Product Description

The theme of Yahweh as healer is illuminated in this comprehensive biblical study of the Divine Healer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #772290 in Books
• Published on: 1995-09-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 462 pages

From the Back Cover
Israel's Diving Healer is the first complete, systematic treatment of the biblical motif of God as "Divine Healer." It traces the theme of the Divine Healer from the Old to the New Testament, showing the continuity and discontinuity between the Testaments, particularly in Jesus' miracles that reveal God as the world's Divine Healer. Israel's Divine Healer begins with a study of various Hebrew words on healing. It then explores, within the larger context of the Ancient Near Eastern religions, the roles of medicine, magic, and the physician-priest together with their possible influences upon Israel's beliefs and practices regarding healing. Against this background, the remaining chapters examine, from the Torah to the Gospels, how Yahweh progressively revealed himself as Divine Healer to Israel and ultimately, through Jesus, to the whole of humanity.

About the Author
Michael L. Brown, (Ph.D., New York University) is president and professor of practical theology at Fellowship for International Revival and Evangelism School of Ministry. He has also served as adjunct professor of Old Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield and adjunct professor of Jewish apologetics at Fuller Theological Seminary School of World Mission. He has contributed to the Oxford Dictionary of Jewish Religion, and the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Preface

My interest in Israel’s divine Healer is long-standing, both spiritually and academically. The origins of that interest, however, are unique and worth recounting. Raised in a Conservative Jewish home on Long Island, New York, I can only explain my teenage foray into the world of drugs and hard rock music as symptomatic of the times—those turbulent years of the late 60s and early 70s, the years of Woodstock idealism, the so-called Age of Aquarius. For me, a pleasure-seeking youth of just fifteen or sixteen, the rock/drug world was full of allure and temptation, and I plunged into that world with reckless abandon.

Little did I know that by the end of 1971, while still sixteen, I would experience a radical conversion in a small Italian Pentecostal church in Queens, New York. Drawn there with the sole purpose of pulling my two best friends (and fellow band members) out of the church and back to "reality," I was confronted instead with the love of God emanating from a sincere people who simply believed. Their testimony of God’s life-changing power, their acceptance of this young, proud, stubborn rebel, and their eyewitness stories of miracles, healings, and deliverances seemed totally genuine. Soon enough, my resistance melted, faith came alive, and I surrendered. In a moment of time, I was free.

In the present context, there are two key events from those early days that are especially relevant. First, I experienced a sudden and dramatic healing of a bad and persistent case of hives, which had tormented me for days. The remission came in immediate answer to prayer after a frustrating week. Now I was an eyewitness. Second, at the behest of my dear father, I met the local rabbi. Pleased beyond words that I had given up my destructive ways, my father wanted me to "return" to my traditions. Although I did not take the route they had envisioned, the relationship formed with that rabbi has endured for almost twenty-five years, and it was in direct response to his persistent prodding that I began to study Hebrew in college. At that time, I had not the faintest inkling that those studies would lead to serious Semitic scholarship.

But that is only part of the story. Life was not always so simple in my Pentecostal church. Why were many prayers for the sick not answered? Why was it that the more I read and learned, the more I questioned some of our doctrinal distinctives? By 1977, a separation came, and I became active in a church that was theologically and academically much more broad-minded, albeit certainly lacking in terms of those early, miraculous testimonies of which I had by now become skeptical. Then, in 1982–83, I and many others in the congregation experienced a dramatic spiritual renewal, prompting me to reconsider the relevance of what was then my working dissertation topic, "Abbreviated Verbal Idioms in the Hebrew Bible." In the light of eternity, was such a project worth the time and effort?

Along with this was a new problem: People were getting healed again in answer to prayer, but their theology, so far as I could tell, was askew, and their use of Scripture to support their position seemed amiss. The same held true, I thought, in even more pronounced fashion among the leading figures in public healing ministry. How could this be? Was it my view that needed adjustment? Or was God simply honoring honest, trusting hearts in spite of doctrinal error?

I was determined to understand as best I could the biblical views of God as Healer, and as one specializing in Old Testament and Semitics, the study of the Hebrew root rampam’ seemed logical. Thus I began my exegetical and comparative philological study of rampam’, completed as a New York University dissertation in 1985 under the tutelage of Baruch Levine. At the same time, I began to teach on the subject of healing in various popular and academic settings here and abroad, often praying for the sick as well. I can now add further eyewitness accounts of supernatural answers to prayer, along with some difficult stories of suffering, pain, and death, all in connection with seeking to minister to those in need.

In 1990, the idea of turning my rather technical (and not particularly edifying) dissertation into a book began to gel, and, at the request of a potential publisher, in 1991 I drafted a chapter on "Israel’s Divine Healer in the Prophetic Books," greatly expanding and revising relevant portions of my thesis for a theological and biblical audience. It was to the credit of Len Goss at Zondervan Publishing House that the projected volume was deemed suitable for the nascent series, Studies in Old Testament Biblical Theology. The bulk of this present monograph was written from June 1992 to April 1994, with roughly 20 percent of the material drawn from my thesis. That which was used, of course, has been thoroughly reworked, and I am amazed to see just how much I have learned personally through a fresh, wide-ranging encounter with the biblical text. It is liberating to derive one’s theology and beliefs from the Scriptures, without having a prefabricated mold into which every passage and book must be squeezed. The reader can make his or her own judgment as to how faithful I have been to the task of honest interpretation.

When preparing the chapter on the prophetic literature, I regularly used my own translations of the Hebrew text. This has been retained in what is now chapter 4. However, as the project wore on, I felt that, for the most part, my own renderings added little to the argument, hence my primary use of the NIV elsewhere. When appropriate, I have suggested corrections to the NIV, and for comparison, I have made reference in particular to the New Jewish Version, since its overall approach and methodology often vary greatly from "Christian" versions.

Customer Reviews

A brilliant and comprehensive statement of God as Healer
Steeped in Hebrew scholarship and Christian appreciation of healing, Brown challenges much of Old Testament scholarship about the meaning of healing as a word and concept. Yahweh as the source of all healing becomes a prominent theme in the Hebrew Bible, which then turns into a flood of healing in the New Testament.

The Best Book on Divine Healing
Israel's Divine Healer is the most scholarly book that I have ever read on the subject of divine healing from a Pentecostal perspective. Many books that I have read tend to focus on the individual or positive confession but Dr. Brown does neither and focuses rather on building a case that God is indeed a healer based on His revelations to Israel.

Dr. Brown further argues that God is immutable and therefore His promise of healing is the same for today. Dr. Brown's book has thousands of footnotes and is full of Scripture. For those not use to reading a book on divine healing from a theological viewpoint then you will want to skip this book. It is quite technical and deep. However, don't let that scare you. Read this book and be filled with faith that Jesus is a healing God.

God as Restorer
Brown makes it clear that the Old Testament root concept of healing was that of being restored from a broken or unhealthy state. This is a key concept and one that present (and often past) philosophers and theologians have not considered carefully. The mindset today is to contain an illness, to splice new genes into the old (new patches on old cloth?) with the conviction that the new will satisfactorily replace the old. However, there has to be, as Brown notes, restoration to God and ultimately our resurrection bodies will be like Adam and Eve's before sin overtook the world. In one sense restoration is figurative because we can't go back to Adam and Eve, but it is also literal because our "new" bodies will be recognizable when at the resurrection we are restored with God and taken out of a sinful world.