The oldest roots of the European concepts of witchcraft and magic lie in the Hebrew and other cultures of the ancient Near East and in the Celtic, Nordic and Germanic Societies of the North and West. The authors of this volume survey three crucial aspects of this earliest phase of development. These are the role of magical incantations and rituals against witchcraft in Mesopotamia in the last three millennia BC, the attitudes to witchcraft and magic in the Old Testament and in later Jewish tradition, and the beliefs and legends associated with trolldomor (witchcraft) in pre-Christian Scandanavia.

In this revealing study, the author suggests that ancient Israel was a 'magic society' like those around it, and similar in many respects to a number of magic-using 'savage' societies studied by modern social anthropology. Although the Old Testament attempts to distinguish between priestly and prophetic divination, this distinction was not sharply drawn in ancient times. References to divination in fact are found in all genres of Israelite literature, implying that many of these practices were performed throughout Israelite society. 'Cryer's investigation of divination in ancient Israel is a masterful synthesis of social and historical analyses of an important yet neglected topic' (Ronald E. Simkins, Catholic Biblical Quarterly).>

Papers from the International Scandinavian Conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls and Qumran, sponsored by the University of Copenhagen and held in 1995. In addition to the contributions of Florentino Garc'a Mart'nez, Emanuel Tov and Ben Zion Wacholder, this collection offers a wide range of recent Scandinavian scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Central issues dealt with include the dating of the scrolls, the theological relationships between the Scrolls and the Old Testament, questions relating to text and tradition formation, and the social relations between Qumran and contemporary Jewish sectarianism.>