Some Contributions of the Babylonian Magic Bowls to the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Lexicon

During the past two decades the number of edited magic bowls bearing incantations written in a form of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (JBA) has tripled and has now surpassed 400. Several times this number remain to be published. These texts contain numerous lexemes that are not attested in Rabbinic literature from Babylonia. Some of these lexemes are listed in Michael Sokoloff’s A Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (2002). Many of the new words, however, appear in manuscripts that were not available at the time that the dictionary was prepared or were not correctly understood in the published editions. In this paper we will present a number of lexemes from the magic bowls that are new to the JBA lexicon and have not been previously noted in the scholarly literature. We will also discuss two ‘ghost words’ which appear in the dictionary, but are based on misreadings in the published editions of the bowls.