The most striking single feature of the Jewish bowls is the use of the get, the writ of divorce, against a lilith. The lilith is treated as having attached herself to a household in the manner of a spouse, and the instrument used to remove her is the ordinary legal document by which a marriage is ended, in the proper form, with the formulae a court would recognise.
Nothing shows more clearly how this material understood what it was doing. The demon is not overpowered. She is dismissed, by a procedure that has standing, in language borrowed from the rabbinic courts. It assumes a world in which the same law binds humans and demons, and it makes the bowl an instrument of that law rather than an act of force against it. Similar borrowings from legal and administrative form run through the corpus.
The corpus also carries an unresolved scholarly and ethical problem, and it is a current one. Nippur, excavated by the University of Pennsylvania between 1888 and 1900 and published by James Montgomery in 1913, supplies the securely provenanced core. The great majority of bowls published since arrived through the antiquities market without findspot, much of it via private collections, and whether that material should be studied and published at all has been argued in print without agreement. It is not only an ethical question. A bowl without a findspot cannot be dated by context or located in a community, and much of what the corpus could otherwise tell us is lost with the provenance.