Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/243

Rh by the worshipers drinking the libations themselves. Of course, the pleasant after effects were considered as solely due to the divine favor, and not to any ingredient common also to the vulgar sura.

In the Bible we find frequent references to both the good and the evil effects of wine. In such marked contrast do some of these passages stand that serious effort has been made, by many well-intentioned moralists, to attribute all the favorable comments—"Wine that maketh glad the heart of man," "Thou hast put gladness into their hearts since the time that their corn and wine and oil increased," and the like—to unfermented grape juice or to the fruit itself, and to apply to the fermented juice, the wine of our everyday life, only the passages, so well known and so frequently quoted, of condemnation. Some grounds for their belief exist in the fact that two Hebrew words, yayin and tirosh, occurring in the Old Testament, are both translated in the authorized version as "wine," although yayin is almost always mentioned with scorn and contempt and tirosh with approval. But this is not always the case. The substances meant by both words are condemned alike in a chapter in Hosea (Hosea, iv, 2). And, furthermore, it is very doubtful whether the unfermented



grape juice is not mentioned under an entirely different word, debish, translated as honey. In that hot climate, with no glass jars and rubber stoppers in which the sterilized grape juice could be preserved, and with no antiseptics to delay or prevent fermentation, the fresh grape juice must have been at once boiled