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Jesus and charismatic Judaism

‘Today and tomorrow I shall be casting out devils and working cures; on the third day I reach my goal.’¹

According to Luke, Jesus himself defined his essential ministry in terms of exorcism and healing, but even if these words are not Jesus’ own, but the evangelist’s, they reflect the firm and unanimous testimony of the whole Synoptic tradition. His mission as he saw it was to the sick: to the physically, mentally and spiritually diseased, all these illnesses being then considered to go hand in hand, as will be shown presently. He was the healer, the physician par excellence.

‘It is not the healthy that need a doctor, but the sick; I did not come to invite virtuous people, but sinners.’²

In consequence, if his religious personality is to be reconstructed and his affinities with the spiritual trends of his time determined, the three fundamental aspects of his function must be examined in their natural setting. His roles, that is to say, as healer of the physically ill, exorciser of the possessed, and dispenser of forgiveness to sinners, must be seen in the context to which they belong, namely charismatic Judaism. It is not until he is placed within that stream, in the company of other religious personalities with affiliations to diverse movements and groups, that his work and personality can be seen in true perspective and proportion.

The Physician

What is the relationship in biblical and inter-Testamental Judaism between sickness, sin and the devil? Inversely, how is the role of the physician determined? To find the answers to these two questions is the first necessary step towards a proper understanding.

The Bible is almost completely silent on the subject of professional healing. Egyptian physicians, who were renowned as expert embalmers, are explicitly referred to, but their Israelite colleagues receive only obscure and indirect mention: a man convicted of wounding his fellow is ordered to pay compensation for his victim’s loss of earnings and to foot the bill for his medical treatment.³ On the whole, Scripture considers healing as a divine monopoly.⁴ Recourse to the services of a doctor in preference to prayer is held to be evidence of lack of faith, an act of irreligiousness meriting punishment. This attitude is reflected as late as the third century BC in the work of the Chronicler in connection with the grave illness of Asa, king of Judah.

He did not seek the guidance of the Lord but resorted to physicians.⁵

Needless to add, he soon died.

The only human beings empowered to act as God’s delegates were the priests and the prophets. Even so, a priest’s medical competence was limited to the diagnosis of the onset and cure of leprosy and the administration of sundry purificatory rites with medical overtones following childbirth, menstruation and recovery from a venereal disease.⁶ Less institutional but more effective is the part ascribed to certain prophets. Elijah revived the son of a widow,⁷ and Elisha, the son of the Shunemite woman.⁸ Elisha also healed the Syrian Naaman from leprosy, not by waving his hand over the diseased part of the body as the patient expected him to do, but by prescribing a ritual bath in the Jordan.⁹ Isaiah is said to have restored King Hezekiah’s health by means of a fig plaster.¹⁰ In general, it can be asserted that to refer certain matters of health to a priest was a duty; to seek the help of a prophet was an act of religion; and to visit the doctor was an act of impiety.

A compromise allowing the intervention of the professional physician, yet at the same time preserving the religious character of healing, first appeared in Jewish literature at the beginning of the second century BC, when, in a remarkable act of tight-rope walking, the author of Ecclesiasticus, Jesus ben Sira, managed to vest the medical man with respectability.¹¹ The physician’s skill does not, he argues, originate from the regions of darkness; it is a divine gift which confers on him high standing in society and secures the respect of kings and noblemen. The medicinal quality of substances is not obtained by magical means; they have been created as such and their use by the doctor is for God’s glory.

The Lord has imparted knowledge to men, that by their use of his marvels he may win praise; by using them the doctor relieves pain.¹²

The procedure thought irreproachable by the Jerusalem sage, the one which he advises every devout man to adopt when sick, is to pray to God, to repent from sin, to resolve to amend his ways, and to offer gifts and sacrifices in the Temple. Having thus proved his genuine religious disposition, he could then call in the doctor, as though taking out an extra insurance policy:

There may come a time when your recovery is in their hands.¹³

The physician in turn is also to start with a prayer that God may enable him to diagnose the sickness correctly, alleviate the pain and save the patient’s life.

In Ben Sira’s clever synthesis the theological link between sickness and sin is maintained, and the cause of the disease as well as the means to cure it are discovered through a God-given insight, a kind of revelation. The corollary of such a concept, even though not expressly stated, is that a man’s healing powers are measured, first and foremost, by his proximity to God, and only secondarily by the expertise acquired from study of the divinely ordained curative qualities of plants and herbs. Professional knowledge is an additional asset to the healer’s essential requisite, holiness.

Devils and Angels

In the world of Jesus, the devil was believed to be at the basis of sickness as well as sin. The idea that demons were responsible for all moral and physical evil had penetrated deeply into Jewish religious thought in the period following the Babylonian exile, no doubt as a result of Iranian influence on Judaism in the fifth and fourth centuries BC when Palestine as well as Jews from the eastern Diaspora were subject to direct Persian rule.

The apocryphal book of Tobit is among the first to testify to the new idea. According to this work, a jealous evil spirit possessed Sarah and killed all seven of her previous husbands, always on their wedding night. The young Tobias, following the advice given him by the angel Raphael, rendered this demon harmless and expelled it by burning the liver and the heart of a fish on smoking incense.¹⁴

The smell from the fish held the demon off, and he took flight into Upper Egypt; and Raphael instantly followed him there and bound him hand and foot.¹⁵

The author of the Ethiopic Book of Enoch depicts the same Raphael as the healing angel to whom God entrusted the reparation of the damage caused on earth by the fallen angels, the teachers of sorcery and harmful magic.¹⁶

‘Bind Azazel hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness . . . On the day of the great judgement he shall be cast into the fire. And heal the earth which the angels have corrupted, and proclaim the healing of the earth, that they may heal the plague, and that all the children of men may not perish through all the secret things that the watchers have disclosed and have taught their sons . . . The whole earth has been corrupted through the works that were taught by Azazel; to him ascribe all sin.’¹⁷

From then on the concept established itself in inter-Testamental Judaism that the proper use of the science of the angels was the most efficacious method of achieving mastery over demons. This was an art reserved to initiates because since time immemorial the arcane formulae on which it was based were concealed in esoterical books available and intelligible only to the chosen few. Noah and Solomon are said to be the principal repositories of these secrets. When the sons of Noah were led astray, blinded, and struck by devils, he prayed God that angels might come and imprison them; but Mastema, the leader of the forces of darkness, successfully appealed to the Creator for clemency, i.e. the deliverance of one tenth of his captured followers. Then the angels, as one of them remarks, were commanded by the Lord:

that we should teach Noah all the medicines . . . We explained to Noah all the medicines of their diseases, together with their seductions, how he might heal them with herbs of the earth. And Noah wrote down all things in a book as we instructed him concerning every kind of medicine. . . . And he gave all that he had written to Shem, his eldest son.¹⁸

Josephus’s portrait of Solomon is most instructive. As a Hellenistic historian, he describes the Israelite king as a model seeker of wisdom, but accompanies this approach with the more popular ideas of a Palestinian Jew.

There was no form of nature with which he was not acquainted or which he passed over without examining, but he studied them all philosophically and revealed the most complete knowledge of their several properties. And God granted him knowledge of the art used against demons for the benefit and healing of men. He also composed incantations by which illnesses are relieved, and left behind forms of exorcisms with which those possessed by demons drive them out, never to return.¹⁹

In New Testament times the Essenes occupied the leading position among the heirs of the esoterical tradition. Josephus points out that one of their chief characteristics was an ‘extraordinary interest’ in reading the books handed down by the great men of past generations.

They . . . single out in particular those which make for the welfare of soul and body; with the help of these, and with a view to the treatment of diseases, they make investigations into medicinal roots and the properties of stones.²⁰

If my interpretation, Essenes = healers, is correct,²¹ outsiders were so impressed by their activities, which, like those of the Therapeutae – a cognate religious community in Egypt – were devoted to curing the spirit and the body,²² that they regularly and familiarly referred to them as ‘Healers’.

Exorcism

Josephus does not enter into the Essene rite of exorcism but it is unlikely to have differed very greatly from the ‘manner of the cure’ adopted by a certain Eleazar – sometimes surmised to have been a member of the sect – when he expelled demons in the presence of Vespasian and his sons, tribunes and soldiers.

He put to the nose of the possessed man a ring which had under its seal one of the roots prescribed by Solomon, and then, as the man smelled it, drew out the demon through his nostrils, and, when the man at once fell down, adjured the demon never to come back into him, speaking Solomon’s name and reciting the incantations which he had composed.²³

From the same account of Eleazar it appears, furthermore, that the professional healer-exorcist was concerned to provide concrete proof that the evil spirit had departed.

Eleazar placed a cup or foot-basin full of water a little way off and commanded the demon, as it went out of the man, to overturn it and make known to the spectators that he had left the man.²⁴

Since public exorcism was performed with the help of an incantation believed to have been revealed and handed over to saints in distant centuries, the naming of the ultimate authority appears to have been part and parcel of the ritual. In the Josephus story, Solomon is quoted. In the Gospels, Jesus asks in whose name the Pharisee exorcists operate.²⁵ He himself was accused, no doubt because he never invoked any human source, of acting in the name of Beelzebub, the prince of demons.²⁶ His disciples, and even one of their unaffiliated imitators, drove out spirits in their master’s name.²⁷

Contemporary sources also suggest that the exorcist’s success was believed to depend on a literal and precise observance of all the prescribed rules and regulations; the correct substances were to be employed possessing the right supernatural properties and the appropriate conjurations uttered. This quasi-magical slant to professional exorcism gave rise, despite its common occurrence in inter-Testamental Judaism, to a certain measure of rabbinical embarrassment, but it was never directly outlawed, perhaps partly because it had become too integral a component of life, and partly because its condemnation would have reflected unfavourably on certain ritual customs enjoined by the Bible itself. In fact the acceptability of the peculiar ceremony of the red heifer²⁸ is argued from the efficacy of formal exorcism! The anecdote is worth reproducing in full as it helps to place the whole problem of the expulsion of demons in perspective.

A Gentile said to Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai: Certain things you (Jews) do resemble some kind of sorcery. A heifer is brought, it is killed and burned. It is pounded into ashes which are collected. If then one of you is defiled through contact with a corpse, he is sprinkled twice or three times and is told: You are clean.

Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai replied: Has the spirit of madness ever entered you? No, answered the other. Have you seen a person into whom such a spirit has entered? Yes. What does one do to him? he asked. The Gentile answered: Roots are brought and made to smoke under him, and water is splashed on him, and the spirit flees. Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai said: Do your ears not hear what your mouth is saying? This spirit (of madness) is also a spirit of uncleanness; as Scripture says, ‘I will cause the (mad) prophets of the spirit of uncleanness to pass out of the land’ (Zech. 13: 2 (AT)).²⁹

The Gentile may, as the pupils of Yohanan commented, have been ‘knocked down with a straw’, but they themselves were more demanding, and on being pressed by them Yohanan eventually became aware of the speciousness of his argument. A ritual such as that of the red heifer, he confessed, admits of no rational explanation. It is observed simply because God so commanded.

By your life! No dead body defiles and no water cleanses, but this is an ordinance of the King of kings.³⁰

The Holy Man

Was Jesus a professional exorcist of this sort? He is said to have cast out many devils, but no rite is mentioned in connection with these achievements. In fact, compared with the esotericism of other methods, his own, as depicted in the Gospels, is simplicity itself.³¹ Even in regard to healing, the closest he came to the Noachic, Solomonic and Essene type of cure was when he touched the sick with his own saliva, a substance generally thought to be medicinal.³²

On the other hand, Jesus cannot be represented as an exorcist-healer sui generis either, since, in addition to the practice of the angelico-mystical medicine, contemporary Jewish thought reserved a place in the fight against evil for the spontaneous and unscripted activity of the holy man. The pattern set by the miracle-working prophets Elijah and Elisha was first of all applied by post-biblical tradition to other saints of the scriptural past; they, too, were credited with powers of healing and exorcism deriving not from incantations and drugs or the observance of elaborate rubrics, but solely from speech and touch.

Following the biblical chronology, the first hero to be portrayed as a healer is Abraham in the Qumran Genesis Apocryphon. The Old Testament itself provides no real precedent.³³ The patient was the king of Egypt and the illness with which he was afflicted after the abduction of Sarah is attributed, as might be expected, to the intervention of an ‘evil spirit’ sent to scourge him and all the male members of his household and thereby protect Sarah’s virtue. The trouble continued for two full years and no Egyptian physician was able to overcome it.

Not one healer or magician or sage could stay to cure him, for the spirit scourged them all and they fled.

Finally Abraham himself was called in to expel the demon, as is recounted in the following autobiographical narrative.

I prayed . . . and laid my hands on his [head]; and the scourge departed from him and the evil [spirit] was rebuked away [from him], and he recovered.³⁴

This combination of prayer, the laying on of hands, and words of rebuke compelling the devil to depart, deserves particular attention because it provides a striking parallel to Jesus’ style of cure and exorcism.³⁵ There is, however, a noticeable though inessential difference between the Qumran concept and that appearing in the Gospels. In the Genesis Apocryphon exorcism and healing form one process; in the New Testament they are kept separate and each is handled in its own way. Sickness is cured through bodily contact, the laying on of hands;³⁶ the devil is expelled by means of a rebuke.³⁷ An illuminating parallel to such a form of exorcism is found in rabbinic literature. Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai and Rabbi Eleazar ben Yose are reported to have exorcised the emperor’s daughter by ordering her demon, with whom they were personally acquainted, to leave.

Ben Temalion, get out! Ben Temalion, get out!³⁸

Moses, although represented in the Bible as a miracle-worker, is never depicted there as a healer. Yet, as early as the second century BC, the Jewish Hellenist Artapanus, whose history of the Jews survives only in fragments incorporated into Patristic literature, tells the story of a supernatural cure achieved by him. Finding the gate of the prison into which Pharaoh had thrown him opened by a heavenly hand,³⁹ he walked straight into the royal bedchamber and awoke the king. Pharaoh was intrigued by this unexpected visit, and angry – no doubt because Moses had disturbed his sleep – and enquired the name of the God of Israel so that he could curse him. When the Tetragram was murmured into his ears he collapsed lifeless. But Moses, anticipating the act of Jesus in raising the daughter of Jairus,⁴⁰ lifted him up and revived him.⁴¹

David, whose musical performance is said to have calmed the evil spirit of King Saul,⁴² is the only scriptural hero described as a kind of exorcist. The first-century AD author, Pseudo-Philo, portrays him in accordance with tradition as a harp-player and singer, but also reproduces in his Book of Biblical Antiquities a poem allegedly composed by David to keep the devil under control.⁴³

The poetic exorcism, which opens with a sketch of the work of the Creation, reminds the devil of the inferior status of ‘the tribe of your spirits’ and that the infernal world would one day be destroyed by a descendant of David. The poet then issues two commands:

Now cease molesting, since you are a secondary creature!⁴⁴

Remember hell in which you walk!⁴⁵

Another biblical figure posthumously invested with curative gifts is Daniel, according to a very important, but unfortunately badly damaged, fragment from Qumran Cave 4 known as the ‘Prayer of Nabonidus’.⁴⁶ Although the name Daniel does not appear in the surviving parts of the document, it cannot be in doubt. The composition is inspired by the story of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4.⁴⁷ The most crucial section reads:

I was afflicted with an evil ulcer for seven years . . . and a gazer pardoned my sins. He was a Jew from among the [children of Judah and he said:] ‘Recount this in writing to [glorify and exalt] the name of the [Most High God].’

The Aramaic word gazer applied here to the Jew who healed the king and forgave his sins appears four times in the Book of Daniel,⁴⁸ where, as it is usually linked to nouns designating magicians and astrologers, it is habitually rendered in the pejorative sense of ‘soothsayer’ or ‘diviner’. In the Qumran text such an imputation is definitely not attached to it. Gazer signifies in this work, if A. Dupont-Sommer’s suggestion is accepted, an exorcist.⁴⁹ Moreover, because the root from which the term derives means ‘to decree’, a gazer is one who exorcises by decreeing the expulsion of the devil. In a story to be considered presently, the same verb is employed in a command addressed by Hanina ben Dosa to the queen of the demons.⁵⁰

It is worth noting that although the devil, sin and sickness are logically combined in the Qumran picture, the story is told elliptically. The narrator mentions the king’s illness without referring to its cause; and the exorcist is credited, not with the expulsion of a demon, but with the remission of the sufferer’s sins. The three elements were so closely associated that it was natural to jump from the first to the third without recording the intermediary stage: an exorcist pardoned my sins and I recovered from my sickness.

This fragment which has so luckily survived is particularly valuable in that it sheds fresh light on the controversial Gospel episode of the healing of the paralytic.⁵¹ Considered side by side with the Nabonidus story, there is nothing outstandingly novel or unique in the words of Jesus, ‘My son, your sins are forgiven.’ The scribes think that they are blasphemous, but for Jesus – as for the author of the Qumran fragment – the phrase ‘to forgive sins’ was synonymous with ‘to heal’, and he clearly used it in that sense.

‘But that you may know that the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins’ – he said to the paralytic – ‘I say to you, rise, take your pallet and go home’ (RSV).

By comparison with the style of the Qumran text, ‘he pardoned my sins’, the Gospel use of the passive form, ‘your sins are forgiven’, strikes a more cautious note. The words are not disrespectful of God, nor do they imply that the speaker claimed for himself divine status. The main reason for the scandal of the scribes must have been that their legal language was very different from that of Jesus. But however this may have been, rabbis of the second and third century AD were still voicing the opinion that no one could recover from illness until all his sins were remitted.⁵²

Jewish Charismatics

The representation of Jesus in the Gospels as a man whose supernatural abilities derived, not from secret powers, but from immediate contact with God, proves him to be a genuine charismatic, the true heir of an age-old prophetic religious line. But can other contemporary figures be defined in the same way?

The answer is yes. Furthermore, far from digressing from the main theme of the present enquiry, it is very pertinent to a search for the real Jesus to study these other men of God and the part they played in Palestinian religious life during the final period of the Second Temple era.⁵³

1. Honi

One of the prime characteristics of the ancient Hasidim or Devout is that their prayer was believed to be all-powerful, capable of performing miracles. The best known of these charismatics, though perhaps not the most important from the point of view of New Testament study, is a first-century BC saint, called Honi the Circle-Drawer by the rabbis, and Onias the Righteous by Josephus.⁵⁴

To understand the figure of Honi it is necessary to remember that from the time of the prophet Elijah⁵⁵ Jews believed that holy men were able to exert their will on natural phenomena. Thus, in addition to offering formal, liturgical prayers for rain, in times of drought people urged persons reputed to be miracle-workers to exercise their infallible intervention on behalf of the community. Such a request for relief from their misery is reported to have been addressed to Honi some time before the fall of Jerusalem to Pompey in 63 BC.

Once they said to Honi the Circle-Drawer: ‘Pray that it may rain.’. . . He prayed but it did not rain. Then what did he do? He drew a circle, and stood in it, and said before God: ‘Lord of the world, thy children have turned to me because I am as a son of the house before thee. I swear by thy great name that I will not move hence until thou be merciful towards thy children.’ It then began to drizzle. ‘I have not asked for this’, he said, ‘but for rain to fill cisterns, pits and rock-cavities.’ There came a cloud-burst. ‘I have not asked for this, but for a rain of grace, blessing and gift.’ It then rained normally.⁵⁶

It is easy to misjudge the curious attitude revealed by Honi in this episode. His behaviour towards God appears impertinent; indeed, as will be seen, it was frowned on by the authorities of his own day as well as by subsequent orthodoxy. Nevertheless, in the last resort even his rabbinic critics likened the relationship between the saint and God to that of a tiresome and spoiled child with his loving and long-suffering father. The leading Pharisee of Honi’s time, Simeon ben Shetah, is said to have declared:

‘What can I do with you, since even though you importune God, he does what you wish in the same way that a father does whatever his importuning son asks him?’⁵⁷

Josephus’s Onias is rather different. This is an admirable and heroic character, whose saintly detachment aroused the anger of political partisans just before Rome first intervened in the affairs of Judea at the time of the conflict between the two sons of Alexander Janneus, Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II. As in the rabbinic story, the supernaturally efficacious nature of Honi’s intercession is once more accepted as a matter of course.

There was a certain Onias, who, being a righteous man and dear to God, had once in a rainless period prayed to God to end the drought, and God had heard his prayer and sent rain.

Although he had gone into hiding, he was sought out by the men of Hyrcanus who wished him to ‘place a curse on Aristobulus’ which they believed would be as effective as his prayer for rain.

When in spite of his refusals and excuses he was forced to speak by the mob, he stood up in their midst and said: ‘O God, king of the universe, since these men standing beside me are thy people, and those who are besieged are thy priests, I beseech thee not to hearken to them against these men nor to bring to pass what these men ask thee to do to those others.’

Incensed by such neutrality, ‘the villains among the Jews’ stoned him to death.⁵⁸

The shift from the almost openly critical presentation of Honi in the Mishnah to the fully sympathetic portrayal in Josephus for the benefit of a Hellenistic audience is worthy of remark. Compare in particular the rather sinister Hebrew epithet, ‘Circle-Drawer’, with the Greek, ‘righteous man and dear to God’. On the other hand, despite the unfriendly mainstream of rabbinic thought concerning Honi, it would be incorrect to characterize Josephus’s point of view as representing Hellenistic Judaism and contrast it with that of Talmudic literature. In effect, fragments exist showing a less antipathetic attitude. For example, Simeon ben Shetah declares that a word of the Bible, Proverbs 23: 23, found its fulfilment in Honi.⁵⁹ Again, an anonymous comment on Job 22: 28, described as a message from the members of the Sanhedrin to Honi and assigned to the first or second century AD, reads:

Whatever you command will come to pass: You have commanded on earth, and God has fulfilled your word in heaven.

And light will shine on your path: You have enlightened by your prayer the generation which was in darkness.⁶⁰

Even more pregnant is another anonymous saying from the Midrash Rabbah:

No man has existed comparable to Elijah and Honi the Circle-Drawer, causing mankind to serve God.⁶¹

The sources contain no further information concerning Honi. It is known that he was active in Jerusalem before being killed there, but since both the Mishnah and Josephus date the event close to the feast of Passover, he may as easily have been a pilgrim to the holy city as a citizen of the capital. Two of his grandsons, Hanan, his daughter’s son, and Abba Hilkiah, his son’s son, were also renowned for their powers as rain-makers.⁶² From the viewpoint of geographical connections it is of interest to note that in a parallel text Abba Hilkiah, instead of being mentioned by name, is referred to as ‘a Hasid from Kefar Imi’, a village otherwise unknown but appearing in a Galilean context in the passage in question of the Palestinian Talmud.⁶³

2. Hanina ben Dosa

The Galilean connections of his descendants, and even more those of Honi himself, remain purely conjectural. Nevertheless the hypothesis associating charismatic Judaism with Galilee acquires further support in the incontestably Galilean background of Hanina ben Dosa, one of the most important figures for the understanding of the charismatic stream in the first century AD.⁶⁴ In a minor key, he offers remarkable similarities with Jesus, so much so that it is curious, to say the least, that traditions relating to him have been so little utilized in New Testament scholarship.⁶⁵

Who then was Hanina ben Dosa? Rabbinic sources report that he lived in Arab, a Galilean city in the district of Sepphoris.⁶⁶ Situated about ten miles north of Nazareth, the town, as has been noted, had for its religious leader some time in the first century AD, though definitely before the outbreak of the First War, a figure of no less eminence than Yohanan ben Zakkai. Hanina is once described as his pupil.⁶⁷ His family background is undocumented, but it would be a mistake to attach much importance to the Greek name of his father; Dosa ( = Dositheus) was not unheard of even among rabbis and to carry this name was not tantamount to favouring Hellenistic ideas.

That Hanina lived in the first century AD may be deduced indirectly but convincingly from the fact that the Talmudic sources associate him with three historical figures who definitely belonged to that period: Nehuniah, a Temple official, Rabban Gamaliel and Yohanan ben Zakkai.⁶⁸ If, as is likely, the Gamaliel in question was Gamaliel the Elder, a man claimed by the Apostle Paul to have been his master,⁶⁹ and not Gamaliel II, the former’s grandson, Hanina’s activity would appear to have fallen in the period preceding the year of AD 70. In support of this view, it should be underlined that he is nowhere connected with any event occurring after the destruction of Jerusalem.⁷⁰

Setting aside various secondary accretions according to which he was a wholesale wonder-worker, the primary rabbinic tradition represents Hanina as a man of extraordinary devotion and miraculous healing talents.

His name first appears in a chapter of the Mishnah where the early Hasid is depicted as spending a full hour on directing his heart towards his Father in heaven before starting his prayer proper, his rule of concentration being:

Though the king salute him, he shall not return his greeting. Though a snake wind itself around his ankle, he shall not interrupt his prayer.⁷¹

An episode in Hanina’s life is chosen to illustrate this injunction.

When Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa prayed, a poisonous reptile⁷² bit him, but he did not interrupt his prayer. They (the onlookers) departed and found the same ‘snake’ dead at the opening of its hole. ‘Woe to the man’, they exclaimed, ‘bitten by a snake, but woe to the snake which has bitten Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa.’⁷³