note: "Canticles" refers to the Old Testament book "Song of
Solomon" or "Song of Songs". "Vulgate" and "LXX" are early
translations of the Christian Bible. Passages heavy with "..."
marks are places where the author inserted Hebrew or Greek
characters untranslateable to ASCII. --T.R.
From: JANUS, Archives internationales pour l'Histoire de la
Medecine et la Geographie Medicale, Huitieme Annee, 1903, p.
241-246
ON INDICATIONS OF THE HACHISH-VICE IN THE OLD
TESTAMENT
By C. CREIGHTON, M.D., *London*.
Hachish, which is the disreputable intoxicant drug of the
East, as opium is the respectable narcotic, is of unknown
antiquity. It is known that the fibre of the hemp-plant,
*Cannabis sativa*, was used for cordage in ancient times; and it
is therefore probable that the resinous exudation, "honey" or
"dew", which is found upon its flowering tops on some soils, or
in certain climates (*Cannabis Indica*), was known for its
stimulant or intoxicant properties from an equally early date.
The use of the resin as an intoxicant can be proved from Arabic
writings as early as the 6th or 7th centuries of our era (De Sacy,
*Chrestomathie Arabe*) and we may assume it to have been
traditional among the Semites from remote antiquity. There are
reasons, in the nature of the case, why there should be no clear
history. All vices are veiled from view; they are *sub rosa*; and
that is true especially of the vices of the East. Where they are
alluded to at all, it is in cryptic, subtle, witty and allegorical
terms. Therefore, if we are to discover them, we must he [sic]
prepared to look below the surface of the text.
In the O.T. there are some half-dozen passages where a
cryptic reference to hachish may be discovered. Of these I shall
select two to begin with, as being the least ambiguous, leaving
the rest for a few remarks at the end. The two which I shall
choose are both made easy by the use of a significant word in
the Hebrew text. But that word, which is the key to the
meaning, has been knowingly mistranslated in the Vulgate and
in the modern versions, having been rendered by a variant also
by the LXX in one of the passages, and confessed as
unintelligible in the other by the use of a marginal Hebrew word
in Greek letters. One must therefore become philologist for the
nonce; and I must apologise for trespassing beyond my proper
sphere. My apology is, that if one knows the subject-matter, a
little philology may go a long way. On the other hand, the
Biblical scholars themselves cannot always be purely objective;
they cannot avoid having some theory in the background of the
exegesis; and the theory may be a caprice, where there is no
insight into a subject which involves medical considerations.
The first passage which I shall take is Canticles 5.1: "I am
come into my garden, my sister, my spouse; I have gathered my
myrrh with my spice: *I have eaten my honeycomb with my
honey*; I have drunk my wine with my milk." In the Hebrew
text, the phrase in italics reads: "I have eaten my wood (yagar)
with my honey (debash)." St. Jerome, in the Vulgate, translated
the Hebrew word meaning "wood" by *favum*, or honey-comb
-- *comedi favum cum melle meo*; which is not only a hold
licence, but a platitude to boot, inasmuch as there is neither wit
nor point in making one to eat the honeycomb with the honey.
The LXX adopted a similar licence, but avoided the platitude, by
translating thus: ... . "I have eaten *my bread* with my honey".
And this is the reading that Renan has followed in his French
dramatic version of Canticles (the first verse of the fifth chapter
being transferred to the end of the fourth chapter). Where
"honeycomb", *favus*, is plainly meant by context, the Hebrew
word is either *tzooph*, as in Ps. 19, 10 and Prov. 16, 24,
(where the droppings of honey from the comb are meant), or it
is *noh-pheth*, as in a passage of Canticles, 4,11, close to the
one in question. ("Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the
honeycomb; honey and milk are under thy tongue".) Again, the
word *yagar*, which the Vulgate translated *favum* for the
occasion, is used in some fifty or sixty other places of O.T.
always in the sense of wood, forest, planted field, herbage, or
the like. The meaning of Cant. 5,1, is clear enough in its
aphrodisiac context: "I have eaten *my hemp* with my honey"
-- *comedi cannabim cum confectione mellis*, which is the
elegant way of taking hachish in the East to this day. And this
meaning of *yagar* (wood) in association with *debash*
(honey) is made clear by the other passage with which I am to
deal, namely 1 Sam. 14, 27, the incident of Jonathan dipping the
point of his staff into a "honey-wood", and merely tasting the
honey, so that his eyes were enlightened. The one is the
aphrodisiac effect of hachish, the other is its bellicose or furious
effect.
The correct exegesis of 1 Sam. 14, 25-45, is of great
importance not only for understanding Jonathan's breach of a
certain taboo, but also for the whole career of his father Saul,
ending in his deposition from the kingship through the firm
action of Samuel, and the pitiable collapse of his courage on the
eve of the battle of Gilboa. The theory is, that both Saul and
Jonathan were hachish-eaters; it was a secret vice of the palace,
while it was strictly forbidden to the people; Saul had learned it
of the Amalekites; it was that, and not his disobedience in saving
captives and cattle alive, which was his real transgression, and
the real ground of his deposition from the kingship at the
instance of the far-seeing prophet. No true statesman would
have taken action on account of a merely technical sin of
disobedience; the disobedience was real and vital; but the
substance of it had to be veiled behind a convenient fiction. One
great object of Jewish particularism was, to save Israel from the
vices that destroyed the nations around; and Samuel appears in
that respect the first and the greatest of the prophets, the
prototype *censor morum*.
The incident related in I Sam. 14 arose during a raid upon the
Philistines, in which the Jewish leader, Jonathan, distinguished
himself by the number of the enemy whom he slew, but at the
same time broke a certain law or taboo, for which he was
afterwards put upon his trial and condemned to death. The
incident, previous to the slaughter, is thus described: "And all
[they of] the land came to a wood, and there was honey on the
ground. And when the people were come into the wood, behold
the honey dropped; but no man put his hand to his mouth: for
the people feared the oath. But Jonathan heard not when his
father charged the people with the oath; wherefore he put forth
the end of the rod that was in his hand and dipped it in an honey-
comb (*yagarah hadebash*), and put his hand to his mouth; and
his eyes were enlightened." The exegesis of this passage has
been started in an entirely false direction by the bold licence of
the Vulgate in translating the two Hebrew words meaning
"honey wood" by *favum*, honey-comb. The earlier
sentences, however obscure, show that the "honey" was of a
peculiar kind, there being no suggestion of combs or bees. The
Syriac version gives the most intelligible account of it, as
follows, *latine*: "Et sylvas ingressi essent, essetque mel in
sylva super faciem agri, flueretque mel" -- expressing not inaptly
a field of hemp with the resinous exudation upon the flower-
stalks, which would flow or run by the heat. In *The Bengal
Dispensatory*, by W.B. O'Shaughnessy, M.D. (London,
1842), there is the following illustrative passage p. 582: "In
Central India and the Saugor territory, and in Nipal, *churrus*
is collected during the hot season in the following singular
manner: Men clad in leathern dresses run through the hemp-
fields brushing through the plants with all possible violence.
The soft resin adheres to the leather, and is subsequently scraped
off and kneaded into balls, which sell from 5 to 6 R. the seer. A
still finer kind, the *moomeea*, or waxen *churrus*, is
collected by the hand in Nipal, and sells for double the price of
the ordinary kind. In Nipal, Dr. McKinnon informus us, the
leathern attire is dispensed with, and the resin is gathered on the
skins of naked coolies." Jonathan's mode of collecting was of
the simplest: he dipped the end of a rod into a "honey-wood",
and carried it to his mouth; a mere taste of it caused his eyes to
be enlightened. The whole incident is obviously dramatised, or
made picturesque -- the growing field of hemp, the men passing
through it, Jonathan dipping the end of a rod or staff into the
resin upon a stalk as he passed by. The real meaning is, that
Jonathan was a hachish-eater.
It is remarkable that the LXX translators had no suspicion of
this cryptic meaning. Their Greek version is the most confused
of any; but it appears that they were aware of something
obscure, and that they made an honest attempt to give a meaning
to the Hebrew pair of words "honey wood", translating the
word for "honey" by itself and again, by itself the word for
"wood" in the Hebrew text (v. 25, 26), by ... bee-house. The
Greek of the LXX is: .... The strange word ... is obiously a
transliteration into Greek of a Hebrew word. Wellhausen, in his
earliest work, *Der Text der Buchen Samuelis*, Gott. 1871,
p.91, has given an explanation, which I should not have recalled
had it not been pronounced to be "remarkably clever" by Driver,
(*Notes on the Hebrew Text of the Books of Samuel*, Oxford,
1890, p.86). Wellhausen says: "... und ... ist Duplette, beides
dem hebraischen *yagar* entsprechend. Demselben Worte aber
entspricht nach v.26 auch .... Also haben wir hier ein
Triplette". I speak with deference; but I do not understand how
... (Hebrew) can be a doublet of ..., still less how ... can be a
doublet of either or both. ... as a Hebrew word written in Greek
characters appears to be exactly the part of a verb meaning "we
have done foolishly", or "they are foolish", which would have
been used as a marginal remark (although now incorporated in
the text) to signify that the passage was unintelligible or corrupt.
How it can stand for *yagar*, meaning "wood" (..., a wood or
coppice), is probably clear to Hebraists; at all events, that is
assumed in Wellhausen's theory of a doublet, the sense being
"there was honeycomb on the ground". The idea is that of
"honey" in some association with "wood", which the LXX took
to the bee-house. The natural association of "honey" with
"wood", is "vegetable honey", or plant-honey; and it is clear
from the powerful effect of a minute quantity of it, and from the
kinds of effect, (aphrodisiac and bellicose) that the honey-wood
was the hemp-plant with the resinous exudation.
The effects, in the case of Jonathan, are unmistakeable. A
mere taste of the honey on the end of the rod caused his eyes to
be enlightened. His defence, when put on his trial for breaking
the taboo, was the small-ness of the quantity he ate; a plea which
reminds one of the famous apology of the young woman for her
love-child, that "it was such a little one". There is an old
explanation of this enlightenment, discussed by F.T. Withof,
"De Jonathane post esum mellis visum recipiente" (*Opusc.
philolog. Lingae, 1778, pp. 135 - 139). It turns upon on the
Talmudic saying, *Oculi tui prae jejunio obscuranti sunt*; and
upon another passage in the same, where food is to be
administered to one, "*donec illuminentur oculi ejus*". Some
colour is given to this idea of the illuminating effect of food for
the hungry, by the context, I Sam. 14, 24, 28, namely the
formal words of the taboo, "Cursed be the man that eatheth
*food* until the evening", and the remark, that "the people were
faint", as if by abstinence from food. But the minute quantity
tasted by Jonathan shows that all these references to "food" are
merely cryptic or allegorical. Also the effect upon Jonathan
was, that he ran *a-mok* amongst the Philistines; and it is
implied not vaguely that, if his followers had also partaken of
the same food, "there had been now a much greater slaughter
among the Philistines". Jonathan's exceptional prowess upon
the occasion was also the ground of his being rescued by the
admiring populace from the death to which he had been
condemned by his father for breaking the taboo.
The evidence that Saul himself was a hachish-eater is not so
direct as in the case of Jonathan. There is not a hint of it until
after the incident of the forbidden honey in the attack upon the
Philistines; but, in the inquiry upon that breach of law, it is
significant that Saul and Jonathan are ranged together upon one
side of the trial by lot, and the people on the other, the second
ballot being between Saul and Jonathathan. The next chapter
introduces the very old theme of revenge upon Amelek for
treachery many generations before; Saul goes upon the
expedition, brings back Agag with him, and disobeys the
prophet's orders in other respects. From that disobedience his
ruin dates. Samuel had a most unaccountable animosity to
Agag, so that he hewed him in pieces with his own hands. The
presumption is, that he had corrupted Saul by the evil example
of his Amalekite ways. Next, we have the appearance of David
upon the scene, in the capacity of a harper, to soothe Saul's fits
of fury and melancholy, when he was under the influence of the
evil spirit. Dr. J. Moreau (de Tours) in his valuable work *Du
Hachish et de l'Alienation Mentale*, Paris 1845, has shown that
music has no effect upon the ordinary run of melancholics (pp.
84-85); the idea that it might be useful in lunatic asylums comes
from the misunderstood example of David playing before Saul.
But this idea, says Dr. Moreau, "belongs to the domain of comic
opera"; not only so, "mais nous avons maudit souvent la harpe
de David et l'hypochondrie de Saul, qui ont manifestement
produit toutes les billevesees". The only kind of mental
alienation that is influenced by music, as Dr. Moreau shows
farther, is that due to the intoxication of hachish -- "la puissante
influence qu'exerce la musique sur ceux qui ont pris du
hachish... La musique la plus grossiere, les simples vibrations
des cordes d'une harpe ou d'une guitare vous exaltent jusqu' au
delire ou vous plongent dans une douce melancholie". And yet
Dr. Moreau does not suggest that Saul's susceptibility to the
music of David's harp was owing to the fact that his "evil spirit"
was hachish. The inference seems to obvious to have been
missed, after he had distinguished between ordinary melancholia
and hachish-intoxication in regard to the effects of music; and
yet I do not find any such diagnosis of Saul's malady in any part
of his book. That diagnosis is not only consistent with several
things told of his malady, but is also elucidative of his ruined
career. The sudden throwing of his javelin at David as he played
before him is as graphic an illustration as could be given, of the
ungovernable fits of temper which hachish produces. Also the
extraordinary exhibition that Saul makes of himself in the end of
chapter 19 is best understood as a fit of drunkenness. But the
most significant, as well as the most pathetic, of all, is the failure
of his courage on the night before the battle of Gilboa. Here we
see the stalwart hero of the people with his nerves shattered by
intoxicants now no longer able to stimulate him: "And when
Saul saw the host of the Philistines he was afraid, and his heart
greatly trembled". Those who are acquainted with Robert
Browning's poem "Saul", will see how well the hypothesis of
hachish fits in with the poet's conception of a heroic life
wrecked by some mysterious "error". That he and Jonathan
should have been practicing in secret that which was taboo to the
people at large, is exactly parallel with Saul's secret dealings in
witchcraft, against which there was a public law. It is also of
the same kind as the evils against which Samuel is reported to
have cautioned the people when they demanded kingly rule --
namely the autocratic self-indulgences of the palace. In his last
desperate strait, Saul gets the witch to summon the spirit of
Samuel, his old monitor; but Samuel is unable to help him;
"Because thou obeyedst not the voice of the Lord, nor
executedst his fierce wrath upon Amalek, therefore hath the Lord
done this thing unto thee this day". It is always Amalek; and
Amalek was just that tribe of Arabs, of the southern desert, who
were engaged in the carrying trade between the Arabian gulf and
Lower Egypt or the Mediterraneae, -- the trade in gold, and
spices, and drugs: probably the same Arabs among whom the
name of *hachashin* was found in the medieval period, and
from whom the latinised name of *assassini* was brought to
Europe by returning Crusaders. (Silvestre de Sacy, *l.c.*)
(To be continued)
(
geocities.com/athens)