Namburbi and Talmud rituals (2)

Text
The second snake ritual in Shabbat 110a calls for the victim’s ‘charmer’ (ḥbr) to help him avoid the snake by carrying the victim for a short distance, or the victim should jump over a dike or cross a river. Alternatively at night, the victim’s bed is to be propped up on barrels and he is to sleep under the stars, and cats are enlisted to protect him against snakes at night:

“If a snake is provoked by someone: if his ‘charmer’ (ḥbr) is with him, let (the ‘charmer’) make him ride four cubits. If not, let him jump over a dike. If not, let him cross a river. At night, let him place his bed on four barrels and sleep under the stars. Let him bring four cats and tie them to the four legs of the bed, and let him bring refuse and and throw it there, so that when they hear (its) noise they (the cats) will eat (the snake).”

The Snake-Namburbis offer further parallels here. One of the standard formulae in Namburbi texts is the expressed wish that the portended evil should ‘cross the river and scale the mountain’ (Maul 1994: 91), i.e. be removed as far away as possible. This oft-repeated phrase may have been re-interpreted in the Aramaic rituals to imply that the victim should remove himself from the snake, by crossing rivers and dikes, etc.. There is no doubt, in any case, that the proper locus for this Talmudic passage is originally Babylonia, as suggested by the topography of rivers (or canals) and dikes. The reference to the victim sleeping under the stars alludes to another common motif in Namburbi texts, namely that the victim is not to return to his own house, at least temporarily (Maul 1994: 274, 46’). The actual wording in the Aramaic text, however, probably goes back to a frequently used phrase in Namburbi rituals, namely that a ritual vessel filled with purifying water is to be put on the roof of the house, and ‘you should set it out (lit. have it spend the night) under the stars’, which also occurs frequently in the Akkadian medical corpus. The use of cats against snakes appears to have no parallels in Namburbi rituals, although in Šumma ālu terrestrial omens the cat kills a snake.

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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