Medicine in Ancient Judaism

In striking contrast to ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Greco-Roman cultures, medical knowledge in ancient Jewish tradition was usually embedded in texts and contexts that were and still are understood primarily as theological. These traditions about medicine appear primarily in the Babylonian Talmud, with some relevant data from the Palestinian Talmud, Midrash, and Apocrypha and occasional references to medicine in other Jewish texts of this period.

These works, particularly late antique rabbinic literature, accumulated, appropriated, and produced knowledge about human anatomy, physiology, illness, and healing as well as how to lead a healthy life, including proper diet, bathing, bloodletting, and other bodily regimes. This information, though scattered through a large textual corpus, forms coherent discussions that exhibit elaborate medical interest, well integrated into a multilayered discourse.

For the assemblage of pertinent knowledge in such “medical clusters,” we may discern at least two different strategies of textual development. On the one hand, the discourse evolves naturally from the discussion of legal matters that border on medicine, such as ritual purity, pregnancy, interaction with medical experts, and permitted and restricted healing practices. On the other hand, this process, especially in the Babylonian Talmud, often entails a particular strategy of accumulation. Using brief discussions or trigger words in the earlier layers as a stepping stone, a technique also deployed for nonmedical topics, the Talmud’s authors bring in numerous medical teachings, narratives, lists, and other information not immediately related to the core issue but linked via a logic of free association.

The lion’s share of medical knowledge in ancient Jewish traditions, and especially in talmudic texts, is concerned with practical medicine comprising therapies, recipes, or advice for healthy living. Most common are single-ingredient recipes (“simples”) similar to those employed in ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Greco-Roman medicine, using easily accessible grains, plants, herbs, or vegetables, usually applied with or in wine, water, oil, or vinegar. Basic therapeutic advice includes ingesting substances, rubbing them in, or applying them externally. Rabbinic texts also contain fairly complex instructions and prescriptions, combining pharmaceutical approaches with rituals or actions and healing objects, and provide disease etiologies.

These medicinal traditions were of course not created whole cloth, nor are most of them rooted in the scriptural tradition. The Mishnah and the Palestinian Talmud, both written largely in Hebrew, emerged from a Palestinian milieu imbued with Greco-Roman cultural influence. Influences on the medical wisdom presented in the Babylonian Talmud are less clear. The rabbinic discussions there, produced in Babylonia over a longer period and written in a combination of Hebrew and Aramaic, likely reflect some influence from that culture while also being rooted in the Mishnah.

Although there was not always a firm distinction between magic and medicine in the ancient world, there were differences between the two disciplines. The concept of magic was easy enough for everyone to comprehend as a system of ritual and recitation that had the power to alter the natural and social environment. Medicines and pharmacy could be accommodated within this framework, along with curses, oaths, and measures to counteract dangers posed by demons, ghosts, bad omens, or aggressive magic initiated by human agents. However, while magic was intended either to counteract all manner of such negative forces or to impose harm on others, medicine was focused specifically on healing therapies. These involved diagnosis and prognosis of symptoms and disease, and prescribing drugs to alleviate pain, fever, infection, chills, and other easily identifiable pathologies. Magic-like rituals and recitations could accompany recipes, but the main purpose of medicine was to alleviate symptoms through the use of pharmaceutical preparations, at the same time reducing the patient’s anxieties. Practitioners and patients in late antiquity were able to distinguish between various approaches to and treatments for illness. Undisturbed by a (largely modern) conceptual dichotomy between medicine and magic, these healing techniques were not considered mutually exclusive methods for influencing the course of nature to restore a person to better health.