Names of Liturgical Tools in Mandaic Manuscripts – A Comparative Study

Abstract

The significance of this research lies in its examination of the names of religious ritual tools in the Mandaic language and in identifying the points of similarity and difference between them and their counterparts in other Semitic languages, based on the comparative method in linguistic and semantic analysis. The importance of this study stems from the scarcity of research that has addressed ritual tools in Mandaic in an independent and comprehensive manner. To the best of the researcher’s knowledge, no previous study has been devoted exclusively to this topic, despite the existence of separate studies on certain ritual instruments in Hebrew; however, these do not correspond—either in designation or in meaning—to the ritual instruments found in Mandaic.

This study aims to compile the names of ritual instruments mentioned in Mandaean manuscripts, to clarify their functions and modes of use in religious rituals, and to compare them with their equivalents in other Semitic languages. The findings indicate that some of these instruments are shared between Mandaic and other Semitic languages, while others have been shown—on the basis of comparative linguistic analysis—to be of purely Mandaic origin. The study also reveals the presence of synonymy among certain Mandaic instrument names, as well as semantic divergence in others when compared with their counterparts in Semitic languages.

This research contributes to enriching the Mandaean scholarly corpus with a specialized linguistic study in the field of ritual instruments and provides scholars of comparative Semitic studies with documented material that can be utilized in linguistic, religious, and cultural research.