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)