“Pay heed, o heaven, and I will speak” (Deut. 32:1): A Greek Amulet with Biblical and Angelic Names

Abstract

A new edition of a foil amulet that contains a pair of circular designs, one above the other, each calling on God to “thoroughly protect Nymphikos, whom Sosike bore, from every demon and every evil!” The text begins with the opening verse of Deuteronomy 32, a text sometimes used on magical amulets: “Pay heed, o heaven and I will speak, because I have proclaimed the name of the god of Jacob!” followed by two parallel lists of male and female names, beginning on the left: “(and) of the god of Abraham, (and) of the god of Isaac, etc., but ends with “the god of the Sabbath”, while the other column names four Jewish women,
some of them famous, interspersed with the names of four angels. The amulet or the magical recipe on which it was based was produced by someone, perhaps a Jew or Christian, with a basic knowledge of the Hebrew Bible and perhaps also of the New Testament. The names of the owner and his mother are attested in the Hellenistic and Roman periods and tell us little about their religious or social background, but the phrase “the God of the Sabbath” might
suggest the Christian reuse of Jewish material.