to practice sorcery: to work forbidden magic meant to harm or control people, using spells, potions, or ritual objects
This word does not mean magic in general. It names one specific, forbidden craft: sorcery worked to cause real effects in the world, usually to harm someone or bend events to the sorcerer's will. That sets it apart from the fortune-telling words it often stands beside. Those name divination, the attempt to learn hidden things by reading signs or casting lots (קסם); sorcery instead tries to make something happen. The one close relative in force is the casting of binding-spells (חבר), and the two together cover the two main branches of harmful magic: what is done with objects and potions, and what is done with spoken spells.
The Bible almost never applies the word to Israelites acting with God's approval. It reserves it for outsiders and for those who have turned away. The sorcerers of Exodus 7 belong to Pharaoh's court; the sorceress of Exodus 22:18 and Queen Jezebel stand outside faithful Israel; King Manasseh earns the label by importing foreign rites into Judah; and the experts of Daniel 2 serve the king of Babylon. When Malachi finally names sorcerers among Israel's own sins, it is as a foreign contamination to be purged. Israel's approved way of hearing from God was the prophet, and this word marks everything that competes with that as off-limits.
Because the word is used to draw a hard line rather than to describe a technique in detail, it stays broad. It covers whatever the condemned specialist does, without pinning down exactly how the magic is thought to work.
Disputed
The origin and underlying sense of the root: whether it was always a word for sorcery, or began as "to cut" (herbs or ritual objects) or as "to whisper a spell."
- majorityA primary Semitic word for illicit sorcery, matching Akkadian kašāpu and attested in the same range of forms; there is no deeper non-magical base.; HALOT, s.v. כשׁף; The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CAD), K, 284–92; Tzvi Abusch, Mesopotamian Witchcraft (Brill, 2002)
- minorityOriginally "to cut," either herbs for potions or objects for spells, comparing Arabic kasafa, and only later specialized into sorcery.; W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites (1889)
- minorityOriginally "to whisper or chant a spell," supported by the later Syriac sense "to entreat, to chant."; Rashi, comment on Exodus 22:17
What the practice actually involved, as reflected in the ancient translations: spoken incantation, drug and potion craft, or a blend of the two by the Hellenistic period.
- majorityThe ancient Greek translators reached for the ordinary Greek word for illicit ritual, which carried drug-and-poison associations the Hebrew word probably lacked; the pharmacological framing is a Hellenistic reframing, culturally apt but not lexically faithful.; John W. Wevers, Notes on the Greek Text of Exodus, SBLSCS 30 (Scholars Press, 1990); Emanuel Tov, The Text-Critical Use of the Septuagint in Biblical Research
- minorityThe practice was fundamentally incantational and ritual, and the biblical writers built a deliberate stigma around it; the Greek drug word Hellenized it.; Ann Jeffers, Magic and Divination in Ancient Palestine and Syria (Brill, 1996)
- minorityBy the Hellenistic period Jewish and Greek magical practice had largely converged, so the Greek drug word genuinely fit what contemporary practitioners did.; Gideon Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2008)