Medicine and Hygiene in the Works of Flavius Josephus, and: Healing in the Second Tempel [sic] Period (review)

The two books under review examine medicine and healing in ancient Judaism. In his study of Josephus, Samuel S. Kottek extends Max Neuberger’s brief treatment of the first-century Jewish historian in his monographic study Die Medizin im Flavius Josephus (1919). Kottek deals in separate chapters with nearly every aspect of medicine in Josephus: physicians, disease and epidemics, hygiene and public health, war injuries and traumatology, psychiatry and psychology, therapeutics and materia medica, and his use of medical metaphors. Five appendices deal, inter alia, with hygiene and healing among the Essenes, Josephus’s opinion of suicide, and Herod’s last illness.

Kottek’s monograph is not intended to provide a comprehensive study of his subject. All but two of the book’s seven chapters and one of its four appendices have previously appeared in print elsewhere. Kottek’s lexical and philological approach is almost entirely descriptive, and one misses any detailed analysis of the subjects treated. Thus, for example, Kottek declines to discuss the identification of biblical leprosy or the background of Jewish rites of purification (p. 78 n. 88). The first two chapters compare medical cases mentioned by Josephus with parallel biblical or midrashic accounts, with some attempt at retrospective diagnosis.

Larry P. Hogan’s study of healing in the Second-Temple period (the last five centuries b.c.) is a published version of his Ph.D. thesis, which was submitted to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He examines attitudes to the body in noncanonical and nonrabbinic Jewish literature as well as in the New Testament. His observation that “the concern of the Hebrew Scriptures is not biomedical, but rather socio-cultural and spiritual” (p. 2) is essential to understanding the place of healing in Jewish literature. It is this emphasis that gives rise to the frequent use of the healing of the body as a metaphor of spiritual healing (and leads not infrequently to a linguistic ambiguity that Hogan himself occasionally fails to notice). Hogan describes Exodus 15:25–26 as the most important Old Testament reference to healing. In the Jewish Scriptures God is depicted as both the ultimate and the direct cause of healing, and the two are often not distinguished. Hogan’s approach is literary-philological and he provides a close exegesis of the texts under examination. He devotes a separate chapter to each of several Jewish pseudepigraphical and apocryphal works, as well as to the Qumran literature and the works of Philo of Alexandria and Josephus.

When he turns to the New Testament, Hogan discusses medicine and healing in each of the four Gospels, the writings of Paul, the Epistle of James, and Revelation. He rightly rejects the assertion of scholars like Ulrich Mueller and Otto Böcher that New Testament writers attribute all disease to a demonic etiology (pp. 232–33, 249). But his treatment tends to be brief and sometimes superficial, and it contains occasional errors and misunderstandings. Even lengthy discussions (like that of the important passage on healing in James 5:14–15) are not very penetrating. Moreover, Hogan intentionally avoids questions of sources, historicity, provenance, and authorship (p. 232), a decision that prevents him from grappling with some of the most crucial problems of interpretation. Hence he merely touches on issues that demand extended discussion (e.g., the difference between the place of healing in the writings of Paul and in the Gospels/Acts). While there is much in the volume that is useful, one regrets that Hogan’s treatment (particularly of the New Testament) does not explore deeply enough issues that require greater theological and historical analysis than he gives them. The bibliography is detailed and comprehensive.