The study of Jewish magic has important historical value outside the light it sheds on the religious nature of ancient Jewish society. Understanding Jewish magic additionally allows one to understand a major component of the lives and ideas of the rabbinic class. Anthropologists and historians of religion have come to question whether the mere use of the term "magic" prejudices the reader to accept the phenomenon under study as more primitive or inferior to official religious expression. This chapter begins with a brief account of the evidence in talmudic literature of magic and rabbinic discourse concerning this phenomenon. Since magical texts themselves are the best witnesses to the nature of magic, the chapter follows with a survey of the worldviews, rhetoric, and ritual practices embedded in amulet texts from Palestine, Babylonian magical bowls, heikhalot literature, and other esoteric sources from the rabbinic period.

Coptic literature of the period AD 337-425 was essentially a functional literature. It was composed for a definite purpose. This purpose was invariably religious in nature. Texts were written for use in liturgy and ritual, public worship and private devotion, or for instruction and edification. Another notable feature of Coptic literature during the period under consideration is that most of it was originally composed in other languages, chiefly Greek, and translated into Coptic subsequently. For purposes of discussion, this chapter is divided into six categories: magical texts, the Bible and Apocrypha, patristic and homiletic works, monastic texts and martyrologies, the Nag Hammadi library and related tractates, and Manichean writings. Virtually the earliest written evidence for the transmission of the Bible to the native population of Egypt is a Greek-Coptic glossary to Hosea and Amos. Patristic literature in Coptic, at least for the period AD 337-425, consisted chiefly if not entirely of works translated from Greek.