1 Rȗaḥ Embodied: Job’s Internal Disease from the Perspective of Mesopotamian Medicine 1 Ingrid E. Lilly Ancient Israelite medical discourse was, as far as we know, particularly interested in skin disease. Leviticus 12-15 provides priests with a manual for analyzing skin infections, eruptions, and other bodily discharges. Israelite narratives about illness focus on victims with skin disease. 2 Indeed, in the most famous Israelite medical case, Job’s illness begins with sores that cover the skin of his whole body. The data available suggests that the boundary of the body was of particular interest to Israelite writers. Skin is one kind of bodily border. Mainstream medicine in the West assumes the body is a bounded entity with skin or other surfaces marking the borders of relevant diagnostic anatomy. Western doctors typically diagnose with invasive procedures or probes. However, the skin remains the relevant boundary defining the medical subject. Embodiment, however, is not so straightforward. Boundaries of bodies are frequently expressed in the language of fluidity, porousness, connectivity, or contingency. Priestly literature is concerned not only with surfaces but also with entrances and exits. The fluidity of embodiment leads to legal material governing boundaries and border-crossings like the ingestion of food and the discharge of puss, semen, menses, or afterbirth. 3 Other examples can further illustrate culturally diverse ways to conceptualize embodiment. Today, we today might say that a person has a conscience in the language of philosophy. However such properties of personhood are frequently conceived physically. For example, as Dale Martin suggests of Paul in The Corinthian Body, syneidēsis (or conscience) is a fluid property in the body, meted and made through physical contingency, especially in relation to pollution. Likewise, several cultures conceptualize bodily 1 Final draft to be published in Borders: Terms, Ideologies, Performances. Edited by Annette Weissenrieder. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016. 2 Miriam in Num 12 and Naaman in 2 Kgs 5. 3 See Howard Eilberg-Schwartz who discusses skin and bodily discharge in Leviticus as a system of “government of the body” in H. Eilberg-Schwartz, “The Problem of the Body for the People of the Book,” in Reading Bibles, Writing Bodies: Identity and the Book ( T.K. Beal and D. Gunn, eds.; New York: Routledge, 1996), 34–55, esp. 36–38. One can return also to the seminal though not unproblematic view of the wholeness and integrity of the Israelite body in Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 1966), esp. 51–52.