Person, Place, and Object: Ritual Healing in Roman and Late Antique Palestine

I argue that three broad avenues for seeking miracles can be identified in Palestine, and indeed across the ancient Mediterranean world: person, place, and object. People were believed to transmit cures by their own intrinsic power or through the use of prescribed words and actions; sacred places hosted incubation rituals where the sick and injured awaited healing in their dreams; and objects inscribed with powerful texts and images were attached to the body as amulets to ward off present and future ailments. Assigning ritual cures to one of these three categories highlights the inherent similarities in the healing methods attested for different cultural and religious groups, despite changes in the identity of the divine healers that they invoked or the specific texts and images that each employed. It also addresses a couple of related methodological concerns. Much previous scholarship on ritual healing is fragmented according to a putative divide between “magical” and “religious” cures. For example, anointing with oil for healing is understood within the framework of normative “religion” for early Christians, while wearing amulets is seen as an example of “magic.” This approach prioritizes the perspective of elite authors, who at times employed ritual healing – such as the use of amulets – as a litmus test to determine whether others belonged to their community or whether they should be considered outsiders.  

At issue in such rhetoric was the porousness of communal boundaries. Patristic and rabbinic authors were keen to demarcate and perpetuate clear lines between groups, and even to advance subsets within their broader communities, such as the rabbis, a monastery, or a particular sect of Christianity. However, it would seem that these concerns were of little importance to many of their coreligionists. Archaeological evidence is helpful in illustrating the prevalence of certain forms of ritual healing, which might otherwise be obscured or considered deviant based on the polemic of elite authors. This tension between what patristic and rabbinic authors thought that their fellow Christians and Jews should be doing and what they actually did is related to a second methodological concern: the conventions for identifying certain rituals or amulets, and the people who used them, as Christian, Jewish, Samaritan, or “pagan.” While such labels are often convenient, I would suggest that in many cases neither people nor rituals fit neatly into such categories. Ultimately, I argue that the inevitability of sickness and injury made people willing to experiment with seemingly beneficial techniques, regardless of the censure that elites within their communities directed at these practices.  

Our evidence for objects used for ritual healing in Roman and late antique Palestine consists of more than 130 published amulets. Unfortunately, most of our amulets lack provenience, and even fewer were found in the course of controlled archaeological excavations. These limitations, coupled with the fact that amulets written on perishable materials, especially papyrus, do not survive from Palestine, means that we can only consider a fraction of the amulets that were used. The lack of perishable amulets, such as those found in abundance in Egypt, is particularly important, as they likely would have been the cheapest and most readily accessible. The gemstone, jewelry, and metal foil amulets that do survive from Palestine would have necessarily been more expensive and likely unavailable to certain segments of the population.