Arch-Tech: Tummy Trouble in Biblical Jerusalem

Home > Magazines > BAR > Fall 2026

Stomach troubles and the very real symptoms we all experience—diarrhea, vomiting, and abdominal pain—were just as much a part of the biblical world as they are our own. Although our expectation today is that we get better, for pre-modern people, who did not fully understand the causes of diarrhea and didn’t know how to treat it, there was real risk of death, especially for children. Indeed, early Mesopotamian medical texts provide vivid descriptions of such ailments: · If a person eats bread and drinks beer and subsequently his stomach is colicky, he has cramps and has a flowing of the bowels, […]

Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.

Join the BAS Library!

Already a library member? Log in here.

Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username

Footnotes

1. Jane M. Cahill et al., “It Had to Happen: Scientists Examine Remains of Ancient Bathroom,” BAR, May/June 1991.

Endnotes

1. JoAnn Scurlock and Burton R. Andersen, Diagnoses in Assyrian and Babylonian Medicine: Ancient Sources, Translations, and Modern Medical Analyses (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2005), pp. 50, 52.

2. Dafna Langgut, “Mid-7th Century BC Human Parasite Remains from Jerusalem,” International Journal of Paleopathology 36 (2022), pp. 1–6, doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpp.2021.10.005.

3. For a detailed treatment, see Piers D. Mitchell et al., “Giardia duodenalis and Dysentery in Iron Age Jerusalem (7th–6th century BCE),” Parasitology 150 (2023), pp. 693–699, doi.org/10.1017/S0031182023000410.