JEWISH EXORCISM BEFORE and AFTER the DESTRUCTION of the SECOND TEMPLE Gideon Bohak in the Testament of Solomon, an Ancient Chris

JEWISH EXORCISM BEFORE AND AFTER THE DESTRUCTION OF THE SECOND TEMPLE Gideon Bohak In the Testament of Solomon, an ancient Christian demonological compendium with much data on the pernicious activities of demons and on the different manners in which they may be thwarted, there is a clear connection between the Jerusalem Temple and the war on demons. On the one hand, the Testament recounts the story—which is well known from many other late antique sources—of how Solomon subdued various demons and used them for the construction of his Temple. On the other hand, it also relates how Solomon subsequently locked the demons up below the Temple’s foundations, and how, many centuries later, when the Babylonians destroyed the Temple they inad- vertently let loose a hoard of wild demons who caused much afflic- tion to the humans they encountered. But if we take the Testament of Solomon seriously—although it is extremely difficult for a modern reader to take the Testament seriously—we should also note that when it comes to the destruction of the Second Temple (as against the First), we find no hair-raising stories about the release of pent-up demons. For the author of the Testament, the real watershed event in the history of demonology had come some forty years before the Destruction with the appearance of the Jewish Messiah, the Emanuel, the Savior who was crucified and rose to heaven, and at whose name(s) all the demons tremble. For the author of the Testament, Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of the First Jewish Temple was an important event in the history of humanity’s fight against the demons, but Titus’ destruction of the Second Jewish Temple made no difference to the demons or those who fought them. Accordingly, it is not even mentioned in the entire work. Leaving such Heilsgeschichte behind and turning to more secular— and hopefully more objective—history, we may ask whether Jewish demonology and Jewish exorcism underwent any major changes in the period after the destruction of the Temple, the failure of the Diaspora revolt, and the crushing of the Bar Kokhba revolt, and whether such changes may be attributed to the direct or indirect influences of these 278 gideon bohak events. But before turning to the question itself, we may ponder its wider nature. A first point to consider is that whereas some aspects of Jewish culture were directly influenced by the destruction of the Temple—most notably, all sacrificial activity and all Temple-related cultic activity either ceased completely or were entirely transformed— the belief in demons and the use of special techniques to fight them does not seem like something that had to change after 70 ce. That is: although the three Jewish revolts brought many changes to Jewish society, including the destruction of much of the priestly class and its most important powerbase, the decimation of Diaspora Jewry, the shift of the centers of the Jewish population in Palestine from Judea to the coastal plain and to the Galilee, and the gradual rise of a rival Jewish center in Babylonia, such major transformations need not have had a strong impact on the exorcistic practices of those Jewish exor- cists who survived the revolts or on the transmission and actual use of the oral and written knowledge relating to demons and the war against them. Thus, asking whether 70 or 135 ce are meaningful dates in the history of Jewish exorcism is one way of asking whether these events entirely transformed all aspects of Jewish society and culture; or rather, whether their impact was greatly felt in some spheres, but was more, or even mostly, imperceptible in others. A second preliminary observation has to do with the sources at our disposal. One obvious change that took place after 70, and especially after 117 and 135 ce, has to do with the nature of the sources avail- able for historians studying the periods before and after these events. For whereas the Second Temple period, and especially its later centuries, is well endowed with a variety of literary sources—including the writings of Josephus and Philo, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls and most of the New Testament—for the period after 135 ce we must rely mostly on rabbinic literature, which is a much more unidimensional, and much less historian-friendly, body of texts. Thus, it is much easier to write a history of the Jewish people, or of most aspects of Jewish society and culture, in the Second Temple period than to write a similar history for the period from the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt to the Muslim conquest, and this imbalance in our sources often makes it hard to say what changed after 70 or 135 ce and what did not. Nevertheless, when it comes to Jewish exorcism we happen to be blessed with quite a few sources, and—what is even more important— with a great variety of different types of sources that supplement and complement each other, both from the Second Temple period and from .

Load more