Literature" (Rabbinical Stories) it is said, "He is a favorite hero of the Talmudists, and the Arabs also speak of him as a magician." The son of the godly Hezekiah, Manasseh, "practised augury, and used enchantments, and practised sorcery, and dealt with them that had familiar spirits, and with wizards." There never was a time in the history of Israel that among its people were not those who practised every form of divination, astrology, magic, and witchcraft.
WITCHCRAFT AND CHRISTIANITY
Christianity originated among the Hebrews, who were firm believers in the reality of witchcraft. It was immediately brought into contact with the Romans, of whose empire Syria was a province; and with the Greeks, among whom it spread during the apostolic age. Among the Greeks and Romans the same general belief, with the corresponding practices, existed. Homer is said to have derived many of his verses from Daphne, the daughter of Tyreseis the Soothsayer, who was considered to surpass all women in the art of divination. Scot, in his " Discoverie of Witchcraft," gives extended extracts, among others the passage in Ovid:
Witches can bleed our ground by magic spell,
And with enchantment dry the springing soil;
Make grapes and currants fly at their command,
And strip our orchards bare without a hand.
Virgil and Horace make similar references. Lecky affirms that "Sorcery could say with truth that there was not a single nation of antiquity, from the polished Greek to the rudest savage, which did not admit a real art enabling men to foretell the future."
