Webster says...
Webster says: Sorcery, as we know, had been practised by the Canaanites before the occupation of Palestine by the Israelites; Egypt, India, and Greece also had their soothsayers and diviners. In spite of the imprecations against sorcery contained in the Law of Moses, the Jews, disregarding these warnings, caught the contagion and mingled the sacred tradition they had inherited with magical ideas partly borrowed from other races partly of their own devising.
At the same time the speculative side of the Jewish Cabala borrowed from the philosophy of the Persian Magi, of the Neo-Platonists,
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