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This time on The Bible Rules, the story of strong substances in biblical times.

The only liquid safe to drink would have been alcohol.

From gory vampiric rites, this worshiper is going to be covered in blood. This

is going to be a filthy process.

To mystical wine drinking practices.

falling into wine jars and getting drunk and misbehaving. The Bible shines a

light on how the ancients ate, drank, and did drugs.

Human beings have sought altered states of consciousness probably for longer

than we've existed as a species.

What was the ancient world really like?

The answer may be hidden in thousands of rules and commandments in the Bible.

Some are shocking.

Some mysterious.

All reveal lost details about the world that was.

The past is now.

The Bible is one of the most important texts in history, and yet its pages are

shrouded in mystery.

We all know the Ten Commandments, but inside the Holy Book are actually

thousands of rules, cryptic code, to a time gone by.

It's 500 B .C. in the barren deserts of ancient Israel, and a gory rule is

inscribed in the book of Leviticus.

If anyone of the house of Israel or of the strangers who sojourn among them

any blood, I will set my face against that person who eats blood and will cut

him off from among his people.

In other words, drinking blood is a dire sin.

It's one of the Bible's most grisly rules, forbidding a practice that is

inconceivable to a modern ear.

So what is it doing in the holy book?

Blood evokes both violence and vitality. Blood is a powerful, magical

thing in the ancient world.

Blood drinking might be the stuff of fantasy today, but 2 ,000 years ago,

believed blood to be supernatural, and only a few ancient communities dared to

drink it.

In the first century AD, a Roman historian named Pliny documented a

gruesome vampiric practice.

He saw people race out after a gladiatorial combat and drinking the

still warm blood of the gladiator who was defeated because they believed that

was a cure for epilepsy.

Another cure for epilepsy in ancient Rome, the blood of a dove or turtle.

These practices might sound shocking, but in the days before modern medicine,

people would often use blood to try to cure disease.

In the ancient world where there was so much that was unexplained, why disease

struck some people and not other people, people were extremely superstitious.

Old wives' tales spread quickly, and medical beliefs were a dime a dozen. A

common one was bloodletting.

A medicine man would make a small incision in the skin and let the blood

out slowly.

If somebody was sick, you had an imbalance of the different elements in

body. And if the blood was the thing to exit, you wanted to let some of the

blood flow out.

Another form of bloodletting, leeches. A blood -sucking creature that would be

applied to particularly sensitive regions, such as the eyes, gums, or even

genitals. And in Europe, doctors were still prescribing leeches for

through the 19th century and used so many that they became an endangered

species.

The rampant use of blood for medical purposes might explain why this rule was

written down at all.

But it doesn't explain why the early biblical authors found drinking blood so

objectionable.

A clue to this mystery might lie in an ancient Israelite belief about what

represents. We have to remember they don't know about hemoglobin. There's

something more elemental and primal in their interaction with blood.

And so there is reverence about blood because we understand it as the life

that flows through the body.

That's one reason, I think, why...

the drinking of blood was forbidden because it seems to desecrate something

is so sacred and holy.

For the Israelites, blood was the source of life. It was sacred and could not be

ingested at all.

And even today, 2 ,000 years after this rule was written down, religious Jews

ritually drain the blood from their meat to ensure they don't consume even a

single drop.

If you're going to eat meat, draining the blood is part of that procedure

because... God says over and over again, the life is in the blood.

A kosher butcher kills the animal with a sharp knife, then removes the veins and

arteries. And finally, the meat is soaked in salt to remove any extra

It's a labor -intensive way to follow this rule. But for religious Jews and

ancient Israelites, the liquid you consume holds a great deal of meaning.

But there's an especially mysterious substance mentioned in the Bible that

puzzles scholars today.

Strong drink.

Give strong drink to the one who is perishing, and wine to those in bitter

distress.

Translation, give strong drink to someone on his deathbed.

No one knows when this strange rule was penned, but some attribute it to King

Solomon, an Israelite king who lived in the 9th century BC and was known for his

wisdom.

But what exact substance was Solomon referring to when he wrote the word

drink? Nobody can be really sure what that fermented beverage is. It's usually

used in the Bible in parallel to wine. So presumably it's some kind of a wine

-derived product.

Nearly 3 ,000 years after this rule was written, historians and archaeologists

are still stumped by exactly what elements went into this strong drink

concoction. What they do know for sure is that it was alcoholic.

But why the counterintuitive advice to serve it to a sick person? Would we ever

offer beer to a person in a hospital bed today?

The portal to the ancient world is opening, and this time we have to go

farther than ever to the Paleolithic era when man first discovered alcohol.

One of the theories is the so -called drunken monkey hypothesis.

The drunken monkey hypothesis claims that our caveman ancestor stumbled

brightly colored fruit.

Once we start gathering these fruits up into a primitive container, the sheer

weight of all the fruit on top will start pressing down on the ripe fruit at

bottom. You would have a fermentation occurring in the first several days.

For Paleolithic man, the discovery of alcohol might have been a happy

But in the last 10 ,000 years of human development, it has become an essential

drink in nearly every culture on the planet.

And the role of alcohol in human culture and biology is that it's very

fundamental.

Alcohol is such an important drink that it is mentioned hundreds of times in the

Bible. and makes an appearance in one of the most famous stories about Jesus

Christ. My favorite story about wine in the Bible is, of course, the wedding

from Cana.

There, Jesus performed his first miracle because the bride and groom ran out of

alcohol. I mean, who does that?

So Jesus went to one of the servants and said, fill these six large tanks that

are 30 gallons each with water. And he turns the water into wine and the

continues because wine is a beverage in ancient culture. There's not orange

juice. There's no Gatorade.

It's wine. It's wine and water. By changing that water into wine, he is

something that's medically more potable.

In the ancient world, before there were sewage systems, water was a deadly

substance.

Alcohol, a fermented beverage that kills bacteria, was much safer.

There was a time when the only liquid safe to drink would have been alcohol.

I mean, people had beer for breakfast. Through most of human history, drinking

water was one of the most dangerous things you could do.

The reason for this is anytime you have a group of people who aren't moving

around, there's a very high chance that their feces are going to get into their

water supply.

Once that happens...

people start to die.

Waterborne diseases were known to wipe out entire populations.

From 430 to 426 BC, one -third of the population of Athens was killed by a

devastating plague of typhoid fever, a disease that was still wreaking havoc in

the 19th century.

And during the U .S. Civil War, thousands of soldiers died in the

typhoid.

So for most of human history, the best thing a person could do was drink

and lay off the water.

Which might explain our Bible rule.

But alcohol wasn't just considered safer than water. It was a cure for many

diseases. We can think of alcoholic beverages as the earliest medicine of

humankind. If people drank a permanent beverage, they might live longer beyond

the 20...

25 years were expected.

And as we'll see, for some agents, the power of alcohol to heal could only mean

one thing.

The drink itself was divine.

It is the God himself that you are drinking.

At least 10 ,000 years ago, Paleolithic man started drinking alcohol, a life

-saving drink in the days before potable water.

Give strong drink to the one who is perishing and wine to those in bitter

distress.

But alcohol wasn't just safer than water. It was an ancient form of

too. The ancient Greeks and Romans mixed wine with herbs to produce medicinal

concoctions and antibacterial ointments.

In the 2nd century B .C., the Roman statesman Cato wrote various wine -based

recipes. Here's a choice one.

Wine, herbs, and manure.

An ancient laxative.

We know that people were selling so -called patent medicines all over the

in the ancient world.

Anywhere you went, you could buy something from somebody, and that person

claim that that something would have a specific medical use.

And thousands of miles east, the Chinese were developing their own alcohol

-based treatment.

We were able to get liquid samples of a rice wine from a Shang

Dynasty bronze.

Some of these early beverages had a wormwood component.

It has remarkable anti -cancer effects.

But even though the ancients had some outstanding medical advances, death

struck fear in people's hearts.

And there are numerous Bible rules about the dead and dying, like this one.

All the days that he separates himself to the Lord, he shall not go near a dead

body.

Or a priest performing his official duties needs to stay away from corpses.

Over 2 ,000 years ago, when this rule was written in ancient Israel, deaths

disease and warfare were routine. It was not uncommon to see bodies in the

street, decaying in public places.

And avoiding a carcass might just be common sense.

There are some pretty good reasons to avoid a dead body. For one thing,

killed that person could still be around, whether it's a saber -toothed

some diphtheria.

It's also the case that bacteria cover us inside and out.

But as soon as our cells stop fighting them off, we become very bacterial very

quickly. Health might explain part of the rule, but the rule is only directed

priests, the most important members of society who worked in the Holy Temple of

Jerusalem.

Part of their job description was maintaining strict purity.

Death is the ultimate impurifier in the Israelite biblical code.

In fact, the highest form of impurity is a dead corpse.

And the temple is meant to be a place of pure life.

We want to mirror a culture which says death can be banished from the world.

Basically, priests had to represent the good things in life.

Death was the opposite of that.

But elsewhere in the ancient world, people approached death very

The Babylonians believed strongly in an afterlife, and it was tradition for the

children of the dead to make offerings to the corpse. They had a special name

for this kind of offering. It was called a kispo. They might pour wine into the

grave where the dead person's remains were.

Other times they would just make food offerings in front of a statue

representing the dead person and leave them.

And it was thought that these really did nourish the person.

Feeding the dead might sound bizarre, but it's not the only strange ancient

practice related to the afterlife.

In 3rd century BC China, the founder of the Qin Dynasty, Qin Shi Huang, wanted

to bring all of his soldiers with him into the next world.

He wanted an army with him in the afterlife, but unlike an earlier king in

Mesopotamia who actually sacrificed his servants.

Here, the emperor brought along terracotta representation.

Qin was buried near tens of thousands of figurines of soldiers, chariots, and

horses, now known to the world as the terracotta warriors.

Some of them were officers, some of them were lower ranks, they were horses, and

so on and so forth. An actual replica of the actual army that he had.

It's a fascinating window into an ancient civilization's relationship to

mortality.

But there's another Bible rule that has a different take on death altogether.

And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying,

Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured

out for many for the forgiveness of sins.

Here Jesus tells his disciples to drink wine because it is actually his blood.

It's the rule of the Eucharist.

For Christians around the world, this passage written into the Gospel of

in the first century A .D. is still considered one of the Bible's most

rules, a foundation of the religion.

And every Sunday, millions gather in church to take communion and receive the

Eucharist. There is a very beautiful way that allows Christians to connect with

Christ every week when the Eucharist is given. It's not just connecting through

prayer or emotion or heart. It's physically connecting back with him

wine and the bread.

But how are we to understand this mysterious commandment from Jesus? Is he

literally telling people to ingest his blood?

For the last 500 years, since the Protestants split from the Catholics,

debates have been waged over the meaning of this rule.

Different denominations within the church see the Eucharist in different

Many Protestants see it as a representation, that this is a way to

Christ, but it's representative of him. Catholics believe with the Eucharist

there is a transubstantiation, meaning the substance, the essence of what is

there is no longer bread, is no longer wine, is now the body and blood of

Christ. It's not symbolic.

Essentially, it is no longer bread and wine. It is now the body and blood of

Christ, which we share as communion.

But in addition to being a religious guideline, this rule is a portal into

deep path, harking back to a time long before Christianity, when ancient man

believed that God could actually be consumed.

It might sound fantastical, but in ancient Greece, worshippers of Dionysus,

god of wine, believed they were drinking the divine.

When you are engaging in Dionysiac ritual and drinking wine, it is the god

himself that you are drinking. So there's a sense that the divinity is

the liquid.

The Greeks weren't alone.

In fact, for thousands of years, ancient people have ritually ingested mind

-altering substances, hallucinated, and believed themselves possessed with the

spirit of God.

Human beings have sought altered states of consciousness probably for longer

than we've existed as a species.

Hallucinogens are an ancient way of attaining an ecstatic, transcendental,

spiritual experience.

Hallucinogens are some of the oldest substances used by mankind.

And, like alcohol, they were probably discovered by accident.

Certain plants, like mushroom and cacti, have natural mind -altering properties,

and once discovered, became ingrained in mystical religious traditions all over

the world.

In North and South America, we find peyote, we find psilocybin mushrooms, we

find ayahuasca, we find a lot of different concoctions that are strong

hallucinogens. resulting in three, four -day experiences.

Hallucinogenic mushrooms can cause out -of -body trances that last for days.

And for the ancients, what happens to the mind on drugs could only be

to one thing,

God.

Logic mushrooms we think of as psychedelic, meaning that it can change

perceptions and it can change your thinking, including about your

You imagine conversations that aren't happening and so forth.

And a lot of people who are on drugs will say that they also feel very

to things. And in terms of a religious experience, that's probably as important

as, for instance, seeing something that's not there.

It might sound like an ancient acid trip, but for the people of Mesoamerica,

magic mushrooms were a supernatural substance.

Archaeologists have unearthed peculiar mushroom art dating back to the Olmec

period in the 12th century B .C., suggesting that mushrooms were a central

of their belief system.

Aztec shaman would fast and then ritually ingest psilocybin mushrooms,

that they were consuming God.

They called these mushrooms teonanacatl, which can be translated as flesh of the

gods. You have to bear in mind that substances, when they get introduced to

we call in medicine naive subjects, people who haven't tried them before,

often seem very amazing.

This widespread ancient belief.

Mind -altering substances, our God, makes our Bible rule seem less radical.

And the idea that a substance can be infused with God can be found in a

used English term, spirits.

Just another way to refer to alcohol.

So this association of strong substances with God still exists today. But as

we'll see, there's one ancient custom that's gone out of style in most of the

world. Ritual sacrifice.

This worshiper is going to be covered in blood. This is going to be a filthy

process.

The Bible rules are immortal to the ancient world.

A window into the hearts and minds of people long gone. And the rules about

strong substances reveal some of the strangest practices.

The ancients drank to get closer to God and offered up wine as a gift to God.

In the holy place, you shall pour out a drink offering of strong drink to the

Lord.

Or, when you're in the temple, give God a sip too.

This rule was written down in ancient Israel around the 5th century B .C., a

time when all ritual revolved around one stone building, the Holy Temple in

Jerusalem.

Sacrifices were offered at altars.

Once the temple is built in Jerusalem, that becomes the central sanctuary.

Each morning, a priest would ceremoniously pour wine on the altar as

daily sacrifice.

And what the sacrifice does is reconnect you to God. But this rule isn't about

any old sacrifice.

What is the significance of giving God a drink?

In the ancient world, one of the ways that you would placate or appease or

the gods is by libation. And a libation meant pouring out wine.

Libation was a part of many ancient cultures.

And in ancient India, a 3 ,000 -year -old text called the Rig Veda describes

worshippers pouring out a mysterious drink to the gods.

They called that potion Soma. In ancient India, when they talk about Soma in

this text, the Rig Veda, it clearly leads to visions. It clearly leads to

inspiration. Some believe that Soma led to immortality, which is why the gods

drank it.

The chief warrior god, Indra, was said to have a belly as wide as a lake to

ingest limitless soma. And the ancients hoped that by sharing soma with the

gods, the gods would then listen to the people.

Let's call them to our ritual fire.

Let's have them sit at the fire and let's all drink soma. We'll share with

gods. It's a way of communicating with the gods very directly.

Communicating with the divine might be one reason for this Israelite rule.

But this rule might shed light on something more basic.

Ancient Israel was the land of vineyards, and the wine business was a

of Israelite economy, essential to their survival as a people. In ancient times,

the Israelites actually were exporters of wine.

Grapes don't grow in Egypt, and we have depictions and archaeological evidence

of jars of wine being shipped from Israel to Egypt in biblical times.

Their wine economy was vast and storied. According to lore, King David's

personal wine collection was so large, he had a special guard to watch over it.

And recently, archaeologists have found evidence of another huge collection that

dates back to 1700 BC.

One of the most recent discoveries that I've made was an ancient wine cellar in

our Canaanite palace at a site called Tel Kabri, which is up in the north of

Israel. We didn't expect it. We actually thought we were digging outside the

palace. Turned out we were not outside, but in the storerooms. And one of the

storerooms had 40 jars, each holding about 50 liters.

2 ,000 liters of ancient wine would be about 3 ,000 bottles in today's world.

For the Israelites, wine was a part of their survival as a people. It was a

blessed substance.

which might explain why they served it to God.

But to fully understand why wine was served up at the Holy Temple, we have to

open up the Bible and dig into the gory chapters on animal sacrifice.

He shall bring his offering of turtle doves or pigeons, and the priest shall

bring it to the altar and wring off its head and burn it on the altar.

Here the Bible commands an Israelite to bring a bird to the priest who will take

it to the altar, rip off its head, and set it on fire.

When this rule was written nearly 3 ,000 years ago, Israelites would travel for

miles to bring a sacrificial offering to the temple with one goal in mind,

atoning for sins.

But how does the bloody death of an animal lead to atonement?

The cow or the animal is a substitute for the human.

But really what we're looking at is we're looking to sacrifice a person.

Basically, the ancients believed that God really wanted humans to sacrifice

themselves to appease him, a gruesome practice that went out of fashion in

ancient Israel and was replaced with animal sacrifice, which had to be done

absolute precision.

So you come up to the temple there in Jerusalem and you bring your offering,

whatever it is, whether it's a bull from the herd or a sheep from the flock or a

bird or whatever.

It's the worshiper himself who's actually going to slay this beast and

dismember it.

So he's probably going to cut its throat and then bleed it dry and then cut its

limbs. So this worshiper is going to be covered in blood. This is going to be a

filthy process.

The sinner will be atoned for by the death of the animal.

But why a turtle dove or pigeon in this particular rule?

Doves are mentioned more than any other bird in the Bible, probably because they

are native to the Near East and would have been abundant in biblical times.

bringing a bird as a sacrifice might come down to basic dollars and cents.

What we do know is that relative to the animal offerings, these were certainly

the cheapest, which probably tells us two things. First of all, at the level

impurity and concern for what has gone wrong.

This is probably a lower level concern and can be rectified with a lower level

sacrifice. In other words, the bigger the sin, the bigger the animal you'd

bring. But why would God want physical gifts in the first place?

In the ancient world, most people worshipped gods with physical qualities

gave them gifts they'd want to receive themselves.

That suggests that this is something precious and valuable to me, something I

enjoy, and I'm willing to make it as an offering to you rather than enjoy it

myself. Though the Israelites just had one god, Yahweh, they had to find a way

to talk to him.

And that's where sacrifice came in.

But they weren't the only tribe using sacrifice as a way to communicate with

divinity. In Vedic India, around 1000 BC, a very specific type of sacrifice

deployed to get a busy god's attention.

First step, get the right animal. The quintessential animal was a cow, a bull.

It's tied to a sacrificial post, and then the animal initially was

So basically, the worshiper had to manually choke the cow himself before

it with a knife. The path that the knife goes through is a very, very important

part of the ritual.

It might sound gruesome, but this sacrifice is essential to communication

the gods and is still practiced in parts of modern India and Nepal.

In 2009, millions attended the Gautamai Festival.

sacrificing over 250 ,000 animals.

But the Bible's rules about substances aren't all about blood and gore.

Some are aimed at simple human pleasure.

Wine makes the human heart happy.

This one might sound obvious, but like thousands of others in the Bible, it's

not just a rule. It's a portal to the past.

Ancient people had a reverence for the religious nature of strong drink, but

there was also a lot of partying involved.

Wine makes the human heart happy.

Translation, drinking causes joy.

Historians can't say exactly when this rule was written down, but it was

probably around 2 ,500 years ago.

Those were dark times for the Israelites.

The Babylonian Empire had invaded, and the kingdom of Judah was under

The Babylonian people have conquered Israel, and they have stripped them of

everything that was familiar to them.

The Babylonians took away at least three of the Judean kings.

We know the captivity lasted from about 586 until 538.

For the first time in Israelite history, The community was splintered, living in

different parts of the land.

It was a soul -crushing event in the life of God's people.

So maybe this verse is saying, in these rough times, it's okay to use drink to

join together.

The alcohol causes the breakdown of some inhibitions.

So people who are drinking a fermented beverage open up to one another more,

there's more social cohesion as a result. In other words, alcohol is the

unifier.

The Egyptians took this idea seriously with drinking festivals that were

motivated by religion that devolved into hierarchy.

The most famous was called the Drunkenness of Hothar, dating back to

B .C.

We have the various festivals the Egyptians would have that involved wine

beer. And one of those it's referred to as the festival of the drunkenness.

There'd be a lot of drinking, a lot of eating, a lot of joy.

It's really a countrywide event.

An estimated 700 ,000 attended these Egyptian drinking festivals.

And graffiti on the temple's walls shows people fornicating. But even a

nationwide orgy has nothing on the Greek drinking fest.

The worship of the god of wine, Dionysus, involved extreme drunkenness.

Dionysus seemed to represent for the Greeks and for the Romans something

to do with the ecstasy and orgiastic quality of a religion given...

to wine and to excess.

We have depictions of them engaging in bestial sexual acts or having extremely

disproportionately large phalluses erect and chasing after pretty much anything.

We also have depictions of them falling into wine jars and getting drunk

and misbehaving.

Evidence that we have for the men involves the consumption of wine and

drunkenness and processions, carrying grape vines and dressed as women.

But the male followers weren't the only ones with subversive practices.

The women would leave the cities and go into a trance. They went into the

mountains. They danced and they engaged in a kind of ecstatic form of ritualized

madness. Greek myth tells us that some of these worshippers were so overcome

with ecstasy that they'd tear the flesh of animals and eat it raw.

The people who worshipped Dionysus were pretty dark -minded people.

The Greeks and Egyptians took the principle in this Bible rule to an

Enjoying alcohol is one thing, but excessive drunkenness is another.

And the Bible has something to say about that.

Written in Rome in the 1st century AD, this rule seems to contradict all other

rules that promote strong drink. The Bible...

doesn't condemn the use of alcohol, although it does condemn drunkenness.

It's around this time that the Roman Empire began to object to the Dionysian

festivals of drunkenness and revelry.

And in 186 BC, the Roman government imposed punishing limits on these

The Romans passed a decree against Bacchanalian celebrations.

Because they were gathering large crowds in rural places, mountains, areas where

they were not subject to control.

And the Romans decreed that no more than five people could ever meet. And even

then it had to get state permission.

But in order to oppose them, they sent the army out.

And it is said that they killed 7 ,000 people.

In the ancient world, some religious celebrations got out of hand and became

orgiastic feasts, and there's a backlash in the Bible.

Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the

Spirit. In other words, don't drink in excess.

These weren't just words of wisdom 2 ,000 years ago. In 2013, an estimated 15

million Americans abused alcohol, and over 10 ,000 people were killed in drunk

driving accidents.

In the ancient world, people didn't fear a car crash, but they loathed immoral

behavior. And they saw that alcohol led to one thing, sex.

Alcohol might make you much more likely to have sex because the parts of your

brain that are more in charge of restraining you get impaired when you

Not only might sex be a natural outcome of drink, but surprisingly, in most

ancient cultures, the production of alcohol was associated with women.

Whether we're in Africa or in the Middle East or China, it's usually the women

that are making the beverages.

In the ancient Incan Empire, the women were employed to make chicha, corn beer.

They would choose the most beautiful women to do the chewing of the corn to

chicha. They put them in a separate palace building where they would do

and other crafts.

But one of the main responsibilities was to chew and spit out the corn.

These complicated connections between alcohol and sex can even be found in the

first book of the Bible, where we find the first story of drunkenness. There's

the famous story of Noah and his three sons.

Noah gets off the boat and plants a vineyard. Noah gets sauced, he gets

drunk, and he lays exposed in his tent.

His youngest son, Ham.

He sees his father passed out and naked in his tent and goes out and tells his

other brothers that his father's passed out naked in the tent.

And didn't cover his nakedness. There's probably a sexual connotation here.

It's unclear what exactly transpired between father and son.

Some suggest it's a case of incest.

Others claim Ham just embarrassed Noah.

Whichever it was, Ham's punishment is dire.

According to the story, Noah curses him and dooms all his future descendants.

A cautionary tale indeed about the danger of wine. Wine becomes the

something unintended and naughty and destructive to happen. If wine was a

powerful substance, it had to be handled carefully. And the Bible suggests that

certain people should just never drink it.

No priest shall drink wine when he enters the inner court.

Essentially, priests need to abstain from drinking when performing their

The place, ancient Israel. The time, 5th century BC.

In this period, wine was an essential part of Israelite religious ritual at

holy temple. So it seems strange that priests had to avoid it. A clue to

unpacking this rule might lie in the ancient idea of purity.

Let's be clear, when we use the phrase purity, we're not talking about dirt.

Purity and dirtiness are not the same thing.

The basic concept of purity is about those things which distance you from

God and from God as understood in the ideal sense.

No Israelite had to be more pure than a priest.

They were specially endued with both a kind of purity and a kind of association

with the divine that ordinary people didn't have.

Foregoing drink was one way for priests to stay pure.

Ritual bathing was another.

So they need to wash, they need to change their clothes, and then they're

pure again.

Priests were meant to bathe in a mikvah, a ritual bath in the holy temple, and

they did it before any sort of prayer or sacrifice.

But priests weren't the only ones ritually bathing.

Israelite men were supposed to bathe after ejaculation.

The seminal discharge, which is still an issue of impurity.

is seminal in nature you wait until evening and you bathe in israelite women

bathed after menstruation a woman is menstruating she's impure until they

ritual cleansing because the blood is valued and valuable and therefore a

bit magic around it in 2011 archaeologists unearthed ritual bath in

foothills outside of jerusalem that dates back to the first century bc It

built with an advanced water supply system to collect and drain rainwater.

Bathing for spiritual purity might sound like a relic of the deep past, but a

form of ritual bathing still exists today.

Catholics still have holy water, which is almost certainly derived from

ritualistic bathing.

Upon entering a church, Catholics dip their fingers in the holy water basin

then make the sign of the cross.

And in India today, Hindus bathe in the Ganges.

a river thought to be sacred and purifying.

Each year, hundreds of thousands of religious pilgrims flock to the holy

Varanasi to submerge themselves in the water and cremate their dead on the

river's banks.

Holy water might purify one spiritually throughout the ages, and for the

Israelite priests, purity meant no alcohol.

But as we'll see, even today in some societies, taking a sip can have

consequences.

The Bible's rules open up a portal on the ancient world, especially when it

comes to rules about strong drink.

3 ,000 years ago, as well as today, alcohol was an essential beverage.

But Israelite priests shunned it in an effort to stay spiritually pure.

No priest shall drink wine when he enters the inner court.

They weren't the only ones. For thousands of years, an Israelite sect

Nazarites abstained from drinking altogether.

That was actually applauded in that they were more religious, in a sense,

because they weren't indulging themselves in a worldly pastime, but

dedicated to God.

Both men and women could become Nazarites by taking a simple vow not to

wine or wine vinegar or eat grapes or raisins.

And there were teetotalers in other societies too, like China.

The Shang Dynasty kings...

were excessive drinkers and they were poisoning themselves and they went crazy

and they committed suicide and all sorts of other bad things. So the next

dynasty that came along, the Zhou dynasty, said, oh, we're not going to be

the Shang dynasty. They were tending then toward the prohibitionist attitude.

A few hundred centuries later, in the 7th century AD, alcohol was still being

debated in the Middle East.

The Muslim Quran prohibits it completely.

Islam takes a much stronger stance regarding alcohol.

The term for that is haram, which is the opposite of halal. Halal is something

that is permissible, whereas haram is something that is completely forbidden.

If you consume alcohol, it is an abomination.

It is the handiwork of Satan. This is one of those places, incidentally, where

there is significant difference between Jewish observance, Jewish history, and

Muslim. observance in Muslim history, because one of the ways we dealt with

alcohol was to make it almost like a sacrament.

You know, it's like this is something which can support spirituality and

and community.

So there is no banning of alcohol in Jewish tradition the way there is in

While alcohol remains a part of Jewish tradition, some Christians still avoid

on biblical principle.

There's an older generation of Baptists who are more firmly committed to the

position of teetotalism. So no alcohol whatsoever under any circumstances.

The teetotalers, they might actually argue that the Bible under no

anywhere ever condones any use of alcohol whatsoever.

And then you have others who will say we're free in Christ. So you can partake

with moderation as long as you don't.

lose control of your faculties, and then these people would feel the freedom to

go ahead and partake.

There's one era in American history where the teetotalers won out.

Prohibition.

In the early 20th century, Christian groups in the United States petitioned

alcohol to be banned completely, and in 1920, the 18th Amendment was instated,

outlawing the sale, production, transportation, and importation of all

beverages.

This era of prohibition lasted until 1933.

In the case of prohibition, I think we just have like the swing of the pendulum

over toward this negative side, not recognizing the positive elements that

embedded in the scriptures.

Sometimes people drink too much. But in that arc of civilization, there's a

tremendous amount of moderation in the way in which wine is used.

Today, most religions and cultures believe the strong drink is acceptable,

moderation. But there are some countries that still ban it completely.

In Iran, liquor is officially off limits. Caught with it three times, and

punishment is death.

But moonshiners are abundant, mixing homemade brews in bathtubs and

And in every corner of the world, people continue to drink strong substances.

just as our Paleolithic ancestors did 10 ,000 years ago.

By outlawing something that's so embedded in the human biology and

are frustrating just natural tendencies of humans.

You can either use wine to enhance life and enhance your relationships, or you

can use it to degrade the body, and it's the choice.

So I think the Bible was obviously saying, use it in a way that brings you

together and uplifts life.

Humankind's magnetic attraction to strong substances is undeniable and can

seen in the pages of the Holy Bible and in its thousands of cryptic rules, a

portal to years gone by.