. In consequence Claudius deprived him of the Roman citizenship, maintaining that no one could be a Roman citizen who did not also understand Rome's language. We may get the impression that command of Latin was required of a Roman citizen, or was a prerequisite in order to become one. In fact nothing of the sort was true under Claudius or any other Roman emperor, as is implied in another story from the same reign preserved by the same author. Soon after assuming power Claudius saw a theatrical performance of a Pyrrhic dance by young people whom Caligula had brought from Achaia. After the performance Claudius bestowed the Roman citizenship on the troupe and sent it home. It is of course unlikely that any of the young men knew any Latin. Nonetheless the Roman citizenship was given not only to them but also to their relatives: parents, siblings, as well as grandparents and great uncles – as witnessed in the many inscriptions from Achaia which mention the family of T. Statilius Lamprias who died at the age of 18. This young man happened to be one of the dancers whom Claudius rewarded with the Roman citizenship.

The Jewish diaspora of Asia Minor, one of the most vital centres of Jewish diaspora life in antiquity, has left us many testimonies of its life: material remains, ranging from synagogue buildings to lamps; written sources, both pagan and Christian; and, of course, inscriptions. The evidence of inscriptions has the distinct advantage of having been written for and by the Jews of Asia Minor themselves: we are looking not through the eyes of foreign observers, but through their own eyes – even if they adapted themselves to their surroundings and joined the world of epigraphy, the world of communication established by the Greek inhabitants of Asia Minor. Even if we know only about 250 Jewish inscriptions, their distribution in time and place corresponds perfectly with that of inscribed texts in general. The Jewish inscriptions can therefore be seen as media of communication both with the outside world and within the community (sections on ‘The epigraphic habit’ and ‘The use of different kinds of inscriptions’); if pagans, Christians and Jews used, in part, the same language and the same means of expression, we shall have to look at the consequences for identity in the Jewish diaspora: to what extent did the Jews accept local identities (section on ‘Local Identities’)? Of course, there were always differences among religious identities, but were these differences strong enough to overcome the similarities which grew out of living together in the cities and in the countryside of Asia Minor, and sharing the same social and local conditions (‘Religious Identities’)?

The ability to use the same words for the diaspora in Asia Minor and in Syria suggests (at first glance) that circumstances were almost identical.

The interest of modern scholarship in the history of the Samaritan people, their literature and the material remains of their past is a continuous trend started in 1907 by James Allen Montgomery. The script on the early silver coins of Samaria from the fourth century BCE is palaeo Aramaic, however, using in some cases palaeo-Hebrew letter forms. Meshorer and Qedar referred to the script of the legends on these coins as revealing a ‘mixed nature’. The early history of the Samaritan alphabet and in particular the period of its inception have remained an enigma. Montgomery refrained from suggesting a precise date for its beginning, whilst Purvis concluded ‘that the Samaritan script branched off from the paleo-Hebrew in the late Hasmonaean period’. Other scholars have suggested the first century CE. The present discussion aims to establish at what time the Samaritan alphabet was introduced, or rather created, and what its uses were.

THE MOUNT GERIZIM INSCRIPTIONS

The publication in 2004 of the Aramaic, Hebrew and Samaritan inscriptions excavated on Mt Gerizim in 1982–2004 presents a very important corpus of epigraphic material. The 395 inscriptions (almost all fragmentary) include 380 in Aramaic and ‘square’ Jewish script (nos. 1–380: ‘Lapidary Aramaic and Proto-Jewish’) and 9 in palaeo-Hebrew (nos. 382–90: ‘New-Hebrew’ script) ascribed to the third and second centuries BCE, antedating the ruthless destruction of the Samaritan temple by John Hyrcanus I in contributor. 113/112 BCE. The excavations revealed only four Samaritan inscriptions (nos. 392–5) attributed to medieval times. Only ten of several dozens of Greek inscriptions from the excavations were published and attributed to Samaritans during the fourth and fifth centuries CE.

DYING LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTIC SEAMS

Dozens of languages were spoken in the ancient world during the period stretching from the Hellenistic to the Islamic conquests. There were far fewer writing systems than spoken languages, which means that not every language had a cognate script, and many died out before ever being written down. But for those languages with a tradition and formalised system of writing, the connection between language and script was strong. Long integral texts written in the script of another language are a medieval phenomenon; they were not produced as a mainstream cultural activity in antiquity. The concept of separating language from script was not entirely absent, but it is our thesis that a transcribed text invariably indicates marginality or liminality of some kind: a language or script which is dying, an individual on a cultural/linguistic seam, a peripheral medium such as magic, a scholastic exercise. These exceptional cases constitute the first part of the current investigation. In the second part, we shall examine the more complex instance of rabbinical traditions regarding the scripts and languages used in writing biblical books.

In antiquity, it seems, language and script were thought of generally as a unit, to the extent that reference to a particular system of ‘letters’ or ‘writing’ could signify the literary or even the spoken language itself. For example, when Herodotus relates (4.87) that Darius set up two stelae on the Bosporos, ἐνταμὼν γράμματα ἐς μὲν τὴν 'Aσσύρια, ἐς δὲ τὴν ‘Eλληνικά, he of course means not strictly two scripts but two languages, i.e. a bilingual inscription in Aramaic and Greek, each written in its cognate script.

When the Arabs conquered Egypt in 641, they found a deeply divided Christian church – in fact what they found amounted to two quite separate churches. They are usually called, in neutral terms, ‘Chalcedonian’ and ‘anti-’ or ‘non-Chalcedonian’, with reference to the Council of Chalcedon where their split had been consummated two centuries earlier. The two churches disagreed deeply on Christological questions, and during the two centuries that followed the Council, there were several, often heavy-handed, attempts to bring the non-Chalcedonian churches back into the imperial sphere. These events are unfortunately known mainly from polemical sources from both sides, and although this last fact does allow us to get a more balanced view, it also creates the impression that the Chalcedonian conflict dominated life in the Empire after the fifth century, an impression that certainly needs qualification.

In Egypt, the non-Chalcedonian or Monophysite church modelled itself on the highly centralised structure of the existing patriarchate of Alexandria, which, contrary to the other four patriarchates, did not have an intermediate level of metropoles between the patriarch and the local bishops. Both churches had their leaders in Alexandria, heading two welldeveloped parallel networks of episcopal sees and affiliated monasteries which covered most of the valley. In 641, the Chalcedonian church had, for over a century, been actively backed by the imperial power structure, often forcing the non-Chalcedonian hierarchy to leave the city centres and retreat to monasteries from where they managed their communities. The political break with Constantinople brought about by the Arab conquest eventually weakened the position of the Chalcedonian Church.

In his recent discussion of the tomb and nefesh of the Benei Ḥezir at Jerusalem, D. Barag described and identified palpable Nabataean elements in the architecture and decorations of this monument from first-century BCE Jerusalem. As evidenced by a scatter of finds, ‘Nabataeanising’ was fashionable among at least some Judaean families. Jewish–Nabataean contacts in the first centuries BCE/CE operated on the levels of politics, trade, and settlement, and are inscribed within the larger context of Judaean/Jewish presence in Transjordan and North Arabia from Achaemenid times to the coming of Islam.

Political relations between the Jewish and Nabataean principalities might briefly be summarised, although for a rich family like the Benei Ḥezir (whose wealth, based on trade and land leasing, is evidenced by the splendour of their tomb) they were largely irrelevant. As the biblical book of Ruth demonstrates so well, there had always been emigration from Judah to Moab, and immigration from Moab to Judah. Most scholars date Ruth to the fifth century BCE, but the basic situation of the protagonists is timeless and applies to the whole ‘pre-modern world’ from the beginnings of settled life to the end of the Ottoman period. The Moabite plateau is 200 m higher than the mountains of Judah, thus receiving more precipitation than any area south of Hebron, and becomes an area of refuge in times of drought. It is, from the point of view of the geography of traffic, fairly isolated and less accessible from the north, west and south, and becomes an area of refuge in times of crisis and instability, especially if the aggressors come from the north, west or south.