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Illness and Healing Through Spell and Incantation in the Dead Sea Scrolls

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Illness and Healing Through Spell and Incantation in the Dead Sea Scrolls CHAPTER 7 Illness and Healing through Spell and Incantation in the Dead Sea Scrolls David Hamidović The 950 manuscripts found in eleven caves around the site of Khirbet Qumran, located at the North-West of the Dead Sea shore, constitute one of the most amazing discoveries of the twentieth century. Following the final publication of the scrolls at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are continuing to discover how complex ancient Judaism was at the turn of the era, far beyond what we had previously imagined. Indeed, one third of these manuscripts constitute the oldest physical witnesses to the Hebrew Bible; the diversity of versions for the same passages provides new insights into the canonisation process of the Hebrew Bible and a new understanding of the status of these texts within Judaism. The other two thirds present mostly unknown Jewish texts. Many of them deal with the life of a community named in Hebrew yaḥad, designating a set of groups belonging to the Jewish movement known as the Essenes, already known from the ancient notices of Flavius Josephus, Philo of Alexandria and Pliny the Elder. For other documents, it is difficult to recognize an Essene milieu; they seem to have been composed before the birth of Essenism, yet are also preserved within the Qumran caves. The Qumran manuscripts are therefore not only the so-called library of the Essene move- ment, as is often said, but also a conservatory of Jewish documents from the final centuries BC. The common point of these texts and their raison d’être in the caves is their deliberate selection by the Essenes due to the correspon- dence of the ideas they espoused with Essene doctrine. For example, studies on Judaism and on the Jesus movement have been renewed after the discovery of the Qumran scrolls, especially studies on wisdom, messianism, apocalyptic, eschatology, and belief in an afterlife. Several manuscripts among the new documents discovered in the Qumran caves are particularly concerned with the role of demons1 in causing illness 1 I use the word “demon” by convention in this article, but it would be more accurate to use “evil celestial being” or “evil messenger”. For the cognate Greek words usually translated by “demon”, see the overview of Greg J. Riley, “Demon,” in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (DDD), ed. Karel van der Toorn et al. (Leiden, 1995), pp. 445–456. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004338548_008 98 Hamidović and the proper way to expel them in order to heal. They often attest to motifs known later in Judaism, such as the relationship between sin, impurity and illness, and the use of an intermediary for exorcism. They also present one of the first Jewish attestations of formulas in the first person and the use of imperatives in spells and incantations. Most of these documents preserved in the Qumran caves do not seem to have been composed by the Essenes; they seem to have circulated among Jewish groups at the turn of era. However, a few manuscripts may be an Essene adaptation of these documents and formulas. Sin, Impurity and Exorcism (4Q560) We propose to study the manuscript 4Q560, which is preserved in two fragments.2 Despite its fragmentary nature, we can surmise that the manu- script seems to depict demons attacking pregnant women—thus fragment 1, The .(מרדות ילדן) ”column 1, line 2, reads: “the punishment(s) of child-bearers .but the context is unclear ,(לילדתה) ”first preserved word is “to his/her midwife The text may associate the demonic attack of pregnant women with the mid- .(פקר4 באיש) ”wife.3 The attack is named in the same line as “an evil madness The matter is clearly linked to the impurity that was associated with pregnancy by all Jewish groups around AD.5 Indeed, line 4 preserves the end of Exodus 34:7 and Numbers 14:18 which attribute to YHWH the power to forgive “iniquity This implicit quotation may recall the impure .(עואן ופשע) ”and transgression state of pregnancy that only God can cancel. The only preserved word in line 6 -which can be used to refer to impu ,(ר]שיעין) ”is the plural adjective “w]icked rity. Furthermore, pregnant women, like menstrual women, are excluded from the Temple according to Leviticus 12:2–4. Therefore, this instance of demonic attack accords with well-known notions of impurity in Judaism. It seems to be even a logical extrapolation. But such an observation does not allow us to con- clude that the Essenes composed the document preserved in 4Q560, because 2 Emile Puech, “560. 4QLivret magique ar,” in Qumrân Grotte 4. XXVII. Textes araméens. Deuxième partie, ed. Emile Puech, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XXXVII (Oxford, 2009), pp. 291–302. 3 The motif is well-known in many Semitic incantations; see the summary in Douglas L. Penney and Michael O. Wise, “By the Power of Beelzebub: An Aramaic Incantation Formula from Qumran (4Q560),” Journal of Biblical Literature 113 (1994), p. 635, n. 30. 4 Florentino García Martínez and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar, The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, II visitor”, but the last letter is rather a resh. The scribe draws“ ,פקד Leiden, 1998), p. 1117, read) the dalet with two prominent heads in comparison with the resh. 5 See, for example, Damascus Document (4Q266 6 ii and 4Q272 1 ii)..
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