Search the Scriptures: A Physician Examines Medicine in the Bible

The human condition in Biblical persons as in ourselves is the subject of Search the Scriptures, and its author, a physician and an endocrinologist, pursues it with ease, with grace, with tenderness.On many questions, Dr. Greenblatt casts the light of the latest scientific medicine. Did Esau sell his birthright cheaply, despising it, as the Scriptures tell us? Could Reuben's mandrakes possibly have promoted Racchel's fertility? Was it Joseph's virtue alone that caused him to flee Potiphar his masters ardent wife, to leave his garment in her hand and "get him out"? Wine, alcohol - do they help or harm men? Are fasting, isolation, circumcision so much religious practices as they are for private and public health? Why are sins"scarlet"? What meanings have seven and fourteen? What of "the little sister" of Solomon's Song, who "hath no breasts"? Of the way of a maid with a man, of healing by faith, of man's aging. of Medicine and the place of the physician in our society? Search the Scriptures, thus links the Bible's very old with today's very new medicine, connects the human mode with the scientific, and invites its readers to read again, freshly, many Biblical passages and to examine anew the modes and values of Biblical times and our own. It moves from the Old to the New testament and back again, from mandrake roots and dreams to penicillins and surgery, and from old to fresh interpretations of Biblical characters we have known - or misknown - from our infancy.