“They Dedicated Themselves to the Abominable Idol”: Ancient Hebrew Sexuality and Modern Medical Diagnosis

Over the past five hundred years, medical experts have produced a vast li terature on the history of syphilis and more specifically on the question of its origins. Did the disease begin in the late fifteenth century, when the Old World suddenly encountered the New? Or could researchers find evidence of the disease in the Middle Ages or perhaps antiquity? For those experts who insisted on the antiquity of syphilis, the Hebrew Bible became a key source. The search for syphilis in the Bible entailed a particular way of reading and interpreting biblical texts, one that differed in important respects from more traditional religious hermeneutics. This essay explores the medicalized mode of reading the Hebrew Bible through a close analysis of one late nineteenth-century essay, Paul Hamonic’s Venereal Diseases among the Hebrews in the Time of the Bible (1887). Hamonic’s effort to prove the antiquity of syphilis entailed a retrospective diagnosis of biblical figures and the ancient Israelites as a whole and developed in the context of nineteenth-century medical anxieties and fantasies about familial and national disease and degeneration.