Scribal Overkill: Textual Density on Ancient Jewish Amulets

Examining the Jewish textual amulets from Late Antiquity, we can see great variation in their textual density, i.e., the average amount of text written on each square centimeter of the thin sheet of metal. This variation is due in part to the nature of the metals on which the amulets were inscribed, but also reflects the technical competence of individual amulet producers, and their belief in the powers of the texts they were inscribing. Moreover, in order to fill the entire writing surface with text without spilling over to the other side, some amulet producers wrote the text on more than one sheet of metal, thus filling up one sheet, and then continuing the text on the next sheet, whereas other amulet producers tended to add ever-smaller textual units towards the end of their amulet, so as to have their text end at the very end of the writing surface. And the desire to write as much text as possible on each amulet seems to have been stronger among the Jewish amulet producers than among their non-Jewish colleagues, probably because of the strong Jewish belief in the power of words to change the world around us.