Conclusion
This paper has attempted to explain how ritual healing was experienced at the hot springs of Roman and late antique Palestine. Before concluding, a possible objection should be raised.
Literary accounts make clear that the hot springs were not exclusively sites of ritual healing; while some visitors sought divine cures, others came to the baths simply for leisure. The juxtaposition of leisure and ritual healing is not unknown at other therapeutic sanctuaries. For example, the impressive theater and stadium facilities at Epidauros hosted performances and competitions during religious festivals, and the Asklepieion of Pergamon famously became a center of intellectual life. Similarly, the thermae were multivalent sites, attracting both leisure and ritual healing visitors.[374] It is tempting to see in Antoninus of Placentia’s description a way to relieve the tension between the ritual and leisurely uses of the bath complex. It might be inferred from his account that the hot spring was open to everyone during the day, while those expressly seeking healing came at night, when a setting more conducive for incubation prevailed. While this does not preclude the possibility that visitors to the baths during the day might have also experienced divine epiphanies to which they attributed miraculous cures, it nevertheless offers a plausible explanation for how the hot springs were able to accommodate the different reasons that people had for visiting them.Patronized by pagans, Jews, and Christians, Hammat Gader was a site that experienced remarkable continuity across several centuries. Thermal-mineral springs figured prominently in the ritual landscape of Palestine, where they addressed the universal concerns of sickness and injury. Votive dedications in the form of inscriptions and lamps offer a starting point from which to consider the sanctity of Hammat Gader. The construction of a synagogue near the bath confirms that Jews visited the site alongside pagans and Christians, and rabbinic authors acknowledged the ritual role of the hot springs by permitting travel to them on the Sabbath. I argue that the rituals at the thermae took the form of incubation, as was common in Greco-Roman healing cults. Finally, a case can be made for seeing Elijah and Asklepios as the divine healers that visitors expected to appear in incubation dreams.