Megan S. Nutzman. Contested Cures: Identity and Ritual Healing in Roman and Late Antique Palestine. Edinburgh Studies in Religion in Antiquity. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. Pp. xvii + 272.
A gift to those of us in Jewish and Christian Studies, Nutzman presents a regional study of Roman Palestine that focuses on its non-Jewish and non-Christian populations and their shared ritual practices. The book consists of an introduction, seven chapters, and an epilogue, divided into four parts: 1) miraculous objects, 2) miraculous places, 3) miraculous people, and 4) elite rhetoric. The purpose of this book is twofold: first, to delineate categories of ritual healing that transcended the boundaries of ethnic and religious groups, and second, to use these rituals as a lens to examine the rhetoric by which Jewish and Christian authors differentiated themselves from each other and from their Samaritan, gentile, and ‘pagan’ neighbors” (2). The most innovative sections of the book focus on comparative archaeological evidence of healing objects and sites from late antique Palestine.
Noting the neglect of Samaritan, Greek, Roman and Semitic cults of Palestine in religious studies, “Contested Cures seeks to understand the populations that made up the mosaic of Palestine as a whole and the ideological borders that these groups created surrounding ritual healing” (4–5). Acknowledging Hayim Lapin’s Communities in Later Roman Palestine, Nutzman’s analysis seeks to balance the simultaneous boundary setting and crossing that took place among these five communities. Prioritizing “local ritual practices,” the book examines “a wide variety of approaches to preserving health, healing injury, and curing illness that presuppose some form of divine intervention to bring about the desired result, without exclusions based on the categories of “religion” and “magic” or based on the cultural or religious tradition in which the ritual emerged” (9). Nutzman prioritizes archaeological evidence that is not well known, and each chapter’s comparative analysis yields fascinating observations, challenging philological studies that would reinscribe the boundaries of Judaism, Christianity, and Roman religions.
Nutzman’s study of “Miraculous Objects” focuses on evidence that resists philological analysis like gemstones, rings, and pendants from Palestine, and reflects on their prominent use in antiquity (Chapter 1). Nutzman points out that “of the amulets that survive from Palestine, gemstones comprise the largest category at roughly 45 percent of the corpus, while lamellae [which have received far more attention] are by far the smallest category at only about 15 percent” (18). Nutzman observes a tantalizing trend when language is correlated with amuletic type: Greek is for gemstones and jewelry, Aramaic for lamellae, and Samaritan dialect is found in jewelry exclusively (19). And yet, as Nutzman points out, language does not map onto community boundaries and does not preclude cross-religious use. A gemstone from Caesarea that depicts a figure reaping wheat in the field on the obverse and on the reverse reads in Greek for “cure of the hip” could have been used by any laborer seeking healing from repetitive injury—the image “rendered Greek literacy unimportant” (23).
In the same chapter, Nutzman surveys eleven rings: five rings “simply say hygi(ei)a (health) and the name of the user” (26) — their multireligious appeal is evident. Six extant rings all deploy the Greek imperative boeth(e)i for “help” addressed to a divinity. A brass ring from Hammat Gader addresses Christ, four address Kyrie or “Lord,” and one from Caesarea addresses heis theos (“One God”). She suggests that almost all of these rings “reflect Christian conventions, since they address Kyrie or Christe” (26). With the benefit of Jewish Aramaic poetic studies, Nutzman could have highlighted that the vocative Kyrie was shared among Jews and Christians too. Kyrie was the usual appellation for God among Greek-speaking Jews and is found almost twenty times in the Aramaic poetic corpus as well (although interestingly never in midrash or piyyut).[1] These rings addressing “the Lord” could have comfortably been worn by any inhabitant of Palestine in search of divine assistance in an embodied form.
Along the same lines, Nutzman analyzes a bronze pendant from Gush Halav that on the reverse invokes “Yahweh of the Heavenly Hosts Michael” over an image of the “much-suffering eye” (cf. Testament of Solomon) while on the obverse, an image of the so-called “Holy Rider” is accompanied by a Greek text that reads “one god who conquers evil” (28–30). Nutzman presents compelling evidence that “One God” was an appellation used by Jews, Christians, and even traditional Roman polytheists in late antique Palestine. While she correctly notes that Michael appears in the Book of Daniel, by late antiquity Michael the archangel transcended biblical use and was popular among Jews, Christians, and traditional polytheists as well: study of angels, popular among Jews, Greeks, and traditional polytheists would support her over-all thesis of shared and contested approaches to healing in Roman Palestine.[2]
The second chapter undertakes a systematic inquiry into how different communities employed biblical material. While one might expect that Jewish Aramaic amulets would quote biblical material the most, it is the Samaritan amulets that quote the Pentateuch most consistently. Only 8 of 21 extant and published Aramaic amulets contain biblical quotations, and each lamella only quotes a single source. Analyzing polygonal rings and double-sided pendants, Nutzman observes that these jewels exclusively quote the Samaritan Pentateuch and deploy a delimited collection of verses, which she suggests reflects “consensus” of appropriate texts or perhaps “pressure from elites” interested in boundary maintenance (43–44). At the same time, she acknowledges that these same verses form the core of the Jewish liturgy (e.g. the Shema) and that Jews associated these verses with tefillin, not amuletic necklaces or bracelets. The fact that Samaritan amulets have been found in Christian tombs suggests to her that the boundaries between Samaritan, Christian (and perhaps Jewish) communities were more porous than scholars have acknowledged. She offers a fresh perspective on objects previously examined only by Jewish Studies scholars, identifying a Christogram juxtaposing a Tetragrammaton in the ‘Evron lamella and “invites speculation” about bilingual amulets and the boundary-crossing they imply (60). When she situates the “Jewish” evidence in broader regional context, her book shines.[3]
Turning to section two on Miraculous Places, she is more assertive about shared ritual practices among diverse communities of the region. Nutzman points out that in contrast to famous Egyptian and Greek cultic sites, “In Palestine, the most popular healing sites were of a markedly different character … in that they were situated at hot springs” (74). Nutzman’s focus on healing sites in general helps contextualize geographical Palestine’s significance in the Mediterranean world: in antiquity seven thermal springs were famous in this region with one writer claiming that Hammat Gader was second only to the springs of Baiae in Naples (75). She argues that it seems likely that Jews, Christians and polytheists engaged in dream incubation at Hammat Gader, despite scholarly (and ancient elite) discourse that would deny that Christians would do so (Chapter 3). My only complaint about this chapter is that she does not engage with Alessia Bellusci’s work on Jewish dream divination and Brian Sowers’ work on Eudocia, especially his new translation of her inscription at Hammat Gader.[4] Engaging with Bellusci’s research on dream requests among Jews in the Medieval period (šeʾilat ḥalom) would have strengthened her argument and more fully contextualized the Jewish practice in the pre-modern Middle East. Sower’s work on Eudocia, meanwhile, does much to revivify Eudocia’s paean to Hammat Gader, one of the few women’s texts preserved from Palestine. Nutzman rightly observes that it is probable the impressive synagogues of Hammat Gader and Hammat Tiberias “were built to accommodate Jewish visitors to the thermae” rather than just local inhabitants (83) and again, she could go further, postulating that these Jewish sites were intended to welcome non-Jewish visitors as well.
In section three on Miraculous People, Nutzman ventures beyond the late antique Palestinian material record to examine literary evidence for Jewish, Christian, and polytheistic ritual practitioners (those working within sanctioned hierarchies) and so-called freelancers who were unaffiliated and often “denounced as magicians” (118). She devotes one chapter to these two types of expert practitioners, who rely on “performative utterances.” While the incorporation of evidence from the Qumran community alongside Josephus accounts, Testament of Solomon, and Sepher ha-Razim in chapter 5 is productive, the absence of discussion of Jewish priests, rabbis, prayer leaders (paytanim), and other late antique Jews as experts sought for healing is surprising.[5] Though in Jewish Studies scholarship they are compared as leaders, the category of healing hasn’t been used to analyze these Jewish figures—a desideratum that Nutzman’s work brings to the foreground. Many stories depict the rabbis of Roman Palestine as practitioners powerful due to their relationship to Torah (not exactly halakhah as Nutzman puts it).[6] The evidence of Jewish magic bowls from Babylonia would have strengthened her argument for different kinds of ritual practitioners.[7] The absence of reference to women as healers—whether as midwives, ritual experts or “witches”—is striking and calls for an article length study at least.[8] Chapter 6 is focused on charismatic healers with a reputation for their extraordinary abilities, e.g. Jesus and Christian ascetics; Honi the Circle-Maker and Hanina Ben Dosa; Apollonius of Tyana, and even the emperors Vespasian and Hadrian. Likely, stories of emperors as healers are least well known and others will be familiar to readers. One unfortunate omission in the unsanctioned practitioner chapter is Rabbi Joshua b. Perahia, who is linked in the Talmud to Jesus, reputed to be his teacher, and achieves popularity in Babylonian magic bowls for his demon-repelling divorce formula.[9]
The first three sections of the book set up the context to understand why rabbinic and patristic authors were so worried about drawing boundaries between their communities, with many voicing sentiments like John Chyrsostom’s: that it is better to die than to be healed by idolatrous practices (203). Chapter 7 also reminds readers what material objects these thinkers had in mind when they railed against charms and amulets. Nutzman is right that in the shared milieu of late antique Palestine, Jews, Christians, and polytheists had much in common and ought to be studied together. One caveat, however: we would do well to keep in mind Ross Shepherd Kraemer’s findings that Byzantine legislation sought to separate and eventually suppress non-Christian populations—and was quite successful in this endeavor.[10] My quibbles with this book are small compared to its magnificent achievement of bringing together evidence from so many fields and setting the stage for conversation about quests for healing in antiquity among scholars from an array of fields. The events of the last few years have made clear how all-consuming and central the search for cures can be in the formation of group identity—and group boundaries. This is an overdue study that gives proper attention to the search for healing among the diverse populations of Late Antique Palestine.
Mika Ahuvia is an associate professor of Classical Judaism in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies, and Director of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle.
[1] Michael Sokoloff and Josephy Yahalom, Jewish Palestinian Aramaic Poetry from Late Antiquity (Jerusalem, 1999), 42 [Hebrew]. See Laura Lieber, trans., Jewish Aramaic Poetry from Late Antiquity (Cambridge Genizah Studies 8; Brill, 2018), 22, 42, 43, etc.
[2] Rangar Cline, “Archangels, Magical Amulets, and the Defense of Late Antique Miletus,” Journal of Late Antiquity 4.1 (Spring)55–78.
[3] I think she could go farther in deconstructing the idealized normative Jew of antiquity: my marginalia on the ‘Evron lamella with its multiple references to logos (notably, a loanword not found in Jewish Aramaic poetry) may be suggestive of that Jewish-Christian community we often allude to, but seldom find concrete evidence for.
[4] Alessia Bellusci, “Jewish Oneiric Divination: From Daniel’s Prayer to the Genizah Šeʾilat Ḥalom,” Unveiling the Hidden—Anticipating the Future (Brill, 2021), 101–139. Brian Sowers, In Her Own Words: The Life and Poetry of Aelia Eudocia (Harvard University Press, 2020), esp. 23–24.
[5] On scribes as healers, see Avigail Manekin-Bamberger, “Who Were the Jewish ‘magicians’ behind the Aramaic Incantation Bowls?” JJS 41.2 (2020): 235–54 and for the prayer-leader’s role in Jewish society in late antiquity, see Laura Lieber, “An Unholy Spectacle: The Ordeal of the Accused Adultress in the Early Synagogue,” JSQ 29 (2022):135-162.
[6] See Jacob Neusner, “The Phenomenon of the Rabbi in Late Antiquity,” Numen 16.1 (1969): 1–20. For a story about rabbis in a magical duel with a heretic in a bathhouse in Tiberias, see y. Sanh 7.19, 25d). And see y. Qidd 4.11, “even the best woman is an expert at magic.”
[7] My own work on Jewish ritual practitioners also differentiates between those who invoke God, angels, heroes (formulae and historiolae) for power and those that rely on their own power: Ahuvia, On My Right Michael, On My Left Gabriel: Angels in Ancient Jewish Culture (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021), 18–49.
[8] Nutzman imagines a mother as the subject in search of healing, but not mothers or women as healers. See Tal Ilan, Jewish Women in Greco-Roman Palestine (Hendrickson, 1996), 184–190 and Silencing the Queen (Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 214–258. See also Rebecca Lesses, “Exe(o)rcising Power: Women as Sorceresses, Exorcists, and Demonesses in Babylonian Jewish Society of Late Antiquity,” JAAR 69 (2001) 343–375. More recently, there has been much debate about the identity of Jewish ritual practitioners: see Tal Ilan and Dorit Kedar, “The Female Authorship of Babylonian Jewish Incantation Bowls,” JJS 73.2 (2022): 288–304.
[9] See Markham Geller, Joshua b. Perahia and Jesus of Nazareth (Brandeis University, Ph.D. Dissertation, 1973) and more recently, Shaul Shaked, James Nathan Ford and Siam Bhayro, Aramaic Bowl Spells: Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Bowls (vol. 1; Brill, 2013), 103–150.
[10] Speaking of Kraemer, she put forward the elegant phrase “traditionalists” in place of “pagan” as a more neutral term to refer to non-Christians, non-Jews, and non-Samaritans, which I hope will become standard in our field. See Ross Shepard Kraemer, The Mediterranean Diaspora in Late Antiquity: What Christianity Cost the Jews (Oxford, 2020), 6–7.