preoccupations and expectations 207
Once the son of R. Gamaliel fell ill. He sent two scholars to R. Hanina b.
Dosa to ask him to pray for him. When he saw them he went up to an
upper chamber and prayed for him. When he came down he said to them:
‘Go, the fever has left him.’ They said to him: ‘Are you a prophet?’ He
replied: ‘I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I learnt this
from experience. If my prayer is fluent in my mouth, I know that he is
accepted: but if not, I know that he is rejected.’ They sat down and made
a note of the exact moment. When they came to R. Gamaliel, he said to
them: ‘By the temple service! You have not been a moment too soon or too
late, but so it happened: at that very moment the fever left him and he
asked for water to drink.’
Opposition to magic remained frequent and vehement. One story
attributes the cause of Israel’s slavery at the hands of the Midianites in
biblical times to the belief of the people of Israel in the Midianite magi-
cian Aod (who ‘worked with his magic tricks ... and the people of Israel
were deceived ... And God said “I will deliver them into the hands of
the Midianites, because they have been deceived by them” ’). But the
lines between legitimate prayer and magic, and between medicine and
magic, were thin, and Josephus traced back to Solomon the healing
incantations which still exorcised demons in his day:
God also enabled him to learn the technique against demons for the bene-
fit and healing of humans. He composed incantations by which illnesses
are relieved, and left behind exorcistic practices with which those binding
demons expel them so that they return no more. And this same form of
healing remains quite strong among us until today. For I became acquainted
with a certain Eleazar of my own people, who in the presence of Vespasian
and his sons, along with their tribunes and a crowd of soldiers, delivered
those possessed by demons.The New Testament describes many such exorcisms both by Jesus and
by others, although some such healing is recounted with approval, some
with scorn:
God did extraordinary miracles through Paul, so that when the hand-
kerchiefs or aprons that had touched his skin were brought to the sick, their
diseases left them, and the evil spirits came out of them. Then some itiner-
ant Jewish exorcists tried to use the name of the Lord Jesus over those who
had evil spirits, saying, ‘I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims.’
Seven sons of a Jewish high priest named Sceva were doing this. But the
evil spirit said to them in reply, ‘Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who