Illness and Practices of Healing in the Texts of Qumran
Demons are explicitly described as evil agents who introduce sin and impurity on earth. Illness and its symptoms are perceived as manifestations of demonic acts; healing needs a process of exorcism involving prayers, incantations with a human intermediary.
Behind these representations, we seek to reconstruct the practices of ancient Judaism. The Qumran texts seem to be in conformity with ancient Near Eastern practices, especially in Mesopotamia[273] We therefore should wonder whether there is some specificity in the Qumran texts, and raise the question of whether these were actual practices within Judaism or only within the Essene movement. This question is difficult or even impossible to answer. We know that the texts are often rhetorical screens in trying to explain the unexplainable or to depict the practices in conformity with the community’s ideals. In this case, the text and the ideas chase after the practices. One of the famous examples in the Qumran documents is the manuscript 4Q242, which tries to combine a Mesopotamian tale, an historical event, the deuteronomistic conception of history, and the representations of illness and healing. The document in Aramaic is named the Prayer of Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon between 556 and 539 BC. He is presented as a suffering king because of his “evil ulcer” (NWN]3 Ninw in 4Q242 1-3:6). He was healed at Teima, in Arabia, with prayers offered to the Jewish God and with the help of a Jewish exorcist (“itt in 4Q242 1-3:4) who “removed” (p3W in 4Q242 1-3:4) his sin. We do not know his name but he asked Nabonidus to write the story in order to glorify the name of the Jewish God. A closely related narrative seems to have been taken and modified for the famous king of Babylon Nebuchadnezzar, who took the city of Jerusalem in 587 BC, in Daniel 4. Thus the modern dualistic difference between magic and religion, between popular piety and practices on the one hand, and official, elitist ideas and practices on the other, seems too simplistic if we are to explain representations of illness and healing in Antiquity. Concepts feed practices and practices feed concepts; elites wrote for different reasons, such as to explain or to modify common representations and practices. To understand illness and healing in Antiquity, we must decipher, therefore, a complex worldview, that was likely entangled with practices.
More on the topic Illness and Practices of Healing in the Texts of Qumran:
-
Conflictology -
Ecology -
Economy -
Finance -
History -
Law -
Medicine -
Philosophy -
Religious studies -