Honor the Physician: The Ancient World's Surprising Theology of Medicine

Most ancient religious literature treats illness as divine punishment and healing as divine prerogative. Doctors, where they appear at all, are figures of suspicion — intermediaries who stand between the sick person and the divine will, possibly interfering with deserved suffering, possibly depending on pagan arts.

Ben Sira is different. His approach to medicine is the most sophisticated in the Hebrew wisdom tradition and anticipates by two thousand years the framework that most religious people today actually operate with.

Honor the physician with the honor due him, for the Lord created him. The opening is blunt and programmatic: the doctor is not a competitor with God but a creation of God. His skill does not undermine divine sovereignty — it is an expression of it. The statement would have been countercultural in Ben Sira's context, in which some Jewish circles (reflecting a broader ancient tendency) viewed physicians with suspicion.

From the Lord, the physician receives wisdom. The physician's skill comes from the Most High, and the king himself honors him. Ben Sira then turns to the pharmacopeia: God created medicines from the earth, and the sensible person will not despise them. A skilled person can use them for healing, and with them the physician and the surgeon treat the patient in order to preserve health. He mixes the medicines, makes a compound treatment, and applies it.

Then the passage makes its subtlest move: it does not separate medicine from prayer. Before you go to the physician, pray. Confess your sins, for it may be that your illness comes from sin. Then present yourself to the physician. Let the physician take his part — for he, too, prays to God for success in diagnosis and treatment, for the relief and healing of the patient.

The two practices are not in competition. They address different dimensions of the same situation: prayer addresses the relationship between the sick person and God; medicine addresses the physical condition that is also God's creation and therefore within God's domain to heal.