Incubation at Hammat Gader
It is apparent that pagans, Jews, and Christians all visited the hot springs of Roman and late antique Palestine to receive divine healing. What remains to be seen is the form that their ritual activity took.
Only one straightforward account of the rituals at these hot springs exists. A detailed entry on Hammat Gader by Antoninus, a Holy Land pilgrim from Placentia, describes the late sixth century ritual that took place there:In that part of the Jordan, at a distance of three miles from the city there are hot waters, which are called the springs of Elijah (termas Heliae), where lepers are healed. The lepers receive benefits from the xenodochium at public expense. In the evening hour, the springs overflow. Before the furnace (clibanum), there is a great pool of water, and when it is filled, the doors are closed, and the lepers are sent in through the backdoor with candles (luminaria) and incense and they sit in that pool the whole night. When they are asleep, the one who is in need of healing sees some vision, and when he relates what he saw, he abstains from the springs for seven days during which the leper is cleansed. (Itinerarium 7.14-22)[354]
Several details in this passage find support in the archaeological record. Yitzhar Hirschfeld and Giora Solar (1981, 211) proposed that Antoninus’s leper ritual took place in Area B of the bath complex (see figure 2), which was close to the source of the hot spring and contained the only pool that had doors and could be completely closed off, as the passage describes.[355] Antoninus also calls attention to the fact that the ceremony was performed at night, and that supplicants enter the pool carrying luminaria. This detail may explain the preference for lamps as suitable votive offerings to commemorate miraculous cures, and in fact one concentration of votive lamps was discovered under the floor in Area B.
While Antoninus’s account is admittedly late, the pool in Area B was part of the initial building phase at the hot springs, allowing for the possibility of ritual incubation in this space for several centuries before Antoninus’s visit (Hirschfeld and Solar 1981, 208-9). Furthermore, the earliest lamp fragments found in Area B date to the second century, when the complex was first built (Uzzielli 1997, 320). The architectural history and votive lamps from Hammat Gader suggest that incubation might have been practiced at the site as early as the second century CE.The ritual described by Antoninus is similar to other accounts of incubation throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, save the fact that the incubation chamber was a pool rather than a portico or other space that accommodated sleeping supplicants. The practice of incubation by pagan visitors is not difficult to imagine, given the prevalence of incubation rites in Greek religion.[356] Likewise, incubation was present in the ancient Near East long before the arrival of Greek cults, although there continues to be debate over which dream narratives reflect a fully developed incubation ritual.[357] The three criteria of incubation articulated by Kimberly Patton (2004, 202-27)—intentionality, locality, and epiphany—offer a useful way to make this distinction. Applying Patton's standard to the Hebrew Bible reveals that while it contains many stories in which divine revelations or epiphanies take the form of a dream, many of them are missing one of the three constituent elements (Harrisson 2014).[358] In some of these cases, Patton argues (2004, 218-19) that the biblical authors deliberately suppressed elements of incubation, such as in Jacob's dream at Bethel (Gen 28). Turning to Jewish literature from the Hellenistic and Roman periods, knowledge of contemporary incubation rituals is easier to detect (Flannery-Dailey 2004, 153-164; Gnuse 1993). However, Patton observes that the “theology of incubation highly localizes the god,” which likely hindered the initial adoption of this ritual technique among Jews and Christians, to whom it seemed uncomfortably close to polytheistic practices (2004, 216).
The question of incubation is intimately connected to that of sacred sites, as it is the place, not a temple official or charismatic healer, that is understood to facilitate cures (Csepregi 2015, 49-50). Sacred places have taken a variety of forms from antiquity to the present, but J. Z. Smith argues that what makes something sacred—in this case a site—is the presence of ritual activity (1987, 105).[359] Despite early opposition to the concept of sacred sites, Christian authorities eventually recognized and accommodated their popular veneration, including places that were previously the focus of pagan cult (Csepregi 2015, 51, 53-55).[360] I would suggest that Antoninus of Placentia’s description of lepers at Hammat Gader represents a true incubation ritual, meeting all three of Patton’s criteria. Furthermore, as Smith argues, ritual reifies sanctity, and thus it was through the practice of an incubation ritual that hot springs could be recognized as sacred sites, confirming the testimony of the “holy place” (άγιος τόπος) inscriptions.While it is clear that Jewish authors of the Hellenistic and Roman periods were familiar with the practice of incubation, it is more difficult to pinpoint when some Jews began using incubation themselves as a means to experience miraculous cures. It certainly seems to have taken hold by the time that John Chrysostom, in a well-known passage from Against the Jews, criticized the Christians of Antioch for participating in incubation rites at the synagogue in nearby Daphne (1.6.2-3). Incubation also probably informs an exchange between R. Akiba and Zunin in b. Abod. Zar. 55a, which attempts to delegitimize foreign healing cults and their apparent efficacy. This passage describes a wayward Jew who experienced a cure after visiting an “idolatrous shrine” (DOSO ΓΠ13Ρ Π’Π^); R. Akiba does not deny the reality of the miracle, but rather questions the apparent post hoc ergo propter hoc assumption of his interlocutor.
Unwilling to concede that the pagan deity of the shrine was responsible for this cure, R. Akiba concludes that the length of the illness was predetermined and that its termination was unrelated to the healing shrine. In other words, he was healed in spite of, not because of, the time spent inside the sanctuary. Although incubation is not explicitly described, it is still the image that this story invokes, as it was the only ritual model for seeking cures in therapeutic sanctuaries[361]. The authors of this passage must have recognized the appeal of popular healing cults to Jews who faced the same medical complaints as their pagan and Christian neighbors.An interesting contrast to this episode in the Bavli can be found in the medieval Midrash on the Ten Commandments, which portrays a crippled Jew visiting a heathen therapeutic shrine. There are two key differences between these two stories. First, in b. Abod. Zar. 55a the idol of the shrine is considered completely lifeless, while in the later Midrash, the demon is real and uses an idol to mislead the worshipers. Second, the two stories end in a completely opposite manner. While the Jew in the first story walks away healed, the other one is addressed by a demon, “You should know that by tomorrow your time had come to be healed, but because you have done this, you will never find a cure” (Rosenberg 1990, 97).[362] This reversal highlights the accommodation that earlier rabbis were willing to make to spaces in which pagan statues were displayed. By the time that the medieval Midrash was compiled, it was possible to circumvent these displays of idolatry. However, complete avoidance of such images in late antiquity would have severely restricted the Jews' ability to participate in the daily life of the Greco-Roman cities they inhabited. A similar attitude is displayed in a well-known account from the Mishnah, set in the first century CE. As the story goes, when Rabban Gamaliel was visiting the bath of Aphrodite in Akko, he was asked how he could bathe in a complex that contained a statue of the goddess.[363] Rabban Gamaliel answered, “I did not come into her domain; she has come into mine” (m.
Abod. Zar. 3:4). Although the stories about Rabban Gamaliel and R. Akiba offer different reasons for ignoring the presence of pagan statues, they justify the Jewish use of sites with such images and even acknowledge that miracles could be worked in places tainted by them.[364] Jewish visitors to the hot springs would have been surrounded by pagan visual cues, much as R. Akiba was in the bath of Aphrodite, but if these images could be overlooked, nothing prevented the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine from visiting the hot springs alongside their gentile neighbors. Together, these stories reflect Seth Schwartz's contention that the mechanism allowing Jews to participate in the daily life of Greco-Roman cities was “a spectacular act of misprision, of misinterpretation, whereby the rabbis defined pagan religiosity as consisting exclusively of cultic activity, but in so doing declared the noncultic, but still religious aspects of urban culture acceptable” (1998, 207; cf. 2001, 164).If what we know from other therapeutic sanctuaries also holds true for the hot springs, we would expect that preliminary requirements such as offerings or purifications took place outside the incubation chamber or, in this case, the bath complex. At Hammat Gader, the nearby synagogue, church, and perhaps an earlier temple (Sukenik 1935, 30) would have accommodated these functions for their respective constituents.[365] Supplicants at healing sanctuaries and hot springs alike may have encountered priests and other visitors while performing these rites, but the actual encounter with the healing god was a private religious experience. His epiphany in a dream offered direct and personal contact between the supplicant and the divine. Separation of preparatory rites from the incubation itself could have enabled pagans, Jews, and Christians to simultaneously await their epiphanies in the baths, as the offerings, purifications, or prayers particular to their religious community would have been offered in different places.
While this shared use of sacred sites might be unusual, it would not be a unique occurrence, as demonstrated by examples ranging from the Oak of Mamre in the fourth century CE, to medieval and modern shrines of the prophet Elijah, St. George, and Al-Khadir.[366] The ability for multiple religious traditions to coexist at the hot springs should perhaps be understood in light Schwartz’s contention that the religious behavior of Jews living in Greco-Roman cities may have been largely indistinguishable from their pagan neighbors (1998, 207). In the end, I would suggest that the primary difference between pagan, Jewish, and Christian experiences of incubation in the bath complex was the identity of the divine healer whom visitors expected to see.