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The ancient world

In the introduction to his monumental volume Aramaic incantation texts from Nippur (1913) (henceforth AIT), Montgomery referred to magic bowls as ' the membra disjecta of these out-of-the-way texts' and proceeded to justify the level of detail in the commentary which had unavoidably gone 'much beyond the editor's desire and convenience' (p. 9). Montgomery can rest assured that his results have more than justified his undertaking. They have opened a Pandora's box which has become an area of study that has steadily grown over the twentieth century. Montgomery's ' scattered remains' have long since been joined by enough published texts to be considered a corpus of literature which is studied for its own content and peculiarities. Juusola's new book is indeed a welcome and needed addition to the study of Jewish magical texts and the Aramaic language. Its particular objective is the analytical study of the 'distinctive features of the dialect (or dialects) reflected in the bowl texts' which were written in square characters and considered to be Jewish. Juusola attempts to locate both the most common as well as the very unusual grammatical features on the background of known Aramaic dialects. These are neatly set out in the introduction and range from Ancient Old Aramaic (pre-700 B.C.E.) right up to Late Aramaic (up to 700 C.E.) and beyond to include Geonic Aramaic, modern Yemenite oral traditions of the reading of the Babylonian Talmud and even Modern Aramaic. A concise and useful summary of the particular features of each of the dialects is provided. The chapters that follow are organized as a grammar wherein typical forms are presented in neat tables and real examples are given and discussed. There are remarks on phonology, pronouns, nouns and verbs, though numerals are for some reason missing. These discussions often read as a more general comparative study of Aramaic dialect forms. In some cases Juusola can clearly show affinity between the bowl texts and one or another recognized dialect, though in most cases the picture that emerges is far more complex.