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古代의 醫學 Ancient Medicine: In Case of Emergency,

Contact Your Local Prophet  

Sidebar: Did Ancient Israelites Have a Heart?   

When an ancient Israelite got a raging bellyache, what did she do? Where could she—or he—go for help?

According to one recent scholarly study, the answer to the first question was “nothing”; to the second “nowhere”:

“In general a sick person had virtually no aids at his disposal worth mentioning, no physicians in the real sense, and no knowledge of medicine. . .In general he had access to no really recognized or tolerated healing procedures or practices including no ritualistic incantations or exorcism-related manipulations.”

A closer look indicates that this negative view is untenable. Both the Bible and archaeology indicate that numerous options were available. Generally, however, cult and healing were closely related.

Of one thing we may be sure: Raging bellyaches—as well as the other infirmities that flesh is heir to—were not uncommon in ancient times. Archaeoparasitologists (archaeologists who study the remains of ancient parasites) have found evidence of intestinal diseases—both tapeworm (taenia) and whipworm (trichuris trichiura) infections—in ancient Israel. Lice infestation was doubtless a problem if we may judge from lice combs recovered at Megiddo and elsewhere (see scarred skull from Dimona). Numerous other medical problems, from infertility to epidemics, are referred to in the Bible and other ancient literature.

As in modern times, patients usually followed a hierarchy of options, beginning with simple and inexpensive ones, and, if circumstances required, moving to more complicated and expensive ones. Today, our first option for a stomachache might be an antacid from the medicine chest. If the stomachache persists, we seek help from a specialist.

Like modern patients who go to the medicine chest, patients in ancient Israel had some herbal remedies nearby. Rachel and Leah obviously believed that mandrakes could cure infertility (see Genesis 30:14ff. and engraving). Apparently these plants could be collected directly from the field. Balsam (or balm) seems to have been another remedy. A first-century C.E. clay flask discovered in a cave near Qumran contained a thick vegetable oil probably to be identified as balsam based on the proximity of the cave to ancient balsam orchards. In Jeremiah’s prophecies against Egypt, he mockingly suggests that when the Lord takes his vengeance, Egypt will look for remedies: “Go up to Gilead, and take balm. . .In vain you have used many medicines; there is no healing for you” (Jeremiah 46:11). Wounds were dressed and bandaged. Ezekiel, too, prophecies against Egypt: When the Lord breaks Pharaoh’s arm, it will not be “bound up for healing or wrapped with a bandage” (Ezekiel 30:21).

The more common remedies, however, involved the cult. According to the Hebrew Bible, health (in Hebrew, shalom) encompasses a physical state associated with the fulfillment of covenant stipulations; illness results from the violation of those stipulations. Therapy requires reviewing one’s actions in light of this covenant. (Occasionally, as with Job, illness may be rooted in divine plans that are not disclosed; the patient must trust that God’s undisclosed reasons are just.)

Health care associated with the cult of Yahweh was legitimate; health care associated with other gods was not.

The most accessible and inexpensive option was a simple prayer to Yahweh. A number of biblical prayers reflect this viewpoint. When the eighth-seventh century B.C.E. Judahite king Hezekiah fell ill and was near death, he prayed to the Lord, who added 15 years to his life (Isaiah 38:1–5, 16–17//2 Kings 20:1–6).

Another option was to consult a nabi, or prophet. Numerous biblical stories detail the activities of prophets as healers. Elijah and Elisha were consulted for everything from leprosy (2 Kings 5) to even more deadly illnesses. Elisha promised the childless Shunammite woman that she would have son. When the son died, Elisha went to her house, where the boy was laid out dead on his couch. After praying to the Lord, Elisha “mounted [the bed] and placed himself over the child. He put his mouth on its mouth, his eyes on its eyes, and his hands on its hands, as he bent over it. And the body of the child became warm” (2 Kings 4:32–34).

When Naaman, the Aramean general, was cured of his skin disease by Elisha (who prescribed immersion seven times in the Jordan River), Naaman declared, “Now, I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel” (2 Kings 5:15). The story emphasizes the superiority of Yahwistic health care over non-Yahwistic options. Indeed, it even implies that the land of Israel, because of Yahweh’s favor, is a healthier place to be: Naaman loads a couple of mules with some of Israel’s earth to take home with him (2 Kings 5:17).

The ropheim, usually translated physicians or doctors, were viewed as an illegitimate option by at least some biblical authors. In 2 Chronicles 16:12, Asa, king of Judah, is condemned for turning to a physician instead of to the Lord to cure an acute foot ailment. on the basis of this passage, some scholars have suggested that the ropheim were secular healers. More likely, however, the ropheim, like most healers in the ancient Near East, were sponsored by another deity, or included prayers to another deity or deities in their healing proceedings. In Mesopotamia the asû, one of the main healing specialists, was sponsored by the goddess Gula, among others.

If we make non-supernaturalism the hallmark of a “physician,” then there were also virtually no physicians in the ancient Near East. In Egypt, as well as in Mesopotamia, most healers made supernatural assumptions. Even in Greece, naturalistic assumptions mixed with supernatural ones; Greek healers were often sponsored by the god Asclepius.

Yet archaeology also reveals quite sophisticated healing techniques. Trephination, a procedure by which the skull was opened, was successfully performed on numerous patients, as we know from trephinated skulls that have healed, found from the Neolithic period (8000–5000 B.C.E.) through the Arab period (see scarred skull from Dimona).2 Although we cannot be absolutely sure that trephination was a medical procedure, it may have been used to treat people with chronic headaches who sought liberation from some evil force believed to be inside their heads.

Clay liver models inscribed with omens, found at Hazor and Megiddo and dating to the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 B.C.E.), may also have been used in medical consultations (see clay liver model).3 The models were compared with actual animal livers, and the omens were judged to be good or bad depending on the shape, color and other features of the animal liver. Some of these liver models and other devices may have been used to provide medical prognoses.

The implantation of a bronze wire in a tooth found at Horvat En Ziq, a small Nabatean fortress in the northern Negev, suggests the probable existence of dental specialists in the Hellenistic era (see bronze wire found in tooth).4

Bone spatulas found at Tell Jemmeh, near Gaza, are thought to have been used to clean debris from the eyes.5

In short, healing specialists or “physicians” probably were available in ancient Israel, but not all of them were regarded as legitimate by Yahwistic healing consultants.

Another important health care consultant was the midwife (meyaledah), who regularly assisted women during labor and probably helped with post-natal care as well. In Exodus 1:15, Pharaoh instructs the Hebrew midwives to kill infant boys they deliver. In the Bible, midwives provide psychological as well as medical support to women during childbirth. Just before Rachel dies giving birth to Benjamin, a midwife encourages her, “Have no fear, for it is another boy for you” (Genesis 35:17; see also 1 Samuel 4:20).

The ill could also go to the Temple for a cure, especially during the pre-Exilic period. In 1 Samuel 1, the childless Hannah attends the temple at Shiloh, where she prays for the Lord to make her pregnant. Infertility was one of the most serious afflictions for women. In the Hebrew Bible, a woman’s social status depended on her fertility, which often determined whether the family line would continue. Sculpted images of the Canaanite mother goddess Asherah (1 Kings 14:15; 2 Kings 23:4ff.) may have played a role in fertility rituals.d

According to 2 Kings 18:4, the Jerusalem Temple contained a bronze serpent made by Moses in the wilderness. During the Exodus, anyone bitten by a snake could simply “look at the bronze serpent and recover” (Numbers 21:9). Until Hezekiah (715–687 B.C.E.) destroyed the serpent and threw it out, “the people of Israel had burned incense to it” at the Jerusalem Temple (2 Kings 18), apparently with hopes of receiving a cure. Archaeology corroborates the use of bronze serpents for healing: A first-century C.E. bronze serpent has been discovered in the temple of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, at Pergamum, in modern Turkey.6 Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 B.C.E.) serpents have been found in Israel at Tel Mevorakh, Timna and Gezer, where they were likely used for healing.

Dogs too were associated with healing in the ancient Near East. Gula, the Mesopotamian goddess of healing, was represented as a dog or had a dog as an emblem, and dogs may have participated in healing rituals at her temple. Dogs also took part in ceremonies at the Greek temples of Asclepius. Archaeologists have discovered the remains of hundreds of dogs in a Persian-period cemetery at Ashkelon. Excavator Lawrence Stager believes that a healing cult associated with dogs may have been centered there, although the corresponding deity remains undetermined.7 Perhaps the dog became associated with healing because of the curative powers evident from its licking its sores and wounds.e

The destruction of the bronze serpent and the other reforms of kings Hezekiah and Josiah (640–609 B.C.E.) may have signaled a significant shift in the use of the Jerusalem Temple for therapy. These kings aimed to centralize worship in Jerusalem by destroying all outlying shrines. Patients could no longer attend their local shrines—whether dedicated to Yahweh or another deity—for therapy. Further, with the removal of the Asherah cult objects and the bronze serpent, the Jerusalem Temple would no longer serve as the same kind of therapeutic center. For many patients, however, a trip to the Jerusalem Temple to pray to Yahweh for healing may have been too long and difficult.

The advocates of centralization apparently recognized the problems for those who lived far from the Jerusalem Temple. First Kings 8:37–39, part of the so-called Prayer of Solomon, suggests how patients could receive from afar the benefits of praying at the Jerusalem Temple: “If there is a famine in the nation. . .whatever plague, whatever sickness there is; whatever prayer, whatever supplication is made by anyone or by all your people Israel, each knowing the affliction of his own heart, and stretching out his hands toward this house, then you shall hear in heaven, your dwelling place.” Patients no longer needed to come to the Temple to be healed. No matter where they were, the afflicted could simply extend their hands toward the Temple for a long-distance cure.

By the post-Exilic period (after the return of the Exiles from Babylon in the late sixth century B.C.E.), official concern over health had greatly expanded. The Priestly Code,f exemplified mainly in the book of Leviticus and completed in the early post-Exilic era, contains the most complete health care policy in the Hebrew Bible. Its most notable provision is that persons stricken with tzaraath (usually translated as “leprosy”) were banned from the Temple and, indeed, from the community. Priests acted, in effect, as public health officers who diagnosed the condition and decided whether such persons merited expulsion from society.

“Leprosy,” as used by Leviticus, cannot be identified with any single disease known to modern medicine.g Its key involved chronic discoloration of the skin (or almost any surface, including the walls of houses!). Thus, any of a number of diseases that produce chronic changes in the skin was probably diagnosed as leprosy, including skin cancer, psoriasis and lupus erythematosus, if these diseases existed in any significant form at that time.

The “treatment” for this chronic illness was removal from the community for as long as the disease persisted. From Leviticus 13:45–46, we can deduce the following scenario after the diagnosis had been made:

1) The patient is to shout out “Impure, Impure”;

2) the patient shall live alone;

3) the patient shall live outside the camp community;

4) this exile lasts as long as the affliction.

Why this four-step process? The usual response is fear of impurity or contagion. But this is too simple. Recent anthropological studies show that the definitions of contagion and impurity are as much a matter of socio-economic status as they are ｅxpressions of the fear of contagion.8 In other words, socio-economic status, and not simply fear of contagion, plays a role in deciding who and what is declared impure by those who have the power to define impurity.

The priestly establishment may have sought to classify as “impure” those members of society who posed the greatest socio-economic burden. The blind and the lame (see 2 Samuel 5:8), for example, who should have posed no real threat of contamination or contagion, were excluded from the Temple. In effect, the Priestly Code advocated a health care policy by which the state unburdened itself completely of the care for at least some of the chronically ill. The eradication of chronic illness would be left for a future messianic utopia. Indeed, Ezekiel 47:12 attributes a possible therapeutic function to the future Temple and its garden:

“By the river on both banks (shall be) every type of tree fit for food. Their leaves shall not wither, and its fruit shall never cease. Every month it shall renew its fruit, for its waters spring from the Temple itself; And its fruit shall be fit to eat, and its leaves (shall serve as) medicine.”

The community responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls was even stricter toward the chronically ill. Certain patients were expressly forbidden to enter the sanctuary city, according to the Temple Scroll (11QT 45:12–13):9

“All blind persons shall not enter into it for their entire life, so that they might not defile the city within which I dwell.”

Concerning the “leper,” the Temple Scroll (11QT 45:17–18) states:

“Any ‘leper,’ or afflicted (person) shall not enter it [the holy city] until they are purified. once he is purified, he shall offer. . .”

These policies, while no doubt causing emotional hardship to the families of the chronically ill, probably did check the spread of many contagious diseases. In contrast, Greek temples of Asclepius, which welcomed the chronically ill, including lepers, may have helped to spread disease by concentrating the sick in small spaces.

The Priestly Code’s hard-line attitude towards the chronically ill may have unwittingly served to provide a springboard for the rise of Christianity. The code was responsible for the growth of chronically ill populations with little access to the Temple. Since Jesus and his disciples appear to target these populations (Matthew 10:8; Mark 14:3), early Christianity can be seen, in part, as a critique of the Priestly health care system.

Early Christianity recognized that illness was not necessarily a sign of God’s disfavor or anger (Matthew 15:22; Luke 11:14; John 9:2). Christianity also emphasized that the cure for illness was available in this world. Yet, while criticizing the Priestly health care system, Christianity preserved many older Hebrew traditions regarding miraculous healings (Acts 5:16, 9:34) and collective health (James 5:16), though the influence of Hellenistic healing cults, including the Asclepius cult, also may be seen: For example, both Jesus and Asclepius were called soter (Greek for “savior”), both stressed the role of faith in healing and both used similar procedures, such as using spit to cure eye ailments. Further, many of the healing testimonies of Asclepius (particularly those written on a fourth-century B.C.E. inscription at a temple of Asclepius in Epidauros, Greece), like the healing stories related in Matthew 9:18–34, consist of a series of short healing stories that sometimes report the specific number of years that a patient has been afflicted.

In short, disagreements about the ideal health care system among Jewish sects may have been one of the prime factors in the development of Christianity.

But let’s return to our original question. What did people in Judah do when they got a raging bellyache or some other illness? Unlike the scholar quoted at the beginning of this article, we would argue that the Israelite patient did have access to a wide variety of healing specialists who might be called “physicians,” if by that term we include practitioners who held supernatural assumptions.

We must also realize that a more precise answer to our question depends on a number of factors. Where the patient went for a bellyache or some other illness depended on the patient’s economic resources and on the historical period, location, length of illness and willingness to use options not sanctioned by the authorities. Patients might first collect their own remedies from a field or pray for themselves and, if the results were not satisfactory, call a prophet as a next step.

In the early eighth century, patients may have gone to the Temple of Jerusalem or to a local Yahwistic shrine. But after the reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah, people probably could not use the bronze serpents in Jerusalem or at other Yahwistic shrines. If the patient was a pregnant woman with a bellyache, a midwife may have been the preferred consultant. If the patients were not as devoted to Yahweh as the prophets may have liked, they may have contacted a variety of non-Yahwistic healers or temples. What I hope has become clearer is that the complexity and richness of the options available for patients in ancient Israel and the Near East is only beginning to be explored.10

To the ancient Israelites, the leµb, often translated heart, was the seat of the emotions. The heart could be “gladdened” (Proverbs 27:11) or glum—“Why is your face sad, since you are not sick? This can only be sadness of the heart” (Nehemiah 2:2); “trembling” (1 Samuel 4:13) or courageous—a brave man has “the heart of a lion” (2 Samuel 17:10); full of love—“Love the Lord your God with all your heart” (Deuteronomy 6:5)—or full of hate—“[Michal] saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she despised him in her heart” (2 Samuel 6:16).

But the Israelites also associated the heart with knowledge, meditation and morality. The Bible speaks of “the thoughts of the heart” (1 Chronicles 29:18) and “great searchings of the heart” (Judges 5:16), and includes instructions to “commune with your own heart” (Psalm 4:5). The heart can plan wicked deeds—“a heart that hatches evil plots” (Proverbs 6:18)—and can become hard—“The Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart” (Exodus 10:27). The heart can turn away to follow other gods (1 Kings 11:2) or can remain “true” (Nehemiah 9:8).

These varied meanings have led some to interpret leµb as the “mind.” Proverbs 6:18, for example, is variously translated as “a mind that hatches evil plots” (Jewish Publication Society Version) and “a mind given to forging wicked schemes” (Revised English Bible) as well as “a heart that devises wicked plans” (New Revised Standard Version). But this distinction between mind and heart is a relatively modern one. Ancient Israelites had no word for brain and did not associate thinking with the head.11 Instead, thought and will were entwined with what we call emotions. The biblical leµb corresponded largely to the functioning of the nervous system, which the ancients identified as the internal organs of the torso.12 The seat of intelligence and emotion lay in what we refer to as the stomach. Although the term leµb (and its variant form leµbab) occurs more than 850 times in the Bible, it never refers specifically to an organ pumping blood. Ancient Israelites were apparently unaware that the blood circulated throughout the body.

A second-century B.C.E. Etruscan statue (above), now in the Museo Arqueológico of Madrid, illustrates what ancients really meant by the leµb.13 Both the Etruscan statue and the biblical word share a common heritage: medical knowledge from Egypt transmitted by the Greeks. Medicine flourished in Egypt during the early biblical period, and after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt and founded Alexandria in 331 B.C.E., this city became the world-center of medicine. From here, medical knowledge spread to Rome, where for many years all doctors were Greek. The Etruscans, who at this time were well attested from Rome to Florence, would certainly have interacted with the Romans in matters of such importance as medical care. At the same time, the prominence of the now-Greek medicine of Egypt reached Israel, where it is perceptible in the apocryphal, Hellenistic book of Sirach (38:1–3), which praises physicians:

“Honor physicians for their services, for the Lord created them;

for their gift of healing comes from the Most High, and they are rewarded by the king.

The skill of physicians makes them distinguished, and in the presence of the great they are admired.”

An arched panel of “skin” has been cut out below the lungs and heart of this sculpted male torso, creating a window through which we can observe the internal organs of cognition. Although the components seem a jumbled mass to the untrained eye, experts have distinguished various organs and variously identified them by modern medical terms. The large, teardrop-shaped organ at center, for example, is thought to be the liver. Apparently this torso was offered with a prayer that the relevant organ would be healed, or with thanks for a cure.

(For an extended treatment of this subject, see Robert North, “Medical Discoveries of Biblical Times,” in Scripture and Other Artifacts: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Honor of Philip J. King [Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1994].)

The Amarna Tablets

                                         

House Shrines

The Moabite Stone

Israelite Seal Impressions

The Dead Sea Scrolls

Magic Incantation Bowls

Shebnayahu’s Seal Impression

Searching for Sodom and Gomorrah

Sodom and Gomorrah. They are perhaps the most infamous cities of the Bible, inhabited by men and women so vile and wicked that only their utter annihilation could appease God’s wrath (Genesis 19).

But where does the Bible locate these legendary dens of iniquity, and does any trace of them still exist?

It is clear from various Biblical passages that Sodom and Gomorrah should be located in the Dead Sea region. When Abraham and his nephew Lot part ways (Genesis 13:8-13), Lot chooses to settle in the Jordan valley “in the direction of Zoar” and moves his tents to “the cities of the plain” as far as Sodom. According to Genesis 14, the “cities of the plain,” which include Sodom, Gomorrah, Zoar, Zeboiim and Admah, join forces to battle a coalition of Mesopotamian kings in the “Valley of Siddim (that is, the Salt Sea),” a clear reference to the Dead Sea region. Another clue is found in Genesis 10:19, which describes the southern border of Canaan as extending east from Gaza “in the direction of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim,” again placing the cities in the vicinity of the Dead Sea.

But Biblical scholars have long been divided about where exactly around the Dead Sea the cities were located. Most traditional theories place the cities at the southern end of the Dead Sea, in and around the well-watered and fertile plains and valleys south of the Lisan peninsula. At the southern end of this region, the Bible and other sources, including the first-century A.D. historian Josephus and the sixth-century A.D. Madaba Map, locate Zoar, one of the cities of the plain and the place to which Lot and his daughters fled following the destruction of Sodom (Genesis 19:22-23).*

Finding no clear archaeological evidence for Sodom and Gomorrah in the vicinity of Zoar, however, W.F. Albright and others conjectured that the remaining cities of the plain lay submerged beneath the shallow waters of the Dead Sea’s southern basin. They argued that during the time of Abraham, when the level of the Dead Sea was possibly much lower, the entire southern basin would have been a lush valley watered by rivers flowing down from the highlands of Moab.

By the late 1970s, when the level of the Dead Sea had begun to drop considerably due to industrial exploitation and damming projects, archaeologists had an unprecedented opportunity to search the now mostly dry southern basin for remains of the lost cities. But alas, not a sherd was found; there was no evidence that the cities had been submerged beneath the salt sea.

While exploring the high fertile banks along the southeastern shore of the Dead Sea, however, the same archaeological expedition discovered the ruins of four towns that had been inhabited during the Early Bronze Age (3300-2000 B.C.).** Some scholars, though certainly not all,*** date the origins of the stories of Abraham and Lot to the end of this period. The expedition, headed by archaeologists Thomas Schaub of Indiana University of Pennsylvania and Walter Rast of Valparaiso University, excavated two of the largest sites in the plain—Bab edh-Dhra and Numeira—and discovered that both had been thriving Bronze Age cities that were destroyed at almost exactly the same time, about 2350 B.C. Rast proposed that the Biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah originated from ancient traditions surrounding the near-simultaneous demise of these once-prosperous twin cities.¹

Although many have adopted Rast’s view of the southern provenance of the Sodom and Gomorrah tradition, others have proposed that the Bible actually locates the fabled cities at the northern end of the Dead Sea. The most vocal proponent of the northern theory is Dr. Steven Collins of Trinity Southwest University, who argues that Lot’s apportioned territory and all the “cities of the plain” (Genesis 13:8-13) should be located in the broad circular plain where the Jordan River meets the Dead Sea. First, according to Collins, Genesis 13 places the separation scene between Abraham and Lot somewhere around Ai and Bethel, an area that has commanding views over the northern Dead Sea and southern Jordan valley, not the southern Dead Sea region. Second, the passage describes Lot’s territory as the “circular” or “disc-shaped” plain (Heb. kikkar) of the Jordan, a term which Collins argues refers specifically to the broad alluvial plain of the southern Jordan valley just north of the Dead Sea.

What is more, Collins believes he has located the actual site of Biblical Sodom on a high bank overlooking the valley. The site, Tell el-Hammam, is one of the largest mounds in the plain and supported almost continuous occupation from the Chalcolithic to the Byzantine period. Although the site has substantial Early Bronze Age remains (as at Bab edh-Dhra and Numeira), Collins believes that the extensive and well-fortified Middle Bronze Age city (c. 2000-1550 B.C.) represents the Sodom known to Lot and Abraham, Biblical figures that he and many others believe should be dated to the first half of the second millennium B.C. In one area of the Middle Bronze Age city, Collins located a massive destruction layer over 3 feet thick. Could this layer be the archaeological residue of God’s infamous judgment on Sodom? Whatever the case, Collins hopes to uncover even more evidence of the Biblical story in future seasons of excavations at the site.

But whether one locates Sodom and Gomorrah south or north of the Dead Sea, there is plenty of reason to suspect that the Biblical tradition surrounding the doomed cities of the plain was more than just fanciful legend. As suggested by Amos Frumkin in his May/June 2009 BAR article on the salt pillar known as Lot’s Wife, the Sodom story told in the Bible likely represents an ancient memory of a single catastrophic event that affected the cities and peoples of the Dead Sea region nearly 4,000 years ago.

The final destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is vividly described in Genesis 19:24-25:

Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all of the valley, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground.

If the Biblical story does reflect a genuine historical memory of an ancient disaster in the Dead Sea region, what natural disaster would have brought about such a calamitous retelling?

As far back as the first-century A.D. historian Josephus, visitors to the Dead Sea have hypothesized about the nature of the catastrophe that “overthrew” the cities of the plain under a shower of brimstone and fire. For some, the explanation was a powerful flood that inundated the much shallower and then-dry southern basin of the Dead Sea. For others, the destruction was wrought by an ancient volcano that has become hidden and dormant in the centuries since. Some have even postulated that God’s fury was unleashed by a fiery ancient asteroid over a half-mile in diameter that destroyed everything in its path.

But the explanation that provides the most likely historical and geological context for the legendary destruction is a massive earthquake. The Dead Sea, part of the enormous geological fault line known as the Great Rift Valley, has been the epicenter of powerful earthquakes for countless millennia. Indeed, geologist Amos Frumkin believes that an earthquake measuring 8.0 on the Richter Scale gave rise to both the Sodom and Gomorrah tradition as well as the story surrounding the Mt. Sedom salt pillar (known as Lot’s Wife) some 4,000 years ago. Other scholars have proposed that the earthquake caused the narrow isthmus between the northern and southern Dead Sea basins to give way, which in turn flooded the southern “Valley of Siddim” and inundated the wicked cities and all their inhabitants.

Matching the earthquake theory to the Biblical conflagration, however, has required additional explanation. Most have proposed that the earthquake caused the natural sulfur and bitumen deposits of the Dead Sea area to erupt to the surface, thereby releasing large quantities of natural gas into the air. When exposed to fire—perhaps created by a lightning strike from above—the gas could have ignited and turned the entire plain into a huge furnace, consuming everything and everyone that could not escape.

Pergamon: City of Science ... and Satan?

Click to view a slide show of larger images and captions.

Click to view a slide show of larger images and captions.

The best-preserved ancient sacred structure on Pergamon’s acropolis is the Temple of Trajan, built during the reign of Emperor Hadrian (117-138 A.D.)and dedicated to his deified predecessor. Towering imposingly over the surrounding structures and ruins, its commanding presence is a testament to the strength of the imperial cult.

Click to view a slide show of larger images and captions.

It is hard to imagine, gazing up at its enormous height, that this was actually one of the smaller sacred structures in the temple precinct of the acropolis. The sheer size and majesty of the building against the dramatic backdrop of the valley below and the ocean and sky beyond is truly awe-inspiring.

Every ancient Greek city worth its name boasted a theater. A place for both entertainment and civic gatherings, the theater was a focal point of public life in the Greco-Roman world. The architecture of the nearly intact theater of Pergamon not only attests to the city’s importance but also provides what is surely one of the most spectacular—and dizzying—settings of the ancient world. Cascading sharply down the precipitous slope of the acropolis toward the sea, the theater is one of the steepest of its kind. The 10,000 visitors would have had to carefully navigate the 80 rows of horizontal seating, lest they take a fatal tumble to the stage more than 120 vertical feet below. Like many ancient Greek theaters, the theater at Pergamon is an acoustic marvel: An actor (or tourist) speaking normally on the stage can be heard even at the top of the cavea (seating structure).

Click to view a slide show of larger images and captions.

During the second century A.D., Pergamon’s fame as a center of healing and medical science eclipsed its reputation for anything else. Its most celebrated citizen during this period was the physician Galen, whose work and research was largely responsible for providing the foundation from which modern western medicine was to spring. The asclepion at Pergamon was one of the most famous in the ancient world, and this ancient version of a medical spa attracted pilgrims from all over the Mediterranean region who came seeking the restorative powers of its thermal waters and medical treatments for various ailments and injuries.

Given the fact that they city represented the epitome of Hellenistic culture, traditions and religion in both its pursuits and its very architecture, it is perhaps not surprising that early Christians viewed it as a bastion of all that was anathematic to Christian beliefs. In the Book of Revelation, John conveys a message from the risen Christ to seven Christian congregations in Asia Minor, all of which are located in modern Turkey. Pergamon’s congregation was one of these, and Christ’s message to the faithful praises them for adhering to their faith while living in the place “where Satan dwells.” Antipas, a Christian bishop of Pergamon, was believed to have been martyred here at the end of the first century A.D., around the time when many scholars believe the Book of Revelation was composed. The execution of their bishop certainly would not have endeared the city to its Christian inhabitants, and the Biblical reference to the city is reflective of the general tension between Christian and pagan communities at the end of the first century A.D.

As part of the Roman Empire, Pergamon’s decline mirrored that of the empire as a whole. Like the rest of the region, it eventually came under Byzantine and then Ottoman rule. By the late 19th century, excavations had begun at the ancient site, and today it draws people from all over the world. Climbing up to the peak of the acropolis, the modern visitor can easily sense the echo of Pergamon’s glorious past, which can still be heard amongst the beauty of its marble ruins today.

Notes

1. See Adela Yarbro Colins,“Satan’s Throne,” BAR, May/June 2006.

Multimedia

An Archaeological Search for Jesus