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Israel's Divine Healer

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Israel's Divine Healer is the most scholarly book that I have ever read on the subject of divine healing from a Pentecostal perspective. Many books that I have read tend to focus on the individual or positive confession but Dr. Brown does neither and focuses rather on building a case that God is indeed a healer based on His revelations to Israel.

Dr. Brown further argues that God is immutable and therefore His promise of healing is the same for today. Dr. Brown's book has thousands of footnotes and is full of Scripture. For those not use to reading a book on divine healing from a theological viewpoint then you will want to skip this book. It is quite technical and deep. However, don't let that scare you. Read this book and be filled with faith that Jesus is a healing God.

Drawning on a depth of learning in Biblical Hebrew, Brown demonstrates how the key Hebrew terms for healing have been systematically and almost universally mistranslated and misunderstood by Biblical scholars and most existing Bibles. From this linguistic evidence, Brown reinterprets Biblical healing in a radical fashion. Absolutely essential for anyone studying healing in the Bible. (Some serious students and scholars may be surprised at the portrait of Jesus on the cover of a book labelled as an "Old Testament" study, but not to worry. Brown is a meticulous scholar. The footnotes alone--more than a hundred pages--are worth the price of the book.)

Steeped in Hebrew scholarship and Christian appreciation of healing, Brown challenges much of Old Testament scholarship about the meaning of healing as a word and concept. Yahweh as the source of all healing becomes a prominent theme in the Hebrew Bible, which then turns into a flood of healing in the New Testament.

I just now finished reading this book. I have been reading it very, very carefully - writing notes from time to time - for close to three months!

From the cultural background of the Hebrew Scriptures to the etymological study of the Hebrew (and Greek) word translated "to heal" (and the convincing suggestion that it should be translated "to restore, make whole") to a rather full study of significant Biblical texts on the subject of healing to the discussion of healing in the NT to his "Conclusion and Reflections", Dr. Brown gives believers the necessary tools to build up faith in God's desire to miraculously heal today like Jesus did and poses a serious challange to those in the Body of Christ who hold to a cessationist view or have a distaste for the teachings, which they may have heard or read, on the subject.

This book is so important, I would suggest a careful reading of end-notes and, even though Dr. Brown suggests in his preface that the "nontechnical reader may want to skip" the sections on the root meanings of the Hebrew word "rapa", I think it is important that the nontechnical (like me) read it anyway; you may not get all of it but you will gain some basic but vital understanding (along with a section that discusses healing deities), that I believe undergirds and is foundational to all else that is said. If you do not get a satisfactory and firm grasp of what he writes in the Introduction and first chapter, I think you will miss the central significance of everything else and fail to achieve a necessary and clear understanding to strenghten any area where your faith may waver concerning God as Healer.

I cannot over emphasize that those in the Church who do not believe God is healing today should read this book. It is a challanging read and his arguments are logical and persuasive. If you are adamant and serious about what you believe, let me suggest that you gather up all your books on the cessationist view and read them alongside Israel's Divine Healer and see where it all takes you.

The book, while technical, is packed with information that even a layman would recognize as hard for any Biblical scholar to effectively refute. If anyone knows of a book that does so, please let me know.

Brown makes it clear that the Old Testament root concept of healing was that of being restored from a broken or unhealthy state. This is a key concept and one that present (and often past) philosophers and theologians have not considered carefully. The mindset today is to contain an illness, to splice new genes into the old (new patches on old cloth?) with the conviction that the new will satisfactorily replace the old. However, there has to be, as Brown notes, restoration to God and ultimately our resurrection bodies will be like Adam and Eve's before sin overtook the world. In one sense restoration is figurative because we can't go back to Adam and Eve, but it is also literal because our "new" bodies will be recognizable when at the resurrection we are restored with God and taken out of a sinful world.