From hyssop and fig to myrrh and balm of Gilead, plants were the pharmacy of the first century.
Theory talked in humors. Practice talked in plants. Pedanius Dioscorides, a Greek army physician writing a generation after Jesus (c. 50–70 AD), listed some six hundred medicinal plants and a thousand preparations. He had studied at Tarsus and travelled as far as Petra. His De Materia Medica is the period’s pharmacy shelf, even when a Galilean household only owned a dozen of those items.
Plants were sorted as hot or cold, wet or dry, so they could be aimed at an imbalance. Under that grid sat older Near Eastern knowledge — Egyptian and Mesopotamian uses of myrrh, garlic, and pomegranate — and the five species the Bible itself treats as medicine: fig, nard, hyssop, balm of Gilead, and mandrake.
The Lord created medicines out of the earth… By them the physician heals and takes away pain; the pharmacist makes a mixture from them.
Explore the remedies
Filter by Scripture, by local versus imported, or by the complaint a first-century healer might name. Open a card for period use and what modern chemistry can fairly say.
28 of 28 remedies
Period uses. Wounds, skin complaints, cough and chest tightness, digestive gripes, and as a costly antidote. Pliny and Dioscorides both praised it.
What we can say now. Modern chemistry finds related Commiphora resins contain anti-inflammatory and mildly antimicrobial compounds. The ancient fame was also political: after 70 AD the groves became imperial Roman revenue.
Jeremiah’s question — “Is there no balm in Gilead?” — already treated the resin as a proverb for healing.