Namburbi and Talmud rituals (1)

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The Akkadian magical texts which could have been applied to everyday use as well as to the royal household is a group of rituals known as Namburbi texts, which are designed to divert the bad portent caused by ominous occurrences. One such omen is the sighting of a snake, usually in the home, which was considered a bad sign. In Namburbi texts, incantations were often recited in combination with apotropaic rituals designed to ward off the evil effects of the omen. Likewise, one passage in the Babylonian Talmud reports remedies for the sighting of snakes:

“If a snake wraps around (someone): let him go down into the water, put a basket over its head and force (the snake) away from himself, and when (the snake) goes into (the basket), let him throw (the basket) into the water, ascend and go off.”

This ritual makes little sense if taken literally as a remedy for being attacked by a python-like snake. On the other hand, the passage makes sense if seen in the light of Akkadian omens and Namburbi texts. In the ‘snake-tablet’ of terrestrial omens, Šumma ālu, one omen reads: “if a snake coils around a man’, or alternatively: ‘if snakes are coiled up on a man’s house … ‘. As for the victim going into the ‘water’, it is commonplace that Namburbi rituals were performed at the river or even in the river, and offerings were thrown into the river, as well as figurines of the evil sign (e.g. snake), since the river was intended to take away the evil to the Apsû, the netherworld sea. In several Snake-Namburbi texts, the ritual reads, ‘let the water run over (the victim)’, which could refer to the river water itself, suggesting that the victim is submerged in the river, as in our text. One of the frequently recited incantations in the Akkadian Namburbi corpus is to the River, which begins ‘you O River, who created everything’. The purpose of the incantation is to insure that any image of the snake (or another portentous object) will be effectively removed in the depths of the river. The incantation or ritual cited in the Talmud can be applied to any evil portent which is counteracted by this type of sympathetic magic. The use of a ‘basket’ in the Aramaic text to trap the snake was unlikely to be effective, for practical reasons, and this is an example of how the Talmud misunderstands the use of a ritual act to counteract an omen. A basket was used in Namburbi rituals as an offering vessel, although more likely here is the comparison with Snake-Namburbi no. 3, in which a gold and silver image of the ‘entwined’ snakes is to be set downstream in the river. A figurine of this sort would probably not have been acceptable to the rabbis, although some type of comparable ritual act may have originally be prescribed in the Talmud, in which the ‘snake’ in the basket is to be released into the river as an act of sympathetic magic. The use of the basket was later transformed in the Talmud to catch the snake itself, which is a nonsense.

Sources (list of abbreviations) (source links will open in a new browser window)
Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 110a
Namburbi Texts

Bibliography

Mark Geller

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