Concepts of Disease in Traditions of (Late) Antiquity, panel at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the European Association of Biblical Studies, Leuven, July 17–20, 2016

The new EABS research unit Medicine in Bible and Talmud invites paper proposals on the theme of the Concepts of Disease in Traditions of (Late) Antiquity, extending from biblical and apocryphal texts into later Jewish-rabbinic and early Christian traditions, to be presented at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the European Association of Biblical Studies. The panel organisers are especially interested in presentations on rabbinic-talmudic traditions against the foil of their literary and socio-cultural background(s). However, also discussions of earlier discourses in the Bible and the post-biblical (Second Temple) literature as well as of those medical traditions in later medieval are most welcome, as far as they relate to the transfer of knowledge on different paths.

The panel organisers aim to offer a comparative perspective by keeping an eye on the embeddedness of such medical discourses on illness and disease in their surrounding cultures. This contextualization starts with ancient Babylonian and other Near Eastern cultures and their highly developed medical systems. However, also the impact of Greco-Roman medical theory and practice and Early Christian approaches as well as later Byzantine, Syriac and early Muslim-Arabic appropriations and inventions should be considered. Such a perspective will allow for assessing Talmudic medical ideas of disease within a broader history of medicine and to determine their particular Jewishness. Furthermore, the synchronic and diachronic structure of the panel is intended to highlight various processes of transmission, transfer, rejection, modification and invention of the issues under discussion. While addressing the interaction between various medical discourses, papers may consider different strategies (borrowing/ camouflage/ negation etc.) which may relate to questions of the transcultural history of science(s) and knowledge in (Late) Antiquity.

Possible topics (not meant exclusively) might be:

• Biblical medicine and illness: sacred fiction or factual practices?
• Which disease concepts can be found in the so-called scientific literature in the Second Temple period (Apocrypha, Apocalyptic texts like Enoch etc., Qumran).
• Ancient Babylonian and other Near Eastern ideas about illness and their permutations in biblical and rabbinic medical traditions.
• Talmudic medicine and approaches to illness in their Greco-Roman and Iranian-Persian contexts.
• The figure of the healer and his role regarding different diseases in Jewish and neighboring traditions.
• The distinction between physical and mental illness and/ or impairment in biblical, later Jewish, and Talmudic discourse within the context of their varying cultural contexts, with a special regard to ideas of mental illness and possession in early Christian (NT/ patristic and monastic literature) and Byzantine traditions.
• How did theories or concepts of disease affect more practical approaches to the patient in the periods under discussion?