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Understanding Biblical Healing: Selecting the Appropriate Model

As all healing activity follows interpretive models, interpreters of the various healing stories in the Bible should clarify the model that lies behind their interpretion. Cures of people classified as "lepers" in the Bible are considered here using two models: the biomedical or empiricist, and the hermeneutic or cultural. Because the biomedical model depends heavily on modem, scientific understandings of human sickness as disease, it is less helpful in interpreting healing accounts from antiquity. The hermeneutic model, which holds that sickness becomes a human experience and an object of therapeutic attention when it becomes meaningful, is much better suited to analyzing human illness experiences across cultures, such as those portrayed in the Bible. Second Testament accounts of healing "lepers," which show none of the symptoms associated with the disease identified by modem medical science as Hansen's Disease, provide evidence that "lepers" were thought to be a source of pollution, not contagion, and that Jesus' "cure" invariably involved establishing new self-understandings so that those formerly "unclean" and excluded from the holy community now found themselves "clean" and within the holy community.