The Jews indebted to Egypt for their Learning.—The only Ancient People who discarded Demonology.—They had no Magic of their own.—Phylacteries.—Circumcision.—Sanitary Laws.—Diseases in the Bible.—The Essenes.—Surgery in the Talmud.—Alexandrian Philosophy.—Jewish Services to Mediæval Medicine.—The Phœnicians.
That division of the Hebrew peoples which afterwards developed into Israel, left its home in the extreme south of Palestine some fifteen centuries before the Christian era to occupy the pasture lands of Goshen, in the territory of the Pharaohs, where they continued to retain their nomadic habits, their ancient language and patriarchal institutions. In process of time, however, the Egyptian sovereigns began to deal severely with their self-invited guests; they were forced to labour on the public works of Goshen; and though bitterly resenting this attempt to destroy their identity and reduce them to mere slavery, the proud and noble race was powerless to resist, and continued to labour on in despair until a deliverer arose in Moses, who led them out of Egypt to the land of Palestine which they had originally left. Moses was a pupil of the Egyptian priests, versed in all their wisdom, and imbued with the loftiest sentiments of the religion of Egypt. We shall expect to find in the medicine of the Jews abundant traces of their long residence in the land of the Pharaohs. Our sources for the history of the healing art and the theory of disease which obtained with the people of Israel are two—the Bible and the Talmud. Therein we shall see the influences, both external and internal, which made Jewish medicine what it was; and we shall be astonished, on comparing the theory of disease with that of all the other nations and peoples of the earth, to find that it stands by itself, is absolutely unique in its loftiness of idea, its absolute freedom from the absurd and degrading superstitions of the great and civilized nations amongst which they dwelt or by which they were surrounded. When we reflect on the religions of Egypt, Assyria, and Chaldæa, and compare their many gods with the one God of the Jews, their demonology, sorcery, and witchcraft with the pure and elevated faith of these nomads of the Sinaitic Peninsula, and remember that in all the earth at that time there was no other nation which had formulated such a pure theism, no other people which had broken away from the degrading and corrupting demonology which possessed the whole earth, we are compelled to recognise in God’s ancient people the Jews the evidence of a teaching totally unlike anything which had preceded it. If the Bible, the Talmud, and the Koran are all three merely specimens of ancient literature, how comes it that the Bible is so infinitely superior, not only in its noble monotheism, but in its remarkable freedom from so many of the superstitions which, as we have seen, were everywhere intermixed with the noblest religious systems and the most advanced civilizations? Magic in the Bible is everywhere passed by with contempt. Whatever may be the precise date of the Psalms, they must have been written when all nations were sunk in the grossest superstition, and had resort to magical practices on the slightest pretence; yet there is a total absence of all superstition in the Psalms. Granting that the Book of Ecclesiastes is a mere piece of cynical philosophy, it contains no evidence of superstitious belief. The more ancient is a literature, the greater is the certainty that it will contain some reference to superstitious usages; yet how gloriously the oldest books of the Bible shine in their freedom from contamination with the demon-worship and conjuring arts of the nations surrounding the children of Israel.