Advice for a Successful Doctor's Visit: King Asa Meets Ben Sira

Abstract

In 2 Chr 16:12b, King Asa is criticized for turning to physicians in his time of sickness. Scholars disagree about the reasons for the Chronicler's disapproval of Asa's behavior. In this essay, I argue that Asa's mistake consisted of turning to physicians alone when he should also have consulted priests and prophets. Support for this reading can be found in Sir 38:1-15, which describes the role of physicians in consideration of priestly and prophetic roles in healing and mediating between humans and God. Careful analysis of Sir 38:1-15 illustrates that physicians are endowed with divine wisdom but cannot represent God directly. Consequently, Asa's ill-fated consultation with the physicians demonstrates that their service should always be combined with prayer and sacrifices.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.