Posted on 09/23/2017 7:56:37 AM PDT by Kaslin
Just when you think you’ve heard it all, a pastor calls your radio show asking how to respond to a congregant who claims that cannabis was sanctioned by God in the Torah. That’s right, sanctioned by the Lord Himself, not to be smoked but to be burned in large quantities by the priests of Israel. Far out!
To be sure, there was a time in my life when I would have readily believed something like this, since I spent 1969-1971 as a heavy drug-using, hippie rock drummer, consuming everything from pot to LSD and from speed to heroin. Not surprisingly, when my two best friends starting reading the Bible, telling me about the more esoteric passages in the Scriptures – all kinds of visions and dreams and revelations – I asked them in jest, “What were they smoking?”
That, in fact, is what I asked the pastor (again, in jest) who called the show: What is this congregant smoking?
It turns out that there is an alleged scholarly basis for this bogus belief, namely, that the Hebrew words qaneh-bosem in Exod 30:23 refer to marijuana, or, more specifically, hemp. And note the apparent similarity in the words: qaneh-bosem and cannabis. That proves it, right?
According to the Herb Museum website, it was in 1936 that a little-known Polish professor named Sara Benetowa (later Sula Benet) wrote, “The sacred character or Hemp in biblical times is evident from Exodus 30:22- 23, where Moses was instructed by God to anoint the meeting tent and all its furnishings with specially prepared oil, containing hemp.”
This was allegedly confirmed by other Hebrew scholars. And obviously, with the rising popularity of marijuana in today’s culture, arguments like this have great appeal for Christians who want to get high. Not only did their state pass a pro-pot law, but God’s into it too!
As one website proclaims in bold, red letters: “The fact is that the Holy Oil contained 6 Pounds of (Marijuana) with other spices boiled into one gallon of Olive oil! The Holy Oil of God is illegal to obtain today!!!”
Really!
During my drug-using years, I often went to rock concerts at the Fillmore East in New York, seeing groups like Led Zeppelin and the Who and the Grateful Dead and Jethro Tull, among many others.
It was the perfect concert atmosphere, seating only about 2,000 people and with a dynamic light show behind the performers. But it was also a hippie paradise, since the whole place smelled like pot. Is that what the ancient Temple smelled like in Jerusalem? Maybe the priests got high on mushrooms too!
Returning to reality, the alleged connection between qaneh-bosem and cannabis simply doesn’t exist.
Note first that qaneh-bosem is two words in Hebrew, not one. And the words are easily translated, qaneh meaning a stalk or reed, and bosem meaning “sweet smelling.”
Some scholars translate the words together to refer to “aromatic cane,” “scented cane,” or “sweet-smelling cane,” others “sweet calamus” or “fragrant calamus.”
But not a single scholarly, biblical Hebrew lexicon in the world connects these words with cannabis. I can say that emphatically because I own them all, in multiple languages. The alleged connection isn’t there.
It is also certain, for various phonetic and linguistic reasons, that the word cannabis, which comes from the Greek kannabis, is not related to these two Hebrew words. To put it bluntly, there’s no more connection between Hebrew qaneh-bosem and Greek kannabis than there is between “Moses” and “mice.”
As for those who can’t study the issue for themselves, note carefully this commandment to Aaron, the High Priest, and his successors: “Drink no wine or strong drink, you or your sons with you, when you go into the tent of meeting, lest you die. It shall be a statute forever throughout your generations” (Lev. 10:9). Sobriety was a must for those coming into the presence of God.
This makes the claim all the more ridiculous that the Lord commanded large amounts of pot to be burning in this very same holy place. Yes, be sure not to drink any wine or strong drink, but go ahead and inhale deeply!
As for those Christians who feel that smoking pot “in moderation” is fine, since it’s now legal in their state, a word of caution.
First, pot remains a gateway drug, often leading to the use of other, harder drugs, along with becoming addictive in and of itself.
Second, pot today is far more potent than when I smoked it more than 46 years ago.
Third, new studies are pointing to health risks and driving risks associated with marijuana. (See here on pot use in Colorado.)
Fourth, you’ll have a hard time fulfilling the biblical mandate to “be sober and vigilant” (1 Peter 5:8) while smoking a joint.
In any case, people will have to sort out the question of smoking pot, just as they sort out the question of drinking. (The subject of medical marijuana is another question entirely.)
What I can tell you without hesitation is that God never prescribed pot – as incense or to be smoked – anywhere in the Bible. That’s a fact.
Two things:
IMO, marijuana is not a “gateway” drug. It seems so simply because the same black market dude that sells pot also likely has much of the other illegal substances.
Hemp is not cannabis. They are kin, but you can smoke all the hemp you want and never get a buzz, therefore this is a (wait for it.....) straw man.
Trim school nuns...God love em
Scroungey looking buds though
No baby arm noogs.....dude
Are they using fiskers......I bet they are
You go to Arcata California or Cave Junction Oregon the next two months and you see kids standing around on corners holding Fiskers like illegals at Home Depot
It’s fall harvest....
100 a pound to trim
Damn cherry
You got porn in there somehow.....what is it with the ladies porn Nazi auxiliary here?
For the record
Porn is much much much worse than marihuana
Well changing water into wine sure was sanctioning drug use
The lungs have adapted to the inhallation of smoke, especially from camp and cooking fires.
I live in SW OR. “Legal” dope growing is making our already corrupt and lawless county even worse, steep descent into total crapdom. More than 90% of grow ups are unlicensed and thus illegal, the place is crawling with tatttooed filthy felons who just moved here, laid down cash dollars for property, and instantly are growing hundreds of plants, stealing water (no water rights) from streams or sucking the acquifer dry, illegally conducting commercial ag on land not zoned for commercial ag, and using who knows what chemicals. Last year 80% of the LEGAL dope failed the tests for chemicals, and thus could not be sold in the legal dope stores.
It’s insane here. I didn’t even mention the huge surge in crime - assaults, breakins, car thefts, murders.
Yeah, every single solitary plant in the entire world! Including poisonous ones!
I used to be an alcholic, and later a drug user.
Back in the olden days when mj was way milder than now.
People can use alcohol responsibly, like a beer or two here or there, for example.
But two tokes of modern pot makes people instantly stupid and crazy and continued use damages the brain and personality permanently.
The hemp plant is the cannabis sativa plant. Some strains are simply engineered to produce THC by growing only the female plants and preventing them from being fertilized by the male plants, while other strains are cultivated specifically for the industrial applications related to hemp fiber: rope, etc. The hemp plant produces one of the strongest natural fibers known to science.
So you are correct that one will never get a buzz from smoking hemp. Nonetheless, hemp fiber for rope, and marijuana buds for smoking are both products of the same cannabis species, namely cannabis sativa.
Specifically, there are at least 2 cannabis species—and hybrids thereof—and possibly 3 or more: cannabis indica, cannabis sativa, and I believe the 3rd is called cannabis ruderalis, which some hold to be a subspecies of cannabis sativa.
According to Wikipedia, "although cannabis as a drug and industrial hemp both derive from the species Cannabis sativa and contain the psychoactive component tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), they are distinct strains with unique phytochemical compositions and uses".
As for God prescribing the use of cannabis in the Bible, that's not relevant. God made the plant, and therefore for the State to claim the right to put a free human being in prison for possessing it is laughable on its face.
Indeed, anyone who could embrace such arbitrary law necessarily holds an extremely expansive—even arbitrary—view of State power, and can hardly call themselves a "small government" conservative.
The ever-expanding police state needed to enforce contraband law—and the trampling of Unalienable rights which comes with it—represents an effectively unlimited view of State power over the Individual, of the kind which the Left typically uses to justify its nanny-state Tyranny.
As such, I categorically reject such practically unlimited State power—which criminalizes individuals in the total absence of their having infringed on anyone's rights—for the Tyrannical Prohibitionist garbage that it is.
We've seen the lessons of alcohol Prohibition, and since alcohol is, hands down, the worst drug on the face of the earth—worse than all other drugs combined—there is simply nothing which can justify contraband law.
An individual's "pursuit of happiness" is not subject to the whims of any mob—whether on the Left or the right—and consequently such nanny-state views of government power epitomize the totalitarian mindset, and create an expansive model of government which is the diametric opposite of the principle of belief in minimal government...
The vast majority of people on “harder” drugs started with pot. It is indeed a “gateway” drug. Don’t do pot, and the chances are vast that you don’t ever do any other drugs. It’s a drug culture that causes this, and people who smoke after a while the high is less intense and they want something with more kick or oomph.
If you want to get stupid and crazy with drugs, and use pot, sooner or later other stuff is tempting. Many, many people use multiple drugs and often booze, at the same time.
The culture that says it’s perfectly fine and virtuous to damage your intelligence, mind and character with intoxication is to blame.
No they haven’t. That’s a ridiculous assertion.
Hmm,a set of lungs can still inhale, exhale and deliver oxygen to the bloodstream after 40 years of smoking cigarettes. You don’t think human lungs have developed an adaptation to deal with smoke? Inconceivable!
So it’s worse than medical days?
I just always noticed a lot of hippies and grand kid hippies in CJ.
Of course a lot of folks grew pot there
The northern half of the coast is too wet to grow weed well
Despite hippies southwest Oregon went Trump
South of Eugene pot or not it’s Trump nation
Weird huh kinda defies the stereotype
Are you saying strangers have moved in
I haven’t been there since 2014 before recreational pot
Most lib town in Oregon though ain’t Eugene or Portland
It’s Ashland.....most lib town I’ve seen
I love Oregon though......I kind deal with hippie libertarians
Sorry to hear about the riff raff though
Now eastern Oregon is like Texas
They just talk different
Holy weed
Which is why no one ever dies of smoke inhalation during a fire ...........
That isn’t a good example because there isn’t enough oxygen for the lungs to deliver but when you are tending a cooking fire for the majority of your life, you inhale plenty of smoke and your lungs deal with it.
The 'BBQ gene': Early humans evolved to tolerate smoke so they could cook on an open fire
In just a year or two pot will be so potent it will surpass LSD in the quantity required to get you trippin.
No. Really !!
And your lungs suffer from it. Just as they do from inhaling any kind of smoke, especially long term.
That is why people in third world countries, primarily women, who inhale smoke from cooking fires, often in primitive stoves, have lung problems.
I have actually read about this. Human lungs are designed for breathing clean air, and breathing any kind of smoke regularly damages them.
Just like apples have been getting increasingly more appleier since just about everyone is addicted to eating them and oranges have become SO orange thats what we call them now!
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