Talmudic medical recipes (6)

Text
In Yebamoth 76a, R. Idy bar Abin (lived ca. 350 CE) supposedly wrote to his older colleague Abaye and asked about treating a perforated penis; the same passage recorded a diagnostic test to see if the perforation diverted the semen. The answer in this case was a recipe for healing the wound, namely to take a barley grain with which one lacerates (or scrapes) the perforation and takes fat and rubs it in. One takes a large (lit. ‘camel-like’) ant and have (the ant) bite it (the perforation), and (the ant’s) head is cut off. A grain of barley is to be used (for lacerating the penis), since iron causes inflammation. This is done only if (the perforation) is small, but if (the perforation) is large, (the bandage) would be peeled off. Although the recipe as it stands has no parallels in Akkadian, there are features worth noting. There are ingredients among the materia medica which could easily have become corrupted in the course of transmission. The use of an ant in recipes is not surprising, since in Akkadian recipes many different types of small animals, such as lizards and scorpions, were ground up and used as materia medica, or parts of their bodies were used. It would not be difficult for late redactors to mistake the use of an ant’s head as part of materia medica to be confused with using the ant more dramatically in this text. It is also clear from the final comments that the wound is to be bandaged, which one expects with perforations of the skin. Finally, the use of a grain of barley as a scalpel is puzzling, as is the comment about avoiding the use of iron, although we know very little about even simple surgical procedures in Mesopotamia.

Source (list of abbreviations) (source links will open in a new browser window)
Babylonian Talmud, Yebamoth 76a

Bibliography

Mark Geller

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