Wounds

The umbrella collects the texts that speak directly to wounds and their treatment — what wounds are, what an untreated body looks like, and what hands-on care looks like when someone tends them.

What wounds do

A proverb gives wounding a moral function: "Stripes that wound cleanse away evil; And strokes [reach] the innermost parts" (Pr 20:30). The injury is not aimless; it reaches the inner person and works on what evil has settled there.

A body left untreated

Isaiah pictures the nation as a body covered in untended injuries: "From the sole of the foot even to the head there is no soundness in it; [but] wounds, and bruises, and fresh stripes: they haven't been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with oil" (Isa 1:6). The diagnosis is exhaustive — head to foot, every kind of injury — and the indictment is not the wounding itself but the absence of treatment: not closed, not bound, not anointed with oil.

The standard care

The Samaritan's response on the Jericho road shows what treatment looks like in practice: "and came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on [them] oil and wine; and he set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him" (Luke 10:34). The same vocabulary Isaiah missed appears here in full — the wounds are bound, oil is applied, and the wounded man is carried to a place of continued care.