From: JANUS, Archives internationales pour l'Histoire de la
Medecine et la Geographie Medicale, Huitieme Annee, 1903, p.
297-303
ON INDICATIONS OF THE HACHISH-VICE IN THE OLD
TESTAMENT
By C. CREIGHTON, M.D., *London*.
(Concluded.)
In the two instances already given, the hemp-plant is pointed
to somewhat plainly by the use of the Hebrew word for "wood"
in association with the notion of "honey", the translators having
evaded the point in both cases: in the one by rendering the single
word, *yagar*, by *favus*, honeycomb, in the other by
rendering the remarkable and unique compound name, *yagarah
hadebash*, also by *favus*. In those instances, the hypothesis
of hachish rests upon the sure basis of a phrase in the original
text which is otherwise unintelligible. But, in the remaining
instances, there is no such support for the hypothesis; there is
only a degree of probability, which must take its chance with
rival interpretations. The probability, in the case of Samson's
riddle, arises from the cryptic association of "sweet" with
"Strong", of honey with a lion; in the case of Daniel's apologue
of Nebuchadnezzar's fall, it arises from the eating of "grass",
the Semitic word having both a generic and a colloquial meaning
(hachish), as well as from the introduction of the subjective
perceptions of hachish intoxication as gigantic or grotesque
objects.
*Samson's riddle.* -- According to old and new criticism, by
Budde and others, there is a glaring contradiction between the
real or original Samson, the boisterous village hero of whom
many stories were told, and the religious Samson, the judge of
Israel, who was dedicated to God as a Nazarite "from the womb
to the day of his death". It is admitted, however, that there is a
peculiar unity in the text of the story as it has come down to us
in the Book of Judges, notwithstanding the apparent incongruity
of making Samson a Nazarite. The Nazarites are mentioned as
early as the prophecies of Amos, having been allowed to drink
wine in the laxity of morals then prevailing. Samson is not only
the earliest Nazarite known, but he is a Nazarite indeed,
inasmuch as his vow was not terminable after a certain period,
as in the ritual of the Book of Numbers, but was imposed upon
him from the womb to the day of his death. In that respect he
has no compeer until John the Baptist. At the same time, he is
the typical village hero, adored for his strength, boldness,
cunning, and wit, and gratified by numerous amours. Budde
remarks that many must have known a modern counterpart in
village life. Two instances in literature occur to one as
containing the elements of a modern Samson legend, -- the
Oetzthal hero in Madame von Hillern's *Geier Wally*, and the
hero or *jigit* of the village on the Terek in Tolstoy's early
work, *The Cossacks*. Budde, who would eliminate altogether
the Nazarite vow from the real Samson legend, is surprised that
the hero does not eat and drink to excess: "Excess, or at least
enormous capacity, in eating and in drinking strong liquors, is
amongst the things that may almost be taken for granted. It is
strange enough that this trait is not strikingly displayed in
Samson. Who knows, whether from the store of legends that
circulated regarding him, there may not have dropped out this or
that portion dealing with the subject in question?" (Art.
"Samson", in Hasting's, *Dict. of the Bible.* Edin. 1902.)
Josephus appears to have entertained a similar suspicion; for, in
his paraphrase of Delilah's attempts to bind Samson, he makes
on of the attempts to be made upon him when he was drunk with
wine. But it is impossible to take out the Nazarite vow from the
story as we find it; that thread is woven inextricably into the
tapestry; and it may be assumed that Samson's unshorn head
was meant to symoblise his constancy to the vow -- or, at all
events, to the letter of it. My view (which I submit with
deference to the professed Biblical critics) is, that the method of
the literary artist, who composed the existing story, is
consistently ironical and witty. Anyone, who has had his
attention directed to the point, will have found that the instances
of Biblical wit are more numerous that might be supposed from
the solemnity of commentators. Why should not this ancient
literature have had its sallies of wit and humour as well as
another? The Hebrew grammars, remark that the humorous
figure of paronomasia, or pun, is more indigenous to the Semitic
than to any other languages.
Samson's riddle, on the surface, was a mild pleasantry,
hardly worth investing with the dignity of enigma; it has even
been questioned, whether it was a fair problem, considering that
it was based upon one particular if not unique incident known to
himself. He killed a young lion, and threw the carcase into a
wood; in passing that way some time after, he turned aside to
look at it, and found that a swarm of bees had built their combs
inside the ribs. (This is the natural reading, which is adopted by
Josephus in his paraphrase.) He ate some of the honey, and
gave some of it to his father and mother; but, for some deep
reason, he abstained from telling his parents that the honey had
been taken from inside the skeleton of a lion. At his wedding
feast some time after, he propounded a certain riddle to the thirty
young men of Timnath, who were the wedding guests, and laid
a wager that they would not guess the answer within a week.
Being still at fault on the seventh day, they went to Samson's
wife, and induced her to coax the answer from her husband.
Samson answered: "Behold, I have not told my father and my
mother, and shall I tell thee?" However, he told her the incident
of the lion and the bees, and she told the young men of the
village, who came to Samson with this confident and jubilant
solution, "What is sweeter than honey? What is stronger than a
lion?" Samson answered oracularly, "If ye had not plowed with
my heifer, ye had not found out my riddle". This answer
appears to have been given ironically, with his tongue in his
cheek, the reservation being, that their ploughing (with a heifer)
had been but shallow, that they had not got to the bottom of the
matter at all. He may be assumed to have been still in his
ironical mood when he proceeded to pay the forfeit, by killing
thirty other Philistines of Ashkelon and stripping them of their
shirts to give to the thirty Philistines of Timnath.
Leaving these evidences of ironical behaviour, let us turn to
the famous riddle itself. Is it possible that it can have any deeper
meaning than the incident of the bees' nest in the lion's carcase?
What I suspect in Samson's riddle is *an ambiguity in the
terms in which it was stated*. To those who heard it, it might
mean either what it means as printed in the text, or it might mean
something else as an equivoque. Of course, no single text can
reproduce an equivocal effect of spoken words, depending upon
paronomasia. There is a good example in 'Hamlet', III. 2. 262:
*Ophelia*: "Still better and worse". *Hamlet*: "So you *must
take* your husband". This is the reading of the first quarto; but
it is clear that "must take" is to be pronounced ambiguously,
from the fact that the second quarto prints it: "So you mistake
your husbands", which is necessary to the innuendo, and is in
the folio and in most later texts, although "must take" is the
natural *ductus idearum* from the previous reference to the
Marriage Service. The equivoque in Samson's riddle is of the
same kind. It may mean what the text makes it to mean, or it
may mean exactly the converse, without changing the order and
works; thus:
An eater came forth out of meat,
Strength came forth out of sweetness;
-- namely, Samson's strength from hachish. To understand
how the *spoken* Hebrew words might be heart to bear either
sense, according as they were apprehended by the ear, one must
observe that the preposition "out of", which governs the
meaning by being placed in front of one or other of the two
nouns, is the sound *m*' (contraction of *min*), and that the
same sound happens to begin the other nouns also:
*m' ahachal* *yatsah* *maachal*
out of the-eater came forth meat
*m' gaz* *yatsah* *mathok*
out of the strong came forth sweetness.
There appears to be no way of prefixing the prepositional
*m'* to the last noun of each line except by reduplicating the
*m* which is already there, as if by stammering over it -- *m'
maachal, m' mathok*, which might be merely a slight stammer,
or might mean respectively, "*out of* meat", and "*out of*
sweetness". Again, *to get rid* of the preposition from before
the first word of the first line, one must read (as the LXX had
actually done) *mah achal*, the first syllable being a distinct
word, the interrogative pronoun, ..., *quid*, which would be
used to introduce the riddle as a query, "What is this?" to get rid
of the preposition from before the first word in the second line,
one has to substitute for *gaz*, which is the adjective "strong",
its abstract noun *magohz* = "strength", a substitution which is
recommended as balancing *mathok* "sweetness", in abstract
form. The concealed reading would then be:
*mah* *achal* *yatsah* *m' maachal*
What is this? An eater came forth out of meat,
*magohz* *yatsah* *m' mathok*
strength came forth out of sweetness
Thus, to the ear, the riddle may really contain that deeper
problem which ought to be in it if it is to stand for the riddle or
secret of Samson's own strength. The superficial meaning,
which Samson's wife jumped at and conveyed to the young
Philistines of Timnath, is that food (honey) came forth out of the
eater, (lion), sweetness out of the strong one. The deep
meaning is just the converse -- that the eater "came forth out of"
meat, strength out of sweetness. Thus we arrive at some kind of
"food", (not drink) which made one an eater, or a devourer, like
a lion; a sweet food from which came strength. It is pointed out
that the antithesis of the second line, between "sweet" and
"strong", is not a good one; and the Syriac version has gone so
far as to change "strong" into "bitter" for the sake of the
antithesis to "sweet". But the author certainly wanted to
introduce the idea of strength, even if it were no full antithesis to
sweetness; and his reason, doubtless, was, that he was thinking
of Samson himself, and of the secret of his strength, which was
a cryptic "sweetness". From various points of view, we arrive
at the conclusion, that the honey from the carcase of a lion was
not the honey of bees, but an allegory of that strong kind of
honey which causes Jonathan's eyes to be enlightened, namely
the resin of the hemp-plant. It was "sweeter than honey,
stronger than a lion", as the men of Timnath are the unconscious
means of suggesting, by the mood and figure of the answer.
We are now able to follow the ironical purpose of the author
in its entirety, in making Samson a Nazarite and yet a
boisterous, free-living village hero of the most admired type.
The stimulant, which the hero used, was not drink, it was food;
thus it was outside the purview of the Nazarite vow, which
specified many things , but did not specify hachish: "wine and
strong drink, vinegar of wine and vinegar of strong drink, liquor
of grapes, grapes moist or dried, everything that is made of the
vine from the kernels even to the husk". Samson could be made
to pose cleverly as a Nazarite, and yet have his fling all the
same. Budde's desideratum of strong drink, to complete the
equipment of Samson as a village hero, is supplied by a
subterfuge. It appears that the Jewish sense of humour ran
strongly in that direction.
The story of Samson is not far removed in time, or in manner
of telling, from that of Saul and Jonathan; so that, if I am right in
my interpretation of the nature of the taboo which Jonathan
broke, the period at the end of Judges and the beginning of the
Kings was one in which the hachish-question had become
actual. thus it becomes probable that the strength of Samson had
the same source in stimulants as the prowess of Jonathan upon a
particular occasion. It is also remarkable that Samson's
"strength" collapses, just as Saul's courage fails him; and that
the failure in both cases is described by the same phrase:- in the
case of Samson the words are, "the Lord had departed from
him", in the case of Saul the narrative reads, "God is departed
from me, and answereth me no more, neither by prophets nor by
dreams". The material sense of both I take to be, that the
stimulant had lost its power over them, it being a property of
hachish to produce hebetude in those who have used it habitually
over a long time. Samson's recovery of his strength is, of
course, for the sake of dramatic catastrophe.
*The apologue of "Nebuchadnezzar" in Daniel*. The
beginning of these inquiries upon indications of hachish in the
Bible was a suggestion made to me by the late R.A. Neil, of
Cambridge, that the "grass" which Nebuchadnezzar was given
to eat may have been grass in the colloquial Arabic sense of
hachish, the word by which Indian hemp is now so commonly
known being the same as the ordinary Arabic word for grass or
green herbage in general (*hachach*). In seeking to follow up
this idea one finds much to corroborate it in the details of the
story of "morality" which is told of Nebuchadnezzar. The story
begins with an account of dreams and visions of the night, in
which the central object, the tree reaching to heaven and
spreading to the ends of the earth, is highly characteristic of the
elusive and infinite demensions in the subjective perceptions of
hachish intoxication (Compare Bayard Taylor, *The Lands of
the Saracens*; the pyramid of Gizen came before him, with its
sides resting against the vault of the sky).
Daniel, being asked to interpret the dream, declares that the
tree is the mighty Nebuchadnezzar himself, and the fate of the
felled tree his fate: "They shall drive thee from men, and thy
dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field, and they shall
make thee to eat grass as oxen, and they shall wet thee with the
dew of heaven." This fate, it appears, was on account of his
sins and iniquities. But, as the root of the tree was to be left in
the earth, so there was a power of recovery in the degraded
prince, and he was to return to his kingdom after seven years. It
happened as Daniel had said: "Nebuchadnezzar was driven from
men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the
dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles' feathers,
and his nails like birds' claws. And at the end of the days, I
Nebuchadnezzar lifted up mine eyes unto heaven, and mine
understanding returned unto me." One might provide much
amusement by recalling some of the many literal attempts,
ancient and modern, to explain the nature of Nebuchadnezzar's
debasement. The double sense of the word "grass", which may
be assumed to have existed in the ancient Semitic languages or
dialects as in modern Arabic, is a key to the whole enigma.
There appears to be a cryptic reference to hachish not only in the
recurring phrase "They shall give thee grass to eat, as oxen", but
also in the significant introduction of "dew" with equal
reiteration, "they shall wet thee with the dew of heaven." The
allegory is easily extended to, "let a beast's heart be given unto
him", "let his portion be with the beasts of the field", and, "his
body was wet with the dew of heaven". But the most significant
detail of all is that which follows the last quoted phrase: "until
his hairs were grown like eagles' feathers, and his nails like
birds' claws". This is again the grotesque exaggeration and
metamorphosis of one's own features etc. caused by the hachish
subjectivity, which is unlike anything else in morbid imaginings.
There have been real instances among Oriental rulers of hachish
degradation such as "Nebuchadnezzar's"; an example was
rumoured when Upper Burma was occupied by the British some
five-and-twenty years ago. The apologue of Daniel, told of one
under a great historical name, is meant to be general, and has
had a sufficiently wide application, doubtless, in ancient times as
well as in modern.
Lastly, and still in the same Chaldaean atmosphere, we find
in the first chapter of Ezekiel a phantasmagoria of composite
creatures, of wheels, and of brilliant play of colours, which is
strongly suggestive of the subjective visual perceptions of
hachish, and is unintelligible from any other point of view,
human or divine. This is the chapter of Ezekiel that gave so
much trouble to the ancient canonists, and is said to have made
them hesitate about including the book. Ezekiel was included in
the Canon, but with the instruction that no one in the Synagogue
was to attempt to comment upon Chapter I, or, according to
another version, that the opening chapter was not to be read by
or to persons under a certain age. The subjective sensations
stimulated by hachish are those of sight and hearing. It would
be easy to quote examples of fantastic composite form, and of
wondrous colours, which have been seen by experiments. I
must content myself with the generality of Theophile Gautier
(cited by Moreau, *l.c.*, from feuilleton in *La Presse*), that,
if he were to write down all that he saw, he should be writing
the Apocalypse over again (*recommencer l'Apocalypse*). If
this contains an innuendo against the Apocalypse of John, I do
not agree with it, in asmuch as I believe that no part of Scripture
is more rational in its method, or more calmly inspired in its
motives. But, as regards the apocalypse introductory to the
prophecies of Ezekiel, one need not hesitate to assign it to the
source indicated by the witty Frenchman.
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