This post is based on the episode with Gideon Bohak who is a Professor in the Department of Jewish Philosophy and Talmud at Tel Aviv University. He is a specialist in Jewish magic, especially in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and in the study of the Cairo Genizah. This post was generated by AI but edited by a human.
What would you do if you believed a demon had entered your home?
In late antique Mesopotamia, some Jews had a surprisingly practical answer: write the demon a divorce document.
For centuries, Jewish communities in Babylonia produced magical incantations intended to protect their homes, families, and bodies from supernatural threats. Many of these spells were written inside clay bowls and buried beneath houses. Some employed the language of Jewish marriage and divorce law to command demons to depart.
One of the most intriguing targets of these spells was Lilith, the female demon who would eventually become one of the most recognizable figures in Jewish mythology.
In this episode of The Levantini Podcast, I welcome back scholar Gideon Bohak to discuss his research on Jewish magic, Babylonian incantation bowls, the Cairo Geniza, and the changing traditions surrounding Lilith.
Our conversation centers on a remarkable medieval manuscript fragment containing a magical recipe titled a deed of divorce for Lilith. Bohak and his colleague Dan Levene showed that the formula preserves striking parallels to incantations written on Babylonian bowls roughly five centuries earlier.
The discovery offers a rare glimpse into the transmission of Jewish magical traditions across enormous distances and long periods of time.
Jewish Magic in Sasanian Babylonia
Between late antiquity and the early Islamic period, Mesopotamia—roughly modern Iraq and parts of western Iran—was home to substantial Jewish communities.
These communities participated in the religious and intellectual culture that produced the Babylonian Talmud. But their surviving writings reveal another dimension of Jewish life: the widespread use of protective magic.
One of the most distinctive artifacts from this world is the Babylonian incantation bowl.
These were ordinary-looking clay bowls with magical texts written on their interiors, often in spirals beginning at the center and extending toward the rim.
The bowls were commonly deposited upside down or placed in pairs, sometimes beneath floors or near household entrances.
Their purpose was generally protective. They were intended to ward off demons, illness, misfortune, and other perceived supernatural dangers.
Some spells explicitly identified the individuals or families they were meant to protect.
The practice was not exclusively Jewish. Similar bowls survive in Mandaic and Syriac, and a smaller number are known in Arabic.
What makes the Jewish examples particularly valuable is that they preserve extensive Aramaic texts written in Jewish scripts, providing evidence of religious practices beyond the literary works that later became authoritative.
Why have so many incantation bowls survived?
Bohak emphasizes an important methodological point: the survival of artifacts does not necessarily reveal how widespread a practice originally was.
Clay bowls buried underground can survive for approximately 1,500 years.
Amulets written on papyrus, parchment, or other organic materials were much more vulnerable to decay.
Consequently, the large number of surviving bowls may partly reflect their durability rather than the relative popularity of bowl magic compared with other magical practices.
The archaeological record also has another limitation: many bowls entered modern collections through the antiquities market without secure excavation records.
This loss of provenance makes it difficult to reconstruct their original distribution and archaeological contexts.
How Did Babylonian Incantation Bowls Work?
There was no single standardized incantation.
Bohak describes the texts as compositions assembled from smaller formulas. A scribe might begin with an invocation, add a substantial protective spell, and then fill the remaining space with shorter passages.
Different bowls therefore contain overlapping language without being identical.
Some employ biblical quotations, divine names, angels, and lists of demons.
Others contain obscure supernatural names, references to local cults, and formulas whose origins remain uncertain.
This variety raises an important question: who wrote the bowls?
Were the writers rabbis or professional scribes?
The authors rarely identified themselves.
Bohak discusses research suggesting that some bowls were written by professional scribes—the same kind of literate specialists who could prepare contracts, marriage documents, legal petitions, and other written instruments.
This possibility is particularly intriguing because certain magical formulas borrow language from legal documents.
A scribe familiar with marriage and divorce terminology could adapt that language to a magical purpose.
Bohak is cautious about identifying the writers as rabbis. The bowls contain material that does not fit neatly into rabbinic literary culture, and the social influence of rabbis in late antique Babylonia remains a subject of scholarly debate.
The bowls thus reveal a Jewish religious world more diverse than the surviving rabbinic texts alone might suggest.
The Cairo Geniza: A Window into Medieval Jewish Magic
The second major collection discussed in the episode comes from the Cairo Geniza.
A geniza is a repository in which Jewish communities deposited written materials that were no longer in use.
The famous Cairo Geniza, associated with the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, preserves an extraordinary range of Jewish documents and manuscripts.
Among them are magical recipe books, amulets, divinatory texts, and other materials revealing the practical concerns of medieval Jewish communities.
Unlike the clay bowls of Babylonia, these texts survive largely on paper and parchment.
The Geniza materials also belong to a later historical environment, shaped by Arabic language and Islamic culture.
Did Jewish magic change over time?
Very much so.
Bohak challenges the assumption that magical traditions were static.
Early Geniza magical materials sometimes preserve older Palestinian Jewish traditions, including texts in Palestinian Aramaic.
In later centuries, additional techniques and formulas associated with Arabic and Islamic magical traditions become increasingly visible.
These include references to Quranic passages, new supernatural figures, and rituals intended not merely to repel demons but to summon or control them.
Still later, the Geniza also preserves materials associated with Jewish communities from Spain, including texts in Ladino.
Jewish magic was therefore a changing tradition, shaped by migration, language, religious exchange, and the circulation of manuscripts.
The Remarkable Discovery: A Divorce Document for Lilith
At the heart of Bohak's research is a small manuscript fragment now held at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati.
The fragment, approximately 12 by 10 centimeters, contains part of a medieval Jewish magical recipe book.
One of its texts is headed a deed of divorce for Lilith.
The document was not an ordinary divorce between two human beings.
It was a magical formula designed to expel a female demon from someone's home or body.
The formula borrowed the structure and vocabulary of a Jewish get, a formal deed of divorce.
In Jewish law, a get releases a wife from a marriage and permits her to marry someone else.
Magical practitioners adapted that legal concept to the supernatural world.
By declaring the demon divorced, dismissed, and released, the spell sought to terminate her connection with the household.
Why was this particular fragment so important?
Bohak and Dan Levene identified close parallels between the Geniza formula and spells preserved on Babylonian incantation bowls.
The similarities extend well beyond the general idea of divorcing a demon.
Both sets of texts preserve distinctive formulas, unusual names associated with the demon's parents, and references to a figure called Rabbi Joshua ben Perahiah.
The recurrence of these details makes an independent invention of the same formula highly unlikely.
The medieval manuscript appears to preserve a descendant of a much older Babylonian magical tradition.
This is particularly significant because most of the formulas found on the incantation bowls do not reappear in later Geniza magical texts.
The Lilith divorce formula represents an unusually clear example of continuity.
A Magical Formula That Survived Five Centuries
The Babylonian incantation bowls discussed in the episode largely date to the fifth through seventh centuries CE.
The Geniza fragment is dated to approximately the eleventh or twelfth century.
That leaves a gap of roughly 500 years.
The texts also come from different regions: Babylonia and Egypt.
How could such a distinctive magical formula survive?
Bohak suggests that it continued to be copied and transmitted after the practice of producing incantation bowls had largely disappeared.
The Islamic conquests of the seventh century transformed the political and cultural landscape of the Middle East.
Jewish communities in Babylonia, Palestine, and Egypt increasingly participated in a connected world in which Arabic became a major shared language.
The movement of scholars, merchants, manuscripts, and religious traditions made the circulation of texts across these regions possible.
Bohak considers it plausible that the formula continued circulating in Babylonia before eventually reaching Egypt.
The exact route of transmission, however, cannot be reconstructed from the surviving fragment.
Who Was Lilith in Ancient Jewish Belief?
Today, Lilith is frequently described as Adam's first wife, a rebellious woman who refused to submit to him.
But that familiar story is only one part of a much longer and more complicated history.
In the earliest Jewish sources, Lilith was not necessarily understood as a single, fully developed mythological character.
Lilith in the Hebrew Bible
The word commonly rendered as Lilith appears in Isaiah 34:14.
Its precise meaning in that passage is debated.
It may refer to a supernatural being, a nocturnal creature, or something else associated with the desolate landscape described by the prophet.
The passage does not identify Lilith as Adam's wife.
Nor does it tell the later story of her rebellion against Adam.
That narrative belongs to subsequent interpretive traditions.
Lilith in the Dead Sea Scrolls
A reference to Lilith also appears among the Dead Sea Scrolls in an exorcistic context.
For Bohak, the context makes it considerably clearer that the name refers to a demonic being.
This provides evidence that Lilith had a place in Jewish demonological traditions well before the medieval period.
The surviving evidence, however, does not allow scholars to reconstruct a complete early biography of the figure.
Lilith as a category of demons
One of the most interesting points in the interview is that Lilith could function both as a personal name and as a category.
Some incantation bowls refer to multiple male and female liliths or related demonic beings.
Others refer to specific demons with individual names.
Still others treat Lilith as a particular supernatural personality.
Over time, Lilith increasingly became a prominent individual figure in Jewish demonology.
This development helps explain why later Jewish texts contain more elaborate stories about her relationships, genealogy, and powers.
Was Lilith Really Adam's First Wife?
The idea that Lilith was Adam's first wife is a later Jewish interpretation, not an explicit statement in Genesis.
Genesis contains two different presentations of human creation.
Genesis 1:27 describes the creation of humanity as male and female.
Genesis 2:21–22 describes the formation of the woman from the man's side.
Later interpreters developed explanations for the differences between these accounts.
One influential medieval tradition identified an earlier woman with Lilith, describing her conflict with Adam and departure from him.
The best-known developed version appears in the Alphabet of Ben Sira.
This should not be confused with what Genesis itself says.
The historical question is not simply whether Lilith appears in the Bible, but how successive generations of readers transformed a brief and ambiguous reference into a much more elaborate mythological character.
Why Were Ancient Jews Afraid of Lilith?
Lilith was associated with several kinds of danger.
In Jewish demonological traditions, she could appear in dreams, trouble sleeping individuals, threaten households, and, in some later accounts, endanger infants.
Some traditions gave her a particularly sexual character.
Bohak discusses rabbinic references to Lilith visiting men who sleep alone and the association of such encounters with erotic dreams.
From the perspective of the people who used these protective spells, disturbing dreams were not necessarily understood as products of the mind.
They could be interpreted as encounters with external supernatural beings.
A magical divorce was one way to remove the perceived threat.
But Bohak also emphasizes that not every divorce spell involving Lilith was sexual.
Some were intended to protect entire families against a broad range of demonic disturbances.
Why Did Jewish Magicians Use Divorce Law Against Demons?
The use of divorce documents against demons demonstrates the creativity of ancient magical practice.
A familiar legal procedure was adapted to address a supernatural problem.
The spell might name the person seeking protection, identify the demon, invoke supernatural authority, and command the unwanted being to leave.
In some versions, the formula was extended to male demons as well as female demons—even though the ordinary legal framework being borrowed concerned divorce between husband and wife.
The magical practitioner was not simply reproducing Jewish law.
He was transforming legal language into a tool of ritual protection.
The reference to Rabbi Joshua ben Perahiah added another layer of authority.
This ancient rabbinic figure appears in other Jewish traditions, but the magical texts attribute to him a special role in expelling or divorcing demons.
The texts do not establish that the historical rabbi actually composed these spells.
Rather, his name functioned within the tradition as a source of authority.
Was Magic Accepted in Judaism?
The answer depends partly on how magic is defined.
Rabbinic literature could strongly condemn forbidden magical practices while accepting protective amulets and discussing demons extensively.
From the perspective of the practitioners, writing a protective amulet might not have counted as forbidden magic at all.
In the medieval period, thinkers such as Maimonides criticized magical practices much more forcefully.
Yet the surviving manuscripts demonstrate that Jewish magical traditions continued.
Bohak also discusses the later use of the term practical Kabbalah, which could frame certain ritual techniques as inherited religious knowledge rather than illicit magic.
The boundaries between prayer, protection, medicine, religious practice, and magic were historically contested.
What Does the Lilith Divorce Spell Tell Us About Jewish History?
The fragment from the Cairo Geniza is remarkable not because it proves that all Jewish magical traditions remained unchanged, but because it preserves a rare example of continuity.
A formula developed in late antique Babylonia survived in a medieval Egyptian manuscript.
Its wording changed, but its distinctive structure and references remained recognizable.
At the same time, the larger comparison between the incantation bowls and the Geniza reveals just how much Jewish magic evolved.
Different languages, supernatural figures, rituals, and cultural influences entered the tradition over time.
The history of Lilith is part of that larger story.
She began as an ambiguous figure in the surviving ancient evidence, appeared in increasingly recognizable demonological contexts, and eventually became one of the most famous characters in Jewish mythology.
Through her story, we can glimpse a religious world in which legal documents could become exorcisms, professional scribes could produce protective spells, and the boundaries between ordinary life and the supernatural were far more permeable than many modern readers imagine.
Frequently Asked Questions About Lilith and Jewish Magic
1. Who is Lilith in Jewish mythology?
Lilith is a female demonic figure who appears in Jewish religious and magical traditions. Her identity developed over time, from an ambiguous biblical reference to a prominent figure in medieval Jewish mythology.
2. Was Lilith Adam's first wife?
In a well-known medieval Jewish tradition, Lilith is described as Adam's first wife. However, the book of Genesis does not explicitly identify her as Adam's wife.
3. Where is Lilith mentioned in the Bible?
The Hebrew term commonly transliterated as Lilith appears in Isaiah 34:14. Its meaning in that passage is debated.
4. Is Lilith mentioned in Genesis?
No. Lilith is not named in Genesis. The association between Lilith and Adam developed in later interpretive traditions.
5. What are Babylonian incantation bowls?
They are clay bowls inscribed with magical formulas, usually intended to protect people and households against supernatural threats. Many survive from late antique Mesopotamia.
6. Why were incantation bowls buried upside down?
The bowls were commonly buried beneath buildings or near entrances as protective objects. Their placement was part of the ritual use of the incantation.
7. Were incantation bowls exclusively Jewish?
No. Jewish, Mandaean, Syriac, and some Arabic examples survive, demonstrating that the practice crossed religious and linguistic boundaries.
8. What language was used on Jewish incantation bowls?
Many Jewish incantation bowls were written in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic using Hebrew script.
9. How old are Babylonian incantation bowls?
Many surviving examples date to approximately the fifth through seventh centuries CE, although the wider practice and its chronology require careful distinction.
10. What is the Cairo Geniza?
The Cairo Geniza is a large collection of Jewish manuscripts and documents preserved in a synagogue repository in Fustat, medieval Cairo.
11. Did the Cairo Geniza contain magical texts?
Yes. It preserves amulets, magical recipe books, divinatory texts, and other materials associated with Jewish magical traditions.
12. What is the Lilith divorce spell?
It is a magical formula that adapts the language of a Jewish divorce document to command Lilith or related demons to leave a person or household.
13. Why would someone divorce a demon?
The formula treated the demon's unwanted presence as a relationship that could be formally terminated through ritual and legal language.
14. What is a get in Jewish law?
A get is a formal Jewish deed of divorce. Ancient magical practitioners borrowed its terminology for some protective incantations.
15. Who discovered the connection between the Lilith spell and the bowls?
Scholars Gideon Bohak and Dan Levene studied the parallels between a medieval Geniza fragment and older Babylonian incantation bowls.
16. How long did the Lilith divorce formula survive?
The surviving evidence connects versions of the formula across a gap of roughly 500 years, from late antique Babylonia to medieval Egypt.
17. Who was Rabbi Joshua ben Perahiah?
He was an ancient rabbinic figure whose name appears in rabbinic literature and in magical incantations. The magical texts attribute supernatural authority to him, but do not prove he authored the spells.
18. Is Lilith mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls?
Yes. Lilith appears in an exorcistic text among the Dead Sea Scrolls, providing evidence of her place in ancient Jewish demonology.
19. Was Lilith originally one demon or many?
Both usages occur in Jewish magical traditions. Some texts refer to multiple liliths as a class of demons, while others treat Lilith as a particular supernatural figure.
20. What is the connection between Lilith and dreams?
Some Jewish traditions associate Lilith with troubling or erotic dreams. Protective spells could be used against supernatural beings believed to cause such experiences.
21. Did rabbis approve of Jewish magic?
Rabbinic attitudes varied by practice and period. Some forms of magic were condemned, while protective amulets and certain discussions of demons were accepted.
22. What is practical Kabbalah?
Practical Kabbalah refers to ritual techniques associated with esoteric Jewish traditions, sometimes involving divine names, angels, amulets, or protective formulas.
23. Did Islamic culture influence medieval Jewish magic?
Yes. The Cairo Geniza preserves evidence of Jewish engagement with Arabic magical traditions, including new formulas, supernatural figures, and ritual techniques.
24. Who wrote ancient Jewish magical texts?
The writers are usually anonymous. Some were likely professional scribes, while others may have possessed different levels of literacy and religious training.
25. Why is the Lilith divorce fragment historically important?
It preserves unusually close parallels between a medieval Jewish magical recipe and much older Babylonian incantations, offering rare evidence of continuity in Jewish magical transmission.
