Southeast Regional AAR — Charleston, 2024

“Dissolving the Sapiential Body: The Medical Discourses of Corporeal Transformation in Ludlul bel nēmeqi and MT Job with Reference to 11QAram Job”

THESIS — Ancient Medical Knowledge and the Textualized Body of Job

Ingrid E. Lilly

The text of Job reflects an ancient therapeutic, apotropaic project drawing on diverse kinds of medical knowledge: the exorcist’s knowledge of symptomatic signs and agencies of affliction, the physician’s knowledge of “natural” bodies and therapies, and the physiognomist’s knowledge of bodily omina and personal fate. The figure of Job expertly marshals this knowledge to strategize and then enact a corporeal maneuver, slipping past the figure of YHWH during the windstorm, thereby escaping the physiognomist gaze of judgment and fault, averting the attack of unjust divine affliction, and emerging as the GOAT of sapiential knowledge who figured out how to best the court in heaven and on earth.

The more I read the book of Job,* the more I am convinced that the figure of Job does not repent — he is not a sapiential model of trust or faith in God. Rather, the figure of Job is a model of observational, medical, physiognomic wisdom who outsmarts and escapes God with the unwitting help of his “physician-friends.” I say unwitting because Job must actually escape a double bind — that is, Job is subject to two outside agents who drive his fate, both a God of brutal attack and untrustworthy scribes (represented by the friends) who would scathingly memorialize him in the eternal life of inscription.

*Of note, I recently prepared the study notes for the Book of Job in the Westminster Study Bible

The first bind is a well-known and famous litigation theme in the book of Job, that God is Job’s active assailant, that God is a compromised, criminal judge incapable of delivering justice in Job’s case. But what has (to my knowledge) never been discussed is the depth to which this theme owes to both ancient diagnostic and physiognomic knowledge and discourses. God’s attack is a classic medical etiology of affliction, and God’s gaze and judgment is a classic framing of both medical and physiognomic observation and decision. These ancient body discourses have never been fully brought to bear on our understanding of the “litigation” theme in the book of Job.

The second bind is not well-known or in any way obvious. I cannot at this moment recall reading any scholarship that traces the book’s verbs of inscription, its drama of scribal technologies and materials, nor its main character’s terror and dread of a sullied, virtual afterlife. (If I have missed someone’s scholarship on this, I would like to know about it!) If we understand ancient afterlives to depend on children feeding, remembering, and commemorating their deceased elders, and Job’s children have all been killed — Job represents the quintessentially anxious subject whose metamorphic afterlife inscribes his virtual body for a textual eternity — as long as he can outsmart the agents of inscription. I will leave this second theme aside for now so I can focus on sketching an ancient medical lens on Job’s illness narrative.

Understanding Job’s apotropaic/therapeutic project requires an ancient lens on Job’s physical/material/experiential suffering, and so I have turned to Mesopotamian medicine for comparative insights. With countless Aramaic and Akkadian loan words in the book, the West Asian/Babylonian medical context is productive training ground for a modern scholar interested in ancient medical cultures, body discourses, and the poetics of affliction. I will not have time to describe every feature of the book of Job from a magico-medical lens, so I hope I have provided just enough information in today’s remarks.

To begin, we can refresh our memories about just how much the book of Job focalizes illness, far more than is often appreciated. The pious sufferer in the prose narrative (chs. 1-2) becomes a victim to countless catastrophes. But the events and losses of ch. 1 are in the narrated past. Not so his illness. In ch. 2, when the counsel in heaven agrees to afflict Job with skin sores, the accuser challenges YHWH to go bigger — to touch not just skin, but also Job’s bones and his flesh. YHWH agrees to this greater affliction, but when the accuser peppers Job’s skin with sores in 2:7, we are left to wonder what is going on with the bones, flesh, and nefesh on the inside of Job’s body. Most commentators have noted how little Job laments or even mentions the loss of his children, his houses, or fields from ch. 1. Job is focused on his body and physical pain. Indeed, across the speeches with his friends, Job describes his symptoms, identifies agents of his affliction, proposes etiologies for his worsening illness, and defends his blamelessness to friends who have very different ideas about the prohibited or divinely offensive behavioral causes of affliction and therefore the therapies he needs.

What I hope to sketch today is how the figure of Job proposes to dissolve his body, which represents at least one important part of an overall strategy of sapiential escape and victory over the forces of affliction. As I develop this sketch, I will make consistent reference to comparative medical discourses, beginning with the medical discourses Job himself deploys. As we will see, Job is well versed in medical knowledge which the Babylonian exorcist corpora can best illuminate.

Job’s Medical Knowledge: Symptoms, Diagnosis, and Agents of Affliction

He crushes me with a tempest and multiplies my wounds without cause; He will not let me get my breath but fills me with bitterness (Job 9:17-18)

God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me. (Job 23:16-17a)

Such lines about bodily affliction appear throughout Job’s speeches, and they engage the practices and poetics of medicine known to us from first millennium exorcist texts. For example, a major corpus of diagnostic and prognostic medicine, the Diagnostic Handbook, runs 40 tablets long, giving us insight into how exorcists observed the body to identify the agents of affliction. The Handbook famously organizes traditional diagnostic medical knowledge by individual body part. There are tablets on the head and face, the eyes, and the tongue and mouth. For every affected body part listed, an associated cluster of symptoms are gathered to form an entry. Each of these sets of symptoms are always followed by the specific agent of affliction responsible (hand of a God, divine anger, a ghost) and a prognosis (he will live, he will die, he will get better). Job’s close attention to his own bodily symptoms, like his faint heart (23:16) or his shortness of breath and stomach bile (9:18) reflect the importance of observational knowledge in exorcist practice. Further, Job’s certainty that God is the agent of his bodily symptoms reflects the kind of expertise needed to medically read symptomatic body parts: Job’s wounds are multiplied because God “crushes me with a tempest” or Job’s heart is faint because “the Almighty has terrified me.” Job presents himself as the expert of his own body. He alone can correctly read his symptoms and assign the causes of affliction.

In addition to his knowledge of bodily symptoms, Job’s call for a court trial to protest his innocence also engages exorcist knowledge. This comparative point is very important but is also more complicated. Of all the medical/magical texts, therapeutic incantations, prayers, and rituals are the most numerous and diverse. And to be sure, not all medical therapies are couched as trials. But of note, the anti-witchcraft corpus, Maqlû, draws heavily on the language and details of trial procedure (Shalom Holtz, “Maqlu and Trial Procedure”). Some of these rituals of healing specifically give a socially powerless patient access to the divine court where he can appeal his innocence and seek a judgment and punishment (Tzvi Abusch, “Witchcraft and the Anger of the Personal God”). Especially important, in my view, are namburbi rituals that cut off the “thread of evil” (qê lumni) that emanates from a bad omen. Like Maqlû, namburbi rituals are thoroughly couched in legal language, often addressed to Šamaš as “Judge of Heaven and Earth” (Stefan M. Maul). These rituals have been widely discussed in relation to exorcist medicine because of how often bad omens send evil “into the body” and how often the rituals bring the patient “back to life” (Niek Veildhuis, “On Interpreting Meso. Nam. Rituals”). It is clear that knowledge of bad omens and bodily illness have some overlap. But even further, ANE scholarship on namburbi rituals initiated a still open question about the if-then casuistic logic of omens, laws, and diagnostic medical observations. [notes below].

Back to Job’s appeal for a trial to defend his innocence, the comparison may not be specific, but it is still illuminating. All of the texts mentioned above, the Diagnostic Handbook, Maqlu, namburbi rituals — these texts reflect the broad scope of the Babylonian exorcist. We have ample reason to apply an exorcist frame to Job’s trial language and read his call for an encounter with YHWH as a therapeutic/apotropaic ritual.

Job’s Physician Friends — Unwitting Therapists

One of the distinctive features of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar’s speeches is their use of both second person address that accuses Job of foolishness, ignorance, pride, wrong-doing, and wickedness to third-person, depersonalized descriptions of how badly things turn out for such persons. These “blame the victim” sentiments have been largely misunderstood. But as Carol Newsom has compellingly argued, the friends are well-meaning, at least initially (Newsom, ch. 4). They want to reverse Job’s miserable fate, but to do so, they need to identify his offense and solicit his confession of guilt in order to appease the agent(s) of affliction. They want to apply the authoratative medical case narratives to his situation (3rd person descriptions), and they want the affliction he suffers to come to an end (2nd person address).

If iniquity is in your hand, put it far away, and do not let wickedness reside in your tents. … the eyes of the wicked will fail; all way of escape will be lost to them (Zophar in 11:14, 20)

You who tear yourself in your anger—shall the earth be forsaken because of you or the rock be removed out of its place? Surely the light of the wicked is put out, and the flame of their fire does not shine (Bildad in 18:4-5)

In general, the friends speeches reflect the worldview of magical therapeutic texts. As Markham Geller states,

The magical corpus was…designed to deal with a patient’s anxieties, to help him recognize the hidden and harmful forces of the surrounding cosmos, to acknowledge the ultimate causes for misfortune and ill-health, and to try to reconcile the patient with whatever is acting against him. (Geller, 37)

This description of magical therapy maps well onto the initially well-meaning speeches of Job’s friends. They try to reconcile Job to the god who is angry with him and prescribe him therapies and prayers to quell God’s disfavor. However, as Job defends his innocence and the friends grow frustrated with this misbehaving patient of their medical practice, the friends’ speeches shift; their blame sharpens.

What is important to note about the mounting intensity of the friend’s accusations is how they increasingly produce medical effects. All of Job’s speeches responding to his friends open with observations about the materiality of their words — as vocalized wind. Their winds are a linguistic AND material agent that assault him. Job adds such wind attacks into his the etiologies he uses to understand his worsening symptoms, drawing them into the exorcist diagnostic knowledge presented in the book.

At the same time that the friends’ vocalized winds intensify Job’s illness, they also give Job an idea. As he survives the wind attacks of his friends, Job comes to understand that the windstorm of God (chs. 38-41) may also be survivable.

Dissolving the Body

One of the first times Job considers what dissolving does to material things, he views the force negatively. In ch. 14, he presents human death as the inevitable result of God’s power over physical frailty. Looking for evidence that would attest otherwise, Job reviews withering flowers, rotting tree stumps, dried bodies of water, and finishes with mountains that dissolve. Verses 18–20 read: “The mountain falls and crumbles away, and the rock is removed from its place; the waters wear away the stones; the torrents wash away the soil of the earth; so you destroy the hope of mortals. You prevail forever against them, and they pass away.” But Job will develop a different perspective on dissolving over the course of his dialogues, especially after listening to his friends. For example, Zophar warns about the short, temporary life of a wicked person, illustrating how their head flies up the clouds even as they perish in dung and their body decomposes into dust in 20:6-11.

Although Zophar’s body description seems like a depressing, death-oriented model of the physical body, Job begins to see opportunity in such descriptions, particularly of fluttering in the clouds and dissolving into dust. Job is not, however, inventing a therapeutic pathway whole cloth. Similar imagery marks the transition to healing in Ludlul bēl nēmeqi (The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer). A first millennium work with numerous ties to Babylonian exorcism, most scholars conclude that the poem’s author was trained on the exorcist corpora (Alan Lenzi). An illness narrative in three tablets, Šubši-mešrê-Šakkan’s multiple stages of affliction are resolved at the end when Marduk heals him. Both Ludlul’s diagnostic discourses and the imagery used to narrate the therapeutic healing — engage concepts of dissolving.

By my count, there are seven body scans in the Babylonian poem. Six of those seven scans review symptomatic body parts. The seventh body scan structures the account of Marduk’s healing, body part by body part. Imagery of dissolving the body concludes the 4th body scan (II. 59–69)— the afflicted body is pulverized and swamped like a marsh. The 5th body scan (II. 70–81) quickly follows, leaving Šubši-mešrê-Šakkan submerged in the muck, his body parts clogged with sludge, and his face covered by “the mud of death.” The 6th scan (II. 84–116) takes place on Šubši-mešrê-Šakkan’s bed, but the imagery continues. While tossing and turning, his body is violently attacked, crushed, and destroyed — suggesting the image of pulverizing. The scan concludes with him lying in his dung, his body mixed up with excrement as he descends into a open grave. The last body scan, as I mentioned above, narrates Marduk’s healing (III. 76–106) which will restore each relevant body part one by one. However, before discernible body parts like mouth, limbs, and belly can be healed, Šubši-mešrê-Šakkan’s body itself cannot be discerned. As the scene of Marduk’s healing opens, all that remains of Šubši-mešrê-Šakkan’s body is just quivering smoke in heaven. As the healing begins, his body starts to re-materialize as Marduk sends away the evanescent agents of affliction, like fog, dew, shadow, and mud — suggesting that Marduk’s healing is really like a reassembly of the patient’s body, first unscrambled from the particulate and amorphous elements of the cosmos to be re-formed into a human body, part by part.

In a longer version of this paper — I trace the images and medical discourses of Job’s dissolving body across his speeches, arguing that he develops a strategy to face and escape YHWH in the whirlwind. In the interest of time, I will briefly mention a few of these highlights, because I want to leave enough time to point out two variants between MT and the Aramaic Targum of Job found at Qumran (11Q10) — these variants suggest the medical lens sketched here was important to first millennium scribes who penned copies of Job.

First, three highlights —

• Job 7:8–9 — “(8) The eye of the observer will not inspect; your eyes are on me, but I am no more. (9) As the cloud fades and vanishes, so those who go down to Sheol do not come up.” At this early stage, Job is intrigued with imagery of fading and vanishing as a way to escape inspection, which I read through the lens of both diagnostic and physiognomic observation. In this earlier statement, Job is pessimistic. He assumes that human body fades irreversibly into Sheol.

• Job 12:10, 14 — “(10) In his hand is the life-organ (nefeš) of every living thing and the wind (ruaḥ) of all flesh (basar). …(14) If he tears down, no one can rebuild. If he shuts someone in, no one can open up.” Here we can see Job continuing to think about deconstructing the body, but also about the winds in the flesh and about images of bodily protection — of being impenetrably shut in.

• Job 14:10-11, 13 — “(10) Mortals die and are laid low; humans expire and where are they? (11) As waters fail from a lake and a river wastes away and dries up…(13) Oh that you would hide me in Sheol, that you would conceal me until your (hot) nostril turns back.” — In this line, we see the figure of Job add two conceptual observations to his strategy. First, he identifies a temporal feature of his illness — that YHWH’s wrath pulses in and out from a hot nostril — that is to say, divine affliction includes moments of reprieve because God’s nostril must inhale. Second, the body imagery shifts from dissolving to dessication, the disappearance of liquids like lake waters and dried river beds. Not surprisingly, dessication is the etiology of Job’s symptoms in his next speech (ch. 16) where he loses every possible bodily fluid (tears, blood, bile), leaving his strength “in the dust” (v. 15).

Turning to two more instances of this theme, I will briefly point out how the Aramaic Targum of Job presents important relevant variants. [11Q10 is only attested in Job 17:14 – 42:11].

• Job 30:19

  • MT — He has cast me into the muck. I became like dust and ash.

  • 11Q30 — […] they surround me and make me go down to the dust.

I am not going to explain the slight differences here in terms of Job’s overall strategy. But suffice it to say, this variant impacts the plot of dissolving in Job’s illness narrative. Chapter 30 is an important phase of Job’s speeches. In it, he presents two storm afflictions that densely tease apart layers of Job’s body — its winds, particles, and liquids. Like Šubši-mešrê-Šakkan, Job’s body in MT is swamped in muck (30:19-21) and then dissolved as dust roaring about on the wind (30:22). This is the last chapter of body imagery in Job’s speeches, and it ends with his skin turning black and sloughing off — meaning that in the arc of the book’s illness narrative, Job will confront YHWH in the whirlwind speeches of chs. 38-42 in a body that is completely desiccated and flayed. A gruesome image, but one that takes seriously the material imagination of medical discourses.

The last verse about dust and dissolved bodies is Job’s last line in the whole book, the single famous line which bolsters readers arguments about whether the figure of Job repents or if he just hates himself, feels humiliating grief, or melts away. Excellent philologists do not agree what the MT says or means. There are several viable options, but I would like to suggest that linguistic ambiguity and multivocality is part of Job’s strategic escape.

• Job 42:6

  • MT — I melt away/abhor myself AND comfort/repent in dust and ashes.

  • 11Q10 — I am poured out/melted AND liquefied in dust and ashes.

Although the MT affords several viable readings, 11Q10 is a good bit less ambiguous. The Aramaic Targum presents the image of dissolving Job’s body much more explicitly, Job is liquefied in dust. In comparison, MT follows this gist in one of its possible readings, something like: “I melt away and achieve the comfort of dust and ashes.” In this important final body description, Job dissolves, liquefies and melts — corporeal/material processes that are part of his overall strategy to slip past YHWH’s inspection.

Conclusion

As I hope I have demonstrated, the book of Job richly engages ancient West Asian/Babylonian medical discourses. To follow my argument, it must be assumed that the body language matters — including materialities of words as in Job’s conversations with his friends and the materialities of divine encounter, as in YHWH’s speeches from the windstorm. I focused on the imagery of Job dissolving his body as an ancient medical metaphor. This image was initially a hopeless metaphor for Job, a transformation into the dust of death and a one-way ticket to the underworld. However, as the figure of Job withstands the wind attacks of his “physician friends” and perhaps summoning medical discourses like those we discussed in Ludlul bēl nēmeqi (The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer), Job comes to understand that dissolving into dust is also a therapeutic discourse. Job strategically prepares his body across his later speeches, preparing to slip past YHWH and escape the investigative gaze of heaven’s court. Indeed, God’s windstorm obscures the divine ability to see the hidden symptoms within Job’s body.

What I hope I have sketched for you today, and what I argue in a fuller version of this thesis, is that the figure of Job is characterized as having expert medical knowledge which he uses to identify a therapeutic and apotropaic loophole in afflictions caused by the “hand of YHWH.” Using therapeutic, diagnostic, and physiognomic knowledge of his own body’s symptoms and disease agents, Job finds a corporeal loophole between God as agent of affliction and God as inspector/judge of bodies. To put it simply, the loophole consists in the material ambiguities and opportunities of the divine windstorm. My brief presentation of variants in Qumran’s Aramaic copy of Job suggests that the medical lens I brought today is not just an accomplishment of modern comparative study, but reflects an ancient value and concern of first millennium scribes who penned copies of the book of Job.

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Scratch Notes:

confessional strategy —

First-person speech about the pain and anxiety of divine affliction does occur in therapeutic incantations. For example, the anti-witchcraft corpus, Maqlû, always includes the first-person complaint about the witch attack and a second person address to the witch. This may be a promising parallel for Job’s accusations that his friends unleash harsh winds and “break me in pieces with words” (19:2).

But Job’s experiential speech may especially be compared with a group of Late Assyrian and Late Babylonian therapeutic texts known as incantations for “appeasing an angry god” (DINGIR. SA. DIB. BA) (Lambert). These incantations open with the question, “what are my iniquities?” They grapple with the anger of a personal god. They include detailed poetic descriptions of suffering in the first person. And they culminate with confessions, although these confessions can vary in type. According to Lambert,

Sometimes he simply confesses his many sins in the hope that confession alone will appease the angry god, as in I 121 ff. especially. …A different approach is offered in II 10 ff. and elsewhere, for here the sufferer denies any consciousness of sins, though granting that they must have happened. …The incantation I 71 ff. is also based on this approach but takes it further by denying that certain specific sins have been committed, though the speaker had been treated as though they had. Presumably the sins specified are intended as examples only, so the implication is that sins to merit the suffering had not taken place. This is in the realm of wisdom literature and the problem of the righteous sufferer” (Lambert, 270).

The three types of confession quoted here are more strategic than sincere: the first uses confession simply to appease anger, the second focalizes the innocence of ignorance, and the third uses confession as a way to defend innocence. Job’s speeches include all three of these types. And when Job speaks his final words to YHWH, he claims both ignorance (42:3-5) and, as I will discuss below, a strategically worded confession (42:6) whose double meanings appease divine anger yet announce Job’s physical maneuver of escape that maintains his innocence and effects his corporeal healing.

On namburbi rituals and medical knowledge

Stefan M. Maul’s important study of nam-búr-bi rituals for releasing catastrophic omens outlined their numerous connections to legal settings. Niek Veildhuis, “On Interpreting Mesopotamian Namburbi Rituals” noted that Maul overemphasized the legal sphere and neglected how often medical concerns were reversed by the rituals (esp. p. 151). He also raised the question of omen-logic, pointing to the if-then phrasing of diagnostic medicine, like the entries in the Diagnostic Handbook. I was interested in Veildhuis’s attention to the hybrid category of omina about human behavior, and especially sexual behavior. I also noted in both Maul and Veildhuis how often Apšu is mentioned as a place to banish the cut thread of evil, and I wondered about the terminology of “thread” given the importance of threads in DH. Arbøll’s recent book, Medicine in Ancient Assur, which studies the personal library of a specific exorcist, discusses namburbi rituals since several appeared in this library. Arbøll recognized the challenges of categorizing omens vs. medical texts — illustrating some examples of hybridity — where medical incantations occur in omen rituals and vise versa (Arbøll, 9). I was also interested in the occurrence of “evil dust” in some of the namburbi rituals printed in his study (p. 312). Then, there are some random notes — ŚU.ÍL.LÁ prayers address gods as judges, like Marduk and his representatives. Amar Annus opens the edited volume of On the Beginnings and Continuities of Omen Sciences in the Ancient World with a discussion of the metaphor of a court of law for omen collections (p. 3), although the issue does not come up again in any of the ANE essays.

Dissolving — scattered references

A ritual incantation against witchcraft begins like diagnostic medicine, but its therapeutic section prescribes an exorcist ritual that describes a man seized by several agents of affliction, like Hand of God, Hand of a ghost, and Hand of man and then proceeds to list disease terms and symptoms, like “he is sick with ague (himittu), he faces rage, anger, and rejection of god …he keeps having depression (“broken heart”), …he talks to himself, gets heated, vacillates…(has) fear at night, …one looks at him with malevolence, he is cursed by many people…” This particular incantation introduces its magical ritual therapy as follows:

“In order to dissolve these (conditions) so that his anxieties not overcome him, and for these sicknesses to be removed from his body, [perform the following rituals] ... (Farber 1977: 56, 64; see Stol 1999: 65)” — as quoted in Geller, 34 (See more in Geller).

A relevant medical omen:

“If, at the time it overcomes him, his limbs are paralyzed, his head spins, his innards are dissolving and whatever has been put into his mouth is, always on that (same) day, discharged through his anus: Hand of a ghost that has died through murder” (DH, Tablet 26 Obv. 17-18) — Scurlock, The Diagnostic Handbook

If the limbs of a man are 'poured out' as in a sick man, [...] the joints of his feet are loose, he speaks but does not have success, his potence has been taken away, his belly is bad, when urinating or spontaneously his semen 'falls' as if he were cohabiting with a woman: that man is not clean, the god and goddess have turned away from him, his speaking finds no acceptance (with people). [Stol, M. 1999. “Psychomatic Suffering in Ancient Mesopotamia,” in Mesopotamian Magic, ed. T. Abusch and K. van der Toorn (Groningen), 57–68.]

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I want to propose promising parallels between first millennium Babylonian therapeutic texts and the poetic dialogues of Job. This will not only help me argue that the character of Job discerns a therapeutic pathway of corporeal escape during his dialogues with Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. But it will also help me sketch a path towards a more ambitious claim that medical discourses about bodies were central projects of ancient sapiential literature.

As a divine agent of affliction, God uses winds and flooding as two of the malevolent forces that attack Job. And as a divine inspector of human flaws, where God acts like a physiognomist reading a body’s fate and an exorcist reading a body’s symptoms for diagnosis and prognosis,

He will require diverse kinds of medical knowledge: the exorcist’s knowledge of symptoms and agencies of affliction, the physician’s knowledge of “natural” bodies and therapies, and the physiognomist’s knowledge of bodily omina and personal fate. By the end of the work in ch. 42, Job successfully effects an apotropaic maneuver that quells God as the etiological agent of his affliction and evades God as the physiognomic inspector/judge of his fate.

Meanwhile, the “scribe’s lying pen” (cf. Jer. 8:8) developed in the friend’s speeches would sentence Job to a textual afterlife that he fears will misrepresent and far outlive him. For now, I will leave aside the second bind for a future essay on the role of inscription in the book.

Southeast Regional AAR — Charleston, 2024

“Dissolving the Sapiential Body: The Medical Discourses of Corporeal Transformation in Ludlul bel nēmeqi and MT Job with Reference to 11QAram Job”

Abstract: This paper focuses on the illness narratives of Šubši-mešre-Šakkan in the Poem of the Righteous Sufferer (Ludlul bēl nēmeqi) and the character of Job in the Masoretic Text of Job and reads them as ancient medical discourses. With reference to Babylonian medical texts and 11QAram Job, I will argue that both Ludlul and Job communicate distinct yet related medical etiologies that dissolve the patient’s body as a pathway to therapy and corporeal transformation. This analysis suggests that medical discourses about case narratives were central projects of ancient sapiential literature. 

Image Credit

Crinoid Fossil. Photograph from the British Geological Survey.