century BC, when, in a remarkable act of tight-rope walking, the author of Ecclesiasticus, Jesus ben Sira, managed to vest the medical man with respectability.11 The physician’s skill does not, he argues, originate from the regions of darkness; it is a divine gift which confers on him high standing in society and secures the respect of kings and noblemen. The medicinal quality of substances is not obtained by magical means; they have been created as such and their use by the doctor is for God’s glory.
The Lord has imparted knowledge to men, that by their use of his marvels he may win praise; by using them the doctor relieves pain.12
The procedure thought irreproachable by the Jerusalem sage, the one which he advises every devout man to adopt when sick, is to pray to God, to repent from sin, to resolve to amend his ways, and to offer gifts and sacrifices in the Temple. Having thus proved his genuine religious disposition, he could then call in the doctor, as though taking out an extra insurance policy:
There may come a time when your recovery is in their hands.13
The physician in turn is also to start with a prayer that God may enable him to diagnose the sickness correctly, alleviate the pain and save the patient’s life.
In Ben Sira’s clever synthesis the theological link between sickness and sin is maintained, and the cause of the disease as well as the means to cure it are discovered through a God-given insight, a kind of revelation. The corollary of such a concept, even though not expressly stated, is that a man’s healing powers are measured, first and foremost, by his proximity to God, and only secondarily by the expertise acquired from study of the divinely ordained curative qualities of plants and herbs. Professional knowledge is an additional asset to the healer’s essential requisite, holiness.
Devils and Angels
In the world of Jesus, the devil was believed to be at the basis of sickness as well as sin. The idea that demons were responsible for all moral and physical evil had penetrated deeply into Jewish religious thought in the period following the Babylonian exile, no doubt as a result of Iranian influence on Judaism in the fifth and fourth centuries BC when Palestine as well as Jews from the eastern Diaspora were subject to direct Persian rule.
The apocryphal book of Tobit is among the first to testify to the new idea. According to this work, a jealous evil spirit possessed Sarah and killed all seven of her previous husbands, always on their wedding night. The young Tobias, following the advice given him by the angel Raphael, rendered this demon harmless and expelled it by burning the liver and the heart of a fish on smoking incense.14
The smell from the fish held the demon off, and he took flight into Upper Egypt; and Raphael instantly followed him there and bound him hand and foot.15
The author of the Ethiopic Book of Enoch depicts the same Raphael as the healing angel to whom God entrusted the reparation of the damage caused on earth by the fallen angels, the teachers of sorcery and harmful magic.16
‘Bind Azazel hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness . . . On the day of the great judgement he shall be cast into the fire. And heal the earth which the angels have corrupted, and proclaim the healing of the earth, that they may heal the plague, and that all the children of men may not perish through all the secret things that the watchers have disclosed and have taught their sons . . . The whole earth has been corrupted through the works that were taught by Azazel; to him ascribe all sin.’17
From then on the concept established itself in inter-Testamental Judaism that the proper use of the science of the angels was the most efficacious method of achieving mastery over demons. This was an art reserved to initiates because since time immemorial the arcane formulae on which it was based were concealed in esoterical books available and intelligible only to the chosen few. Noah and Solomon are said to be the principal repositories of these secrets. When the sons of Noah were led astray, blinded, and struck by devils, he prayed God that angels might come and imprison them; but Mastema, the leader of the forces of darkness, successfully appealed to the Creator for clemency, i.e. the deliverance of one tenth of his captured followers. Then the angels, as one of them remarks, were commanded by the Lord:
that we should teach Noah all the medicines . . . We explained to Noah all the medicines of their diseases, together with their seductions, how he might heal them with herbs of the earth. And Noah wrote down all things in a book as we instructed him concerning every kind of medicine. . . . And he gave all that he had written to Shem, his eldest son.18
Josephus’s portrait of Solomon is most instructive. As a Hellenistic historian, he describes the Israelite king as a model seeker of wisdom, but accompanies this approach with the more popular ideas of a Palestinian Jew.
There was no form of nature with which he was not acquainted or which he passed over without examining, but he studied them all philosophically and revealed the most complete knowledge of their several properties. And God granted him knowledge of the art used against demons for the benefit and healing of men. He also composed incantations by which illnesses are relieved, and left behind forms of exorcisms with which those possessed by demons drive them out, never to return.19
In New Testament times the Essenes occupied the leading position among the heirs of the esoterical tradition. Josephus points out that one of their chief characteristics was an ‘extraordinary interest’ in reading the books handed down by the great men of past generations.
They . . . single out in particular those which make for the welfare of soul and body; with the help of these, and with a view to the treatment of diseases, they make investigations into medicinal roots and the properties of stones.20
If my interpretation, Essenes = healers, is correct,21 outsiders were so impressed by their activities, which, like those of the Therapeutae – a cognate religious community in Egypt – were devoted to curing the spirit and the body,22 that they regularly and familiarly referred to them as ‘Healers’.
Exorcism
Josephus does not enter into the Essene rite of exorcism but it is unlikely to have differed very greatly from the ‘manner of the cure’ adopted by a certain Eleazar – sometimes surmised to have been a member of the sect – when he expelled demons in the presence of Vespasian and his sons, tribunes and soldiers.
He put to the nose of the possessed man a ring which had under its seal one of the roots prescribed by Solomon, and then, as the man smelled it, drew out the demon through his nostrils, and, when the man at once fell down, adjured the demon never to come back into him, speaking Solomon’s name and reciting the incantations which he had composed.23
From the same account of Eleazar it appears, furthermore, that the professional healer-exorcist was concerned to provide concrete proof that the evil spirit had departed.
Eleazar placed a cup or foot-basin full of water a little way off and commanded the demon, as it went out of the man, to overturn it and make known to the spectators that he had left the man.24
Since public exorcism was performed with the help of an incantation believed to have been revealed and handed over to saints in distant centuries, the naming of the ultimate authority appears to have been part and parcel of the ritual. In the Josephus story, Solomon is quoted. In the Gospels, Jesus asks in whose name the Pharisee exorcists operate.25 He himself was accused, no doubt because he never invoked any human source, of acting in the name of Beelzebub, the prince of demons.26 His disciples, and even one of their unaffiliated imitators, drove out spirits in their master’s name.27
Contemporary sources also
