Laws prohibiting various forms of witchcraft and divination can be found in the books of
Exodus,
Leviticus and
Deuteronomy. These include the following (as translated in the
Revised JPS, 2023: • Exodus 22:18 – "You shall not tolerate a sorceress []." • Leviticus 19:26 – "You shall not eat anything with its blood. You shall not practice divination or soothsaying [
tənaḥăšu wəlo t̲əʿonēnu]." • Leviticus 20:27 – "A man or a woman who has a ghost or a familiar spirit [
ob̲ o yiddəʿoni] shall be put to death; they shall be pelted with stones—and the bloodguilt is theirs." • Deuteronomy 18:10-11 – "Let no one be found among you who consigns a son or daughter to the fire, or who is an augur, a soothsayer, a diviner, a sorcerer, one who casts spells, or one who consults ghosts or familiar spirits, or one who inquires of the dead [
dorēš el-hammēt̲im]." The forms of divination mentioned in Deuteronomy 17 are portrayed as foreign; this is the only part of the
Hebrew Bible to make such a claim. According to Ann Jeffers, the presence of laws forbidding necromancy proves that it was practiced throughout Israel's history. The exact difference between the three forbidden forms of
necromancy mentioned in Deuteronomy 18:11 is a matter of uncertainty;
yiddeʿoni ("wizard") is always used together with
ov "consulter with familiar spirits", and its semantic similarity to
doresh el hametim ("necromancer", or "one who directs inquiries to the dead") raises the question of why all three are mentioned in the same verse. The Jewish tractate
Sanhedrin makes the distinction that a
doresh el hametim was a person who would sleep in a
cemetery after having starved himself, in order to become
possessed. A prophetic passage in the
Book of Micah states that witchcraft and soothsaying will be eliminated in the
Messianic Age (Micah 5:12). ==Instances in Biblical narrative==