Illness and Health Care in the Ancient Near East: The Role of the Temple in Greece, Mesopotamia, and Israel (review)

Hector Avalos. Illness and Health Care in the Ancient Near East: The Role of the Temple in Greece, Mesopotamia, and Israel. Harvard Semitic Museum Monographs, no. 54. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995. xxv + 463 pp. Ill. $49.95.

Hector Avalos writes from the standpoint of medical anthropology, examining the role of the temple in the health-care systems of three ancient cultures, Greece, Mesopotamia and Israel. This is a not a book about biblical medicine, or medicine in the ancient world. Those looking for a new "Preuss" (Biblisch-Talmudische Medizin, 1911) are bound to be disappointed, as are those seeking information about Egyptian medicine. It is not entirely clear for whom the book is intended. On one hand, physicians and others involved in health care will find the chapter on Israel made unnecessarily difficult by the use of Hebrew (without a translation) and abbreviations such as "DtrH" (p. 243) peculiar to critical biblical studies. On the other hand, biblical scholars without a knowledge of medical terminology will need a good dictionary to find words such as cribra orbitalia (p. 122) and "kyphosis" (p. 123). Fortunately, Avalos does provide abundant, clear footnotes and translations of larger text units.

According to the author's definition, a health-care system "consists of, among other things, the etiology of illness, the consultative options available to the patient, and the attitudes toward the patient in the society" (p. 238). It his intention to approach health care as a system. His criticism of previous works is that they have "focused on the identification of diseases rather than on the sociological implications of their incidence" (p. 2).

In his first chapter Avalos discusses the temples of Asclepius, thereby updating and giving a fresh interpretation to the work of Ludwig Edelstein and Emma J. Edelstein (Asclepius, 1945). He concludes that "the most important aspect of the Asclepieion is that it welcomed the sick individual. The sick were not regarded as so impure as to be excluded from the cult or the temple" (p. 92). The following chapter on Mesopotamia provides a thorough introduction to and rich treatment of Gula (the Mesopotamian goddess of healing), as well as interesting material about the role of dogs and their images in healing. For a comparison with the biblical data, an overview of other Mesopotamian gods and their cults--such as Shamash, Tammuz, and Marduk--would have been helpful. In this chapter the author criticizes as too simplistic the standard classification of Mesopotamian medical professions, which he attributes to a 1965 article by E. Ritter: "therefore, the asipu was primarily working under supernatural and magical assumptions, while the asû was more akin to healers who operate relatively free of supernatural assumptions--namely physicians" (p. 143). In fact, this distinction had been formulated by earlier authors, notably by G. Contenau in La médicine en Assyrie et en Babylonie (1938).

In dealing with Israel the author is rightly critical of Klaus Seybold and Ulrich B. Mueller, who claimed that the sick person in ancient Israel "had virtually no aids at his disposal worth mentioning, no physicians in the real sense, and no knowledge of medicine." ¹ Avalos, however, in attempting to describe the health-care system of ancient Israel, claims too much and bases his conclusions on meager evidence. For example, to assert that even in the pre-exilic period the "most important consultant in health care was the person designated as the prophet" (p. 394) is pure speculation based on the evidence of some prophets praying for the healing of a few people. Similarly, his conclusion that the rophim (physicians, healers) were "non-Yahwistic health consultants" (pp. 290-91) is gratuitous and ignores the evidence of Ben Sira (Sirach) 38, in which the physician prays for his patients. It would also...