Medicine in the Babylonian Talmud

Zusatztext

Talmudic medicine in Aramaic originating in Babylonia can be traceable back to cuneiform tablets and ancient Babylonian medicine, essentially unaffected by Western medicine.   A general survey of Talmudic medicine finds it to be based upon 'local' Babylonian medicine, rather than medical traditions brought to Babylonia via the curriculum, i.e. the Mishnah and other compendia in Hebrew.    A medical handbook preserved in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Gittin, is organised from head-to-foot, and extensive evidence to support Akkadian influence is to be found in four different tables of parallels between the Gittin medical handbook and similar recipe compendia in Syriac, Mandaic, and Jewish Aramaic, presumably from the same period (roughly third century CE).  All of these related texts show considerable Akkadian influence in their technical terminology (disease and plant names, etc.).  Talmudic technical terminology for medical ingredients in the Babylonian Talmud points to numerous instances of Akkadian cognates, and these are strong indicators of a local medical substratum.   The conclusion is that cuneiform medicine was still accessible until the 4th century CE and fundamentally influenced medicine in the Babylonian Talmud.        

Autorenportrait

Markham Geller, University College London, London, UK.

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