Magic and Divination in Ancient Palestine and Syria.

• Author: Cryer, Frederick H.
• Position: Review

By ANN JEFFERS. Studies in the History and Culture of the Ancient Near East, vol. 8. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1996. Pp. xviii + 276. HF1 146, $86.

Ann Jeffers brings nothing that is new to the understanding of magic and divination in ancient Syria-Palestine. Instead, one has throughout her study the feeling of having been there before. Jeffers maintains that "the best 'inside' view we could ever get of an ancient society is that provided by language" (p. 16). Few would contest this, but her unceasing hunt for etymologies of the various magical terms is hardly the way to achieve this goal. It is not only in its linguistics that we encounter this work's dated approach to scholarship. Jeffers claims that there is such a thing as a "semitic mentality" (p. 16), an idea traceable back to Adolphe Lods in Hebraic studies, and indirectly to Lucien Levy-Bruhl's theories about "primitive mentality." The point can still be maintained; but, to do so, Jeffers needs to examine more recent social-anthropological literature on the matter than she, in fact, uses.

Jeffers' book takes its organization from the Hebraic distinction (1 Sam 28:6) between prophets (ch. 2, pp. 25-124), dreams and visions (ch. 3, pp. 125-43), and Urim and Thummim (ch. 4, pp. 144-96), all very broadly construed so as to encompass as many apparently related phenomena as possible. The appendices are grouped under such themes as blessing and curse, magic in warfare, and magical healing (app. 1-3, pp. 230-50).

Although Jeffers assumes that the Pentateuch reflects the ideology of the Second Temple (p. 23), everywhere in her work she nevertheless supposes that ancient material is present at many junctures of Hebrew Scripture. Yet, she offers no guidelines for us to discriminate between ancient traditions and those of more recent creation. As a result, her espousal of the critical reevaluation of the biblical historical tradition that has taken place for the last twenty years or so remains arbitrary, and it has no consequences for her analysis.

Elsewhere in Jeffers' work, one finds reflexes of social anthropological notions that have outlived their day. For example, on p. 57 kasdim is said to appear in the MT under a "racial" aspect. This is an eerily poor choice of term, given that many semitic peoples, such as the Mesopotamians, gave little voice to conceptions of ethnic differences (the king of Sumer and Akkad was merely the "ruler of the black-headed ones"), and given that modern social...