Namburbi and Talmud rituals (4)

Text
The Talmudic ritual reads:
“If a snake enters a woman, let her stand with legs apart and place them on two barrels; let fatty meat be brought and cast on the burning coals; let a bowl of cress be brought and spiced wine. Let them be placed there and be stirred together equally. Let her take a pair of tongs in her hand, for when it smells the fragrance (the snake) will come out, so that it can be seized and burnt in the fire, as otherwise it will re-enter her.”

There are several Mesopotamian parallels for the idea of a snake entering the woman’s vagina, although nothing of this kind is explicitly stated within Namburbi texts. In bilingual Utukkū lemnūtu incantations, one demon ‘coils a snake into a human womb’ (16.187). Furthermore, the mythological Akkadian horned snake, bašmu, was known in Sumerian as the muš.šà.tur or ‘womb-snake’, so the idea is an old one. Although the Namburbi texts lack any specific reference to a snake crawling into a woman’s womb, seeing ‘copulating snakes’ (Maul 1994: 474) in the house was considered portentous and may have suggested the form of the text which is in the Talmud. Although cress (Akkadian sahlû) is well-attested in Akkadian rituals and medical texts, the fact that cress appears in the Talmud (thly) but not in the surviving Namburbi corpus is insignificant; the mixing of various plants with beer or wine in a bowl was a standard ritual procedure (Maul 1994: 122ff.). Wine is attested in a snake-Namburbi ritual (no. 8.23), as is the ritual use of ‘fat meat’ (Akkadian šumû); the casting of the meat onto coals, as recommended in the Talmud, probably goes back to the burning of aromatics, as in Namburbi rituals. The significant point is that the Talmud misunderstands the purposes of this ritual, since the rabbis thought that it was necessary to draw the snake physically out of the woman’s womb in order to capture it, rather than to ward off the evil effects of the snake omen.

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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