... Another possible example of imitative magic may be found in 2 Kings 6:1-7 where the sons of the prophets felt that their dwelling was too small. They went to Elisha to ask permission to go to the Jordan to get logs to make a place for them to dwell there. While they were busy cutting down the trees, an axe borrowed from another person fell into the river. Elisha came to their rescue. He asked: “Where did it fall?” When he was shown the place, he cut off a stick, and threw it in the river and made the iron float. Here one can consider the act as an example of imitative magic. An example of imitative magic also occurs in 2 Kings 4:38-41 and is performed by Elisha. A pottage is being brewed by the prophet’s followers, and one of them goes out to gather herbs. Among the herbs gathered, there happens to be a poisonous one. This soon becomes apparent when the company begins to partake of the pottage, but Elisha calls for some meal and casts it into the brew. The immediate effect of which is to make the poison innocuous. In Oesterly’s opinion the wood floats, the iron imitates it; the meal is harmless therefore the poisonous herb will become harmless (Oesterley 1933:89). ...

... Although the texts vary widely in complexity, ranging from individual figures to elaborate assemblages, their unity of purpose and general similarity of technique have defined them as a corpus. Unlike the “prisoner motif” which presents only generalized images of foreigners, the execration texts are quite specific in their intended victims. For by the addition of names, the pot or figurine becomes a substitute image of those victims, an Egyptian counterpart to the “voodoo doll” (see figure 13a). The coupling of name and prisoner image thus effected directly parallels standard practice in the hieroglyphic script as well, where enemy names may receive a “bound prisoner” determinative (Gardiner Sign-list A 13). While the use of a figurine as a substitute image is obvious to the modern researcher, the symbolism of pottery as human substitutes would have been no less so to the Egyptians whose creator deity Khnum fashioned mankind on a potter’s wheel. ...