Medicine in the Biblical Background and Other Essays on the Origins of Hebrew

La medicina nell'ambiente della Bibbia. Studio di Robert North. La scoperta piu importante dell'autore e il fatto che non esiste una parola per cervello nella Bibbia, e il termine generalmente reso come cuore indica piuttosto gli organi interni incaricati della cognizione e del controllo, vagamente collocati nella zona dello stomaco. The author, in view of the coverage of Medicine in his annual bibliography (Elenchus of Biblica 1980-95), was invited to this survey at a Madrid-AIcala summer institute. It is here updated from a 612 item bibliography. Its most notable discovery is that there is no word for brain in the Bible, and the very frequent term generally rendered heart means rather internal organs of cognition and control, largely the functions of the brain, though located vaguely in the stomach-area. The author was then led by the absence of words like brain and (real) heart, also lung, comb, spoon, to a further critical survey of six entirely different approaches to the audacious question, Was biblical Hebrew a language? - all concluding that it was never a used language, but was a scriba) combination of elements from languages really used in the environs. In this it wouid have resembied the Esperanto of many centuries later, except in being probably intended to make less rather than more accessible the contente for which it would have been used. More recently it has been proposed that Ezra's promulgating of his Torah was a maneuvre of Persian overlordship. At any rate the intense scribal activity of this period remains the likeliest background for a Bible-language innovation. But silence about Ezra in Sirach 49,13 leaves open also the period after 130 b.c., at least for insertion of the later books.