In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

381 26 / Constructing aTheology of Healing 1997 In ancient Mesopotamia, a person who felt sick would go to a diagnostician , a baru, or diviner, who would investigate the cause of the illness. If he deemed that the cause was “natural,” a chemical imbalance or something like that, then the sufferer would call for a master of herbal medicine. If the baru declared that the illness was caused by witchcraft, then the sufferer together with the ritual experts would perform a long ritual, maqlu, burning effigies of the witch and sending the witchcraft back on the witch’s head. If the baru declared that the patient could offer penitential prayers, if the sick person’s personal god was angry, he or she could write a letter-prayer asking the god to come back. If the culprits were demons, the patient could exorcise them, and if the patient had done something wrong but didn’t know quite what, or had angered some god that couldn’t be identified, he or she could perform a phenomenal ritual called shurpu, which contained invocations and prayers for all the gods to stand by and help, a long prayer-litany with the refrain “O Marduk, giving life and healing is in your hands,” and physical rituals to rid the client of the wrongful aura. These rituals were symbolic acts in which you would rub yourself with flour and then scrape it off while reciting the message with words like “As this flour is scraped off, so may the harm (and the disease that it caused) be scraped off me.” Or you would be tied up in knots and then would cut the knots: “As the knots that are tied are loosed, so too the knots that bind my illness.” Or you could peel an onion: “As the onion is opened, so am I opened and rid of all the evil within me.” With every possible diagnosis, there was a prescribed remedy to alleviate the suffering. In Judaism, or course, there is no diagnostician. Our theology tells us that there is only one cause, God; and what to do is not always so clearly 382 Theologies II mapped out. God may cause our illness by abandoning us. Deuteronomy 31:14ff contains an interesting statement in which God warns Moses that in the future Israel will be unfaithful, and then “I will be angry at them and leave them, and hide My face from them, and [Israel] will be devoured, and many evils and troubles will find him, and he will say ‘These evils have found me because there is no God in my midst.’” In this paradigm, God is our “protective shield”; when God leaves us, external forces are free to destroy us. In the more common biblical understanding, God’s anger does not lead God to abandon us, but to punish us. The paramount paradigm of reward and punishment is repeated so often, with so many formulations , that it left a profound impression on Israel. The Deuteronomic paragraph included in the Shema, of course, is the best-known expression of reward and punishment, but the most pointed formulation is in Exodus 23:25, at the end of the Book of the Covenant: “You will serve the Lord your God, and God will bless your bread and your water, and I will take away every sickness from your midst.” When you obey, you will have no sickness. When you do not obey, you will suffer all the illnesses of Egypt. Even though the promises and the warnings are expressed in the national (“you, Israel”), the proverbial wisdom of Israel has always understood the same scheme to apply to the personal: the good prosper , the evil get theirs. This thinking is carried to the extreme by Job’s friends, who reverse the truism: if you are not doing well, you must have done wrong. Job’s friends are doing what Deuteronomy is trying to do, and what people tried to do even before Israel, in the Babylonian and even Sumerian tales of the righteous sufferer: they are attempting to maintain their belief that there is an order and a justice to the world. If they can do this, they can also keep their hope for the future, a hope that God is just and will someday relent and restore us all. The best way to do this, or at least the easiest way is to do this, is the Deuteronomic way, by blaming the sufferer: . hata’nu, a...

Share