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Beer in Ancient times

Dr. Homan’s article “Beer and it’s drinkers in the Ancient Near East” refers to influence that alcohol and beer had on the lives of people during ancient times; a time when few people would think alcohol was very popular. Today, alcoholic beverages such as beer are viewed as mind-numbing beverages, which causes the average to behave in a foolish manner that they normally wouldn’t. Alcohol is used as a relaxant that allows one to free them from stress and has been used for this purpose since ancient times. According to the Epic of Gilgamesh, drinking is apart of what makes of human. It was a drink suitable for all classes of society. In ancient religions beer was looked at as a drink for social occasions and was even used medically as remedies for constipation, coughs swollen and other small bodily dysfunctions. As a matter of fact, during that time beer was safer to drink than water because beer consisted of certain ingredients that killed of fatal microorganism. Homan’s article even claims that Jesus himself was a drinker. Wine was a common drink of people during ancient times and like most alcoholic beverages it was consumed at social events. Beer from ancient times tastes completely different than beer of today. There are several extra ingredients in beer of today, but beer during ancient times probably taste like water and malted bread. YUCK! I personally don’t like beer anyway, so all sounds gross to me.

Textual criticism also known as Lower criticism examines the text and many biblical manuscripts that make up the bible. It is referred to as lower criticism because textual criticism uses biblical text from the earliest times. Masoretic Text Vulgate, Targumims and Dead Sea Scrolls and a few of Greek texts are used in textual criticism that is known to be some of the earliest forms of biblical text. It’s very complicated considering the many versions and translated text they have to refer to in order to find the actual meaning of certain biblical text. The opposite of Textual criticism is Higher criticism.

In order to figure who was the actual author of the Torah, biblical authors used Higher Criticism, which is used to discover the original sources of the Bible. Higher Criticism also called Source Criticism begins with the hypothesis that the biblical writings as we now have them are a combination of once distinct written documents that were only later brought together. Julius Wellhausen wrote a book entitled Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Prolegomena to the History of Israel) that argued that the Torah was a combination of several documents that were written several centuries apart by previous scholars. In order to identify these sources he used the letters J, E, P, D, R and Q. The letter “J” is used to represent The Yahwistic source which refers to writings that contain conversations with God or Yahweh and includes dreams, talking animals sex, and several other things. The letter “E” stands for Elohim, the name that God was referred to before he revealed his divine name Yahweh, to Moses. The letter “P” stands for Priestly since the material generally refers to priesthood and their acts such as sacrificing. The letter “D” stands for Deuteronomic, which refers to the different theological outlook and language used in the book of Deuteronomy. The letter “R” which stands for Redactor refers to the union of DPJ and E. The letter “Q” stands for Quelle.

Many people believe that Moses was the original author of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Torah. However, this is not the case. The reason that many people believe Moses wrote the Torah is because of a mistranslation of a passage Deuteronomy 31:9 that says he wrote the Torah. Here the word Torah means “law” of ”instructions” in Hebrew. There is nothing in the Bible that says that Moses wrote any of the text that is in Genesis to Deuteronomy.

After Jesus’ birth, In 586 BCE the city of Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians. This event can found in the book of Lamentations. Jeremiah, who saw the destruction of Jerusalem first hand, is known to be the most depressing book in the Bible. For this reason, Jeremiah is known as the “Weeping Prophet”. Visions of death, torture and enslavement consumed this period.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 31st, 2006 at 9:35 pm and is filed under Class Comments, Week 10: More Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.