Let’s address the elephant in the room: the challenge of trying to diagnose historical figures (especially quasi-legendary ones from sacred texts) with modern mental health categories. This practice, sometimes called retrospective or historical diagnosis, is fraught with pitfalls. And beyond that, there’s the issue of how ancient and modern understandings of mental health differ so profoundly that it’s like comparing apples to asteroids. Here are some key challenges and considerations:
Sparse and Biased Data: What we know about Elijah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel comes from texts that they (or their disciples) largely wrote or at least curated. These are not candid videotapes of their daily behavior; they are literary, theological documents. As one scholar notes, “their written records, even if of an originally visionary or ecstatic experience, must reflect processes of subsequent recollection and reflection… distinguishable from the original experience itself”
In plain terms, by the time we read Ezekiel’s account of a vision, it’s gone through Ezekiel’s own editing and perhaps others’. The raw experience might have been more chaotic or different. We see the end product. Therefore, trying to diagnose based on the text is like diagnosing a patient based on a memoir they wrote years later – a memoir with a religious agenda at that. The impossibility of knowing the exact experience is a huge obstacle. We only know what the prophets chose to describe (or what was preserved). Perhaps they had other mundane or problematic behaviors not recorded because they weren’t relevant to the message. Or perhaps the scribes who passed down these stories already filtered out anything that made the prophet look truly bad or unreliable. So we have incomplete information, and any diagnosis is built on a partial narrative.
Literary Style vs. Literal Symptoms: Prophetic books are often poetic. Jeremiah might write hyperbolically “Every bone in my body trembles” (Jer 23:9) – was that literal or figurative for extreme emotion? If literal, one might say he had a seizure or tremor; if figurative, it’s just colorful language. We have to be careful not to over-literalize ancient expressions. The prophets weren’t writing case notes with clinical precision (“Patient reports auditory hallucination commanding him to dig through wall…” – no, it’s “And the Lord said to me, ‘Dig through the wall…’”). So distinguishing what’s meant literally from literary device is hard. Some visions might be written almost like allegory – does that mean the prophet didn’t “see” it like a hallucination but rather conceived it as a metaphor? Hard to say. For example, Amos’s visions of a plumb line or a basket of fruit (Amos 7-8) are simple images, possibly literary devices to convey a point, not necessarily full-on visual hallucinations. If we misread genre, we misdiagnose.
Changing Definitions of Normal/Abnormal: As we discussed in the cultural section, what’s considered “normal” experience in one culture could be “abnormal” in another. The ancient world had a supernatural worldview. Modern secular society tends to have a naturalistic worldview where hearing a supernatural voice is automatically suspect. So our baseline for what is healthy is different. The DSM-5 tries to account for culture by saying essentially, “If your culture thinks it’s normal, we won’t call you crazy for it”. But ancient Israel’s “culture” is not our culture. Can we apply our norms retroactively? It risks a category error. The prophets lived in a pre-scientific, pre-psychology era. They framed experiences in terms of gods, spirits, etc. We frame similar experiences in terms of neurons and disorders. Neither frame could be proven or disproven at the time; they are interpretive frameworks. So diagnosing a prophet with schizophrenia is somewhat anachronistic – schizophrenia as a concept didn’t exist then (they didn’t conceptualize a “mental illness” distinct from either moral/spiritual issues or physical brain issues like being “mad”). The ancients would likely reject our diagnosis just as much as a modern psychiatrist might reject “God spoke to me” as an explanation. It’s like translating between languages that don’t share words.
Retrospective Diagnosis Limitations: Even when we try to diagnose historical figures with physical illnesses, it’s tentative (e.g., “Did King so-and-so die of diabetes or something else?” based on descriptions). With mental illness, it’s even more precarious because symptoms are subjective and context-dependent. The authors who recorded the prophetic stories weren’t neutral observers cataloging symptoms; they were often the prophets themselves or their followers, invested in presenting a certain image. If a prophet had moments of doubt or confusion, he might not include those unless they served the story (Jeremiah includes his breakdowns, which is part of his message about the burden of prophecy; someone like Ezekiel includes less personal struggle, perhaps intentionally focusing on the visions). So we have an uneven picture.
Scholars who have attempted retrospective psychiatric analysis of prophets or religious figures always include a caveat about the uncertainty. You can list symptoms and make a differential diagnosis (maybe schizophrenia, maybe bipolar, maybe temporal lobe epilepsy, maybe all of the above), but you can’t confirm anything. There are no neuroimaging data, no direct interviews with mental status exams, no family history we can reliably parse (though sometimes lineage is given, that doesn’t tell us about familial mental illness patterns). It’s guesswork, albeit educated guesswork.Confirmation biascan creep in too: a psychiatrist might see schizophrenia because that’s what they know; a neurologist sees epilepsy; a Freudian sees an Oedipal complex (okay, haven’t heard that about prophets, but you get the idea). One humorous example: some psychoanalyst might interpret Ezekiel’s vision details symbolically in Freudian terms (wheels and eyes… but let’s not even go there!). The point is, modern professionals might “find what they’re looking for” in the ancient text, rather than truly discern what happened.
Differing Interpretative Goals: Ancient writers had theological or moral goals, not diagnostic ones. Modern clinicians have diagnostic goals, not theological ones. This means that applying one’s framework to the other often misses the original intent. If we say “Jeremiah as having depression and paranoia,” we might inadvertently downplay the theological significance of his lament as a form of prayer or protest to God. Conversely, if a religious person dismisses a real schizophrenic patient’s voices as “just demons” and tries only exorcism, they might miss that the patient needs medical treatment. So one challenge is avoiding mixing categories inappropriately. We must maintain respect for what the prophetic experiences meant in their original setting (calls to repentance, divine warning, comfort in exile) even as we note similarities to mental symptoms. Retrospective diagnosis can appear to reduce a rich spiritual event to a clinical syndrome, which can offend believers. On the other hand, ignoring all scientific insight can make one naïve to patterns that could be informative (for instance, noting that hearing voices isn’t unique to prophets – it’s a human brain phenomenon that can occur in multiple contexts).
Ethical and Faith Implications: Labeling a revered prophet as “schizophrenic” might be seen as impugning their credibility or dismissing their message. That’s not necessarily the intent – one could say “Perhaps he had schizophrenia and God spoke to him” – but public discourse might not handle that nuance well. It challenges the authority of scripture in the eyes of some believers. For instance, if one says “St. Paul had temporal lobe epilepsy that caused his vision of Christ,” a devout person might reply “No, it was a genuine miracle; epilepsy is just speculation.” There’s also an element of hindsight not being 20/20 here; it can be rather blind if we impose our paradigms incorrectly.
Examples of Misinterpretation: There have been some almost humorous misreads historically – e.g., at one point in the 19th century, some thought the prophet Muhammad (in Islam) must have had epilepsy to have his visions (the “epileptic theory”), which modern scholars largely discredit as an oversimplification (it was often floated by critics to undermine Muhammad’s credibility). Similarly, arguments that Moses was high on Sinai due to inhaling volcanic fumes, or that the burning bush was a hallucination caused by desert isolation – these often rely on conjecture and sometimes ignorance of the text’s genre and context. We have to be cautious not to reduce the sacred to the pathological just because it makes it easier for a modern mind to digest.
The Middle Ground – Dialogue Between Perspectives: Ideally, a retrospective look at prophets through a psychological lens shouldn’t be about debunking their spiritual significance, but about enriching our understanding of human experience. It can foster empathy: recognizing that prophets went through psychological turmoil similar to what people today with mental health struggles go through, can humanize them and destigmatize mental illness. If Elijah could be suicidal and still be God’s prophet, then having suicidal feelings today doesn’t disqualify someone from being a person of faith or purpose. That’s a powerful message. Likewise, seeing parallels with mental illness can make us ask deeper questions about the nature of these experiences: perhaps the capacity for religious experience is something innate in our neurobiology that can manifest in healthy or unhealthy ways depending on context. There is research on the overlap between spirituality and psychosis – some propose a concept of “benign psychosis” or “visionary experience” that is not pathological. For example, the Hearing Voices Movement points out not everyone who hears voices is debilitated; some cope and even find positives. Could prophets be in that category of non-pathological voice-hearers? Possibly. As Cook (a psychiatrist-theologian) observed, “most of the Hebrew prophets were not accused of mental illness at all” by those who knew them, and when they were, it was dismissive rather than substantive. This suggests that whatever their inner experience, externally they weren’t seen as truly “mad” in a way that, say, an obviously insane person in antiquity would have been. They appear to have been more or less in command of their faculties outside the visionary moments.
In conclusion on this point, retrospective diagnosis is an intriguing but inherently speculative endeavor. Ancient and modern conceptions of mental health differ in fundamental ways: the ancient integrated worldview of body-soul-spirit vs. the modern often materialistic view of mind as brain function. Bridging them requires humility. We can’t reach through time and put Elijah on a couch or hook Ezekiel to an EEG during his trance (would that we could!). What we can do is acknowledge both the similarities (yes, they had experiences akin to what we’d call hallucinations or mood swings) and the differences (their context gave those experiences meaning and function that don’t neatly match up to dysfunction). Perhaps the safest stance is an openness to multiple interpretations: one can believe these were divine encounters and/orexplore psychological dimensions without necessarily negating either.
As a wise friend of mine quipped, “If a man in ancient Israel says he hears God, you get Isaiah. If a man today says it on the subway, you scoot away slowly.” The difference is context and what comes next: Isaiah left us with profound writings; the subway prophet usually doesn’t. That doesn’t automatically prove Isaiah was sane or the subway guy insane – but it does show that impact and coherence matter in our evaluations. Thus, retrospective diagnosis will always stumble over the fact that prophecy was a role, not a diagnosis, and ancient minds did not carve up religious experience and mental experience the way we do.
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