According to the Book of Jubilees, the archangels taught the ancient Israelites knowledge of herbal remedies to protect them against the physical maladies caused by demons. This tradition endured into the early Christian era, when the Roman Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (ca. 37/38–100 CE) mentioned it in The Judean War, his account of the ill-fated rebellion of the Jews against Rome (66–73 CE). The identity of the ambient root that he called baaras is unknown, but its name likely derived from the Hebrew word ba’ar (“to burn”) because it was flame-colored. The novel way of extracting this dangerous root by having a dog pull it out persisted in the European Middle Ages as the method for uprooting yet another perilous plant with medicinal properties: the mandrake, whose shrieks were lethal to human ears.
The valley that surrounds Jerusalem on the north side is a place called baaras, where a root by the same name grows. It has a color similar to a flame and in the evening, it flashes like lightning. It does not make it easy for those who approach and wish to pull it out, for it retreats for a long time and does not remain still unless someone pours a woman’s urine or menstrual blood upon it. And moreover, if you touch it, death is certain, unless by chance you carry the root dangling from your hand. It can also be harvested by another method without danger, as follows. Dig in a circle around the whole root, so that only a small part of it is still covered by the earth. Then, tie a dog to it. When that dog tries to follow the person who tied it, the root pulls up easily. The dog dies immediately, handed over as though in the place of the person by whom the herb should have been pulled. Nor indeed is there any fear afterwards for those who pick the root up. Despite such great dangers, it is valuable to harvest because of the single power that it possesses. For if it is only administered to the sick, it quickly drives away those beings which are called demons, the spirits of the worst kind of men, who plunge into the living and kill those for whom there is no help.