There were two starting points for this project. The first was the Archaeology and the World of the New Testament seminar at Harvard Divinity School. I was assigned the site of Epidauros and I spent the semester researching the cult of the healing god Asklepios in preparation to lead the group’s tour at Epidauros, sight unseen. This was my first trip to Greece, and while there I quickly found myself drawn to the similarities between votive offerings dedicated by grateful visitors at ancient Asklepieia and the tamata that continue to be strung up in front of icons in Orthodox churches across Greece. Tamata are small metal plaques embossed with a stylized representation of a body part or a person. Comparisons between these votive offerings in contexts separated by more than two thousand years sparked my interest in how the search for divine cures can transcend time and place.

A second origin story for this book was my introduction to the study of ancient “magic” at the University of Chicago. Through coursework with Chris Faraone and David Martinez, who would become my advisor and a member of my dissertation committee respectively, I learned about the range of practices that scholars label “magic,” including the Greek Magical Papyri and ancient gemstones. Given my prior interest in the cult of Asklepios, it was perhaps no surprise that I was particularly drawn to forms of “magic” associated with healing and protection. When it came time to prepare my dissertation proposal, I wanted to find a way to bring evidence from the cult of Asklepios into dialogue with that from healing “magic,” but I became increasingly disappointed by scholarly conventions that resulted in these two interests rarely being examined alongside each other. I knew that, in part, this reflected the chronological and geographic limitations of our evidence. My thinking shifted when I ran across an article by S. Vernon McCasland (1939a), who in just a few short pages laid out the evidence for a range of ritual healing options in Roman Palestine, including amulets, exorcisms, the hot springs, and the Pool of Bethesda. With this, the pieces fell into place. My focus narrowed to Palestine, the region that first sparked my interest in the ancient world and where I had my first exposure to archaeology, digging at Tel Kedesh with Andrea Berlin.