WALTER JACOB
We shall start with the status of healing and the physician within Judaism . They have certainly not been clearly delineated by the religion of Israel in Biblical times. A wide variety of passages indicate that God is the ultimate healer and also the source of disease,"If you will diligently harken to the voice of the Lord your God and will do that which is right in His eyes and will give ear to His commandments, keep all his statues, I will put none of the diseases upon you which I have put upon the Egyptians for I am the Lord who heals you," or a passage from the time of the kings:"In the thirty-ninth year of his reign Asa was diseased in his feet; his disease was exceedingly grave; yet in his disease he sought not the Lord, but the physicians, and Asa left with his fathers and died in the forty-first year of his reign." Jeremiah expresses some doubts:"Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?" Job is not enthusiastic:"Physicians are of no value." These passages may represent two possible theological views. In the first, God controls and human beings have no autonomy. In the second, human beings possess autonomy, but, as Jews , have surrendered much of it through entering a covenant with God .
The Bible has also expressed two different views about healing; Exodus states:"And if men fight and one smite the other with a stone or with his fist and he does not die but stays in his bed, if he rises again and walks abroad upon his staff, then shall he that struck him be quit; only he shall pay for the loss of his time and shall cause him to be thoroughly healed." A physician may have been involved in the healing process here.
In another place we hear of the foreign general Naaman who came to Israel seeking a cure, and he was healed by God . This dual view of God as the healer versus the physician was continued by the post-Biblical books which were excluded from the canon. Ben Sirach
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