My Lots are in Thy Hands: Sortilege and its Practitioners in Late Antiquity

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AnneMarie Luijendijk, William E. Klingshirn
BRILL, Oct 8, 2018 - History - 410 pages
Sortilege—the making of decisions by casting lots—was widely practiced in the Mediterranean world during the period known as late antiquity, between the third and eighth centuries CE. In My Lots are in Thy Hands: Sortilege and its Practitioners in Late Antiquity, AnneMarie Luijendijk and William Klingshirn have collected fourteen essays that examine late antique lot divination, especially but not exclusively through texts preserved in Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Syriac. Employing the overlapping perspectives of religious studies, classics, anthropology, economics, and history, contributors study a variety of topics, including the hermeneutics and operations of divinatory texts, the importance of diviners and their instruments, and the place of faith and doubt in the search for hidden order in a seemingly random world.
 

Contents

Introduction
1
Chapter 1 The Literature of Lot Divination
19
Chapter 2 The Instruments of Lot Divination
60
Palmomancy and Late Antique Lot Divination
78
an Aid to Bibliomancy
101
a Unique Syriac Biblical Manuscript as an Oracle of Interpretation
124
Chapter 6 Secondhand Homer
138
Chapter 7 Sortes Biblicae Judaicae
154
Ritual Experts and the Great Tradition in Byzantine Egypt
211
Aspects of Jurisdiction in Ritual Texts from Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt
232
Oracle as Economic Indicator in Roman Egypt
248
the Barbarian Christian Tatian Responds to Sortes
290
Doubt in Christian Lot Divination
309
Bibliography
331
Index of Ancient Sources
375
Index of Modern Authors
383

Chapter 8 The Sortes Barberinianae within the Tradition of Oracular Texts
173
Chapter 9 Oxyrhynchus and Oracles in Late Antiquity
196

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