The bronze lamella discovered in the apse of the Nirim synagogue, which was quoted at the beginning of the previous chapter, can again offer a point of departure. In Chapter 1, it drew attention to the issue of an amulet’s provenience and how archaeological context offers insight into the amulet’s user. While provenience continues to be an underlying concern, we turn now to amulets with longer texts whose contents have the potential to convey more information about the user than the short texts discussed in the previous chapter. Two additional case studies, an octagonal ring from Khirbet Kusieh and a silver lamella from Tiberias form the backbone of this chapter. There are a couple of similarities between these two amulets and the one from Nirim. First, they all contain biblical quotations, and in two cases (Nirim and Khirbet Kusieh) these quotations make up a significant portion or even all of the extant text. Second, the community to which the user belonged in all three cases is less ambiguous than some of the examples in Chapter 1. The Nirim amulet was written in a combination of Aramaic and Hebrew and deposited in a synagogue, which has been taken as proof that Esther, the amulet’s owner, was a Jew. The silver lamella from Tiberias was also written in Aramaic, with a quotation from the Hebrew Bible. While it was found in a tomb rather than a synagogue, it is generally accepted that its user, Ina, was another Jewish woman. The octagonal ring from Khirbet Kusieh, on the other hand, was written in Samaritan script using quotations from the Samaritan Pentateuch. While no user is named on the amulet, it is usually understood as having belonged to a Samaritan.

The use of biblical quotations, such as on these three amulets, is not unique to Palestine, nor is it an aspect of Roman and late antique amulets that has been overlooked in recent scholarship. However, a systematic inquiry into how different communities employed biblical material has not been undertaken. Quantifying the use of biblical quotations within the corpus of published amulets from Palestine reveals distinct trends according to the language in which amulets were composed and by extension the communities in which such amulets were used.