The history of spices more or less coincides with written history. And there is evidence as early as the third millennium BC of a lively trade in spices from distant lands, of trade empires such as Egypt and Assyria. Maritime trade was conducted on the shores of the Indian Ocean, and was conducted overland as far as China. The coast from which the spice trade was conducted was the Malabar coast in India (Kerala), through which spices such as pepper, cardamom and cinnamon were traded. It is believed that the ships sent by Hatshepsut to bring goods and spices were not to Punt down the Nile but rather to India via the Red Sea. Regarding Solomon, it is also believed that the ships he sent to “Ophir” were actually for the same coast.

It seems that the one who controlled the trade routes, or at least the one who managed to maintain continuous trade relations with this region (and the continent, therefore) was the one who had the power. Because the land closest to the “West” is the Arabian Peninsula, the Arabs controlled the trade to India, and more or less whoever controlled them or had good relations with them, he had this power. In the days when geographical knowledge was poor, the Arabs also kept the road to India a secret and therefore had a kind of monopoly on it.

This was in their favor when the Romans, after conquering Egypt, sought to take away the monopoly in the spice trade. A Roman fleet left for Aden in 24 BC with the aim of “convincing” the Arabs to accept Rome as a partner. But because they did not have this geographical knowledge, and also the knowledge to deal with the difficult conditions of the road, their journey failed and the ships sank. Those who did not drown were mistaken in their journey.

But the Romans did not give up. Sixty years later, during the time of Claudius Caesar, a Greek merchant named Hippalus discovered the cycle of monsoon storms. This important discovery, which had been known to the Arabs for many years, shortened the journey from Rome to India from two years to less than a year. Following this discovery, control of the spice trade passed into the hands of the Romans until the fall of the Roman Empire.

When the Goths stood at the gates of Rome in 408 AD, they demanded as a ransom for not destroying the city, five thousand pounds of gold, thirty thousand pounds of silver, four thousand silk robes, three thousand pounds of fine scarlet cloth and three thousand pounds of pepper. Rome did not meet the conditions since the public treasury ran out, and on August 24, 410, the city fell to the Goths. Edward Gibbon claims that pepper was at that time a central ingredient in Roman cuisine and was sold for 15 dinars per pound. This made pepper especially popular among the former Roman colonies, and strengthened the Mediterranean trade.

Following the fall of Rome, the trading empire also fell and the Arabs took over the trade to India again, and controlled it until the end of the middle ages. Arab trade brought the spices from India to the Mediterranean, and trade in the Mediterranean was usually controlled by the Venetians. In fact, what drove Columbus was the competition to find new trade routes to India, and in the end it went to the Portuguese. But too late. Columbus discovered the chili (and some say, the pimenta, the allspice), and marketed it as “pepper”, so that for the Spanish this eliminated the need for Indian pepper.

The meaning of the name Dionysus is the god from “Nysa”. Erroneous etymologies associate the name Dionysus with “the twice-born”, as well as with “limp of Zeus”, to allude to the story of the birth of Dionysus.

The story goes like this: Zeus and Hera were married, but Zeus fell in love with all kinds of other women, and Hera who was jealous of him hated them and cursed them, or put obstacles in their way that ended up eliminating the threat from them, usually they died. This was also the case with the mother of Dionysus, Semele, daughter of the king of Thebes. Zeus fell in love with her and she got pregnant. Hera made Semele wishing to see Zeus in the form of lightning, in all his glory. This means death, and indeed a Semele died. Zeus managed to save her baby by uprooting him from her womb and putting it in his thigh.

Some time later Dionysus was born from the thigh of Zeus and therefore his name: “Dio Genissos” (δύο γέννησόσ), the one who was born twice, when the G is not pronounced. Nonus of Panopolis, a Christian Greek poet of the fifth century, wrote the work “Dionysica”, in which he claims that in the Syracuse language “Nisus” is a limp on the thigh, a symbol of Zeus’ limp while carrying Dionysus on his thigh, due to his weight.

What is Nissa? It is not clear. The philosopher Pherecydes of Syros claimed that this is an archaic Greek word for tree (nũsa), but the popular opinion was that it was a nymph of that name in whose hands Zeus entrusted the raising of his son and she raised him on a diet of honey in a place called Nysa, where he invented wine. A multitude of cities therefore claimed to be the birthplace of God, as was the city of Beit Shean in the Land of Israel. Coins were also found there in which the figure of Dionysus leaps from the right thigh of Zeus, similar to Eve born from the Adam rib. Pliny the Elder also says that Scythopolis, the name of Beit Shean at that time, was formerly Nysa and was named after the nurse of Dionysus, as she was buried there. The city was indeed a center of worship for Dionysus.

In the book “Land of Wine” by Oded Feingarsh and David Eitam (1988) it is stated that the city of Rafah was at the time another city where there was a center for the worship of Dionysus. Although the etymology of Rafah is unknown, it is of Egyptian origin. However, it is claimed in the book, and it should be noted that I did not find a reference for this on the Internet, that the etymology of the city is Greek. Rhaphe in Greek is a seam (ῥαφή), a connection between two parts of an organ or skin tissue, and the city is named after the seam that Zeus made in his thigh after putting Dionysus within it. The city of Rafah was called in Greek Ῥαφία and therefore in Latin Rhaphía.

Through these myths about Dionysus one can see a considerable similarity to the story of the creation of Eve in Genesis 2. The fact that the myth mentions a limp and a thigh, alludes both to the unclear “rib” that God took from Adam “and closed flesh under it”, after all, this is the seam under the missing rib, and to Jacob’s struggle with the angel, during which the angel touched his thigh and it was broken, and thus Jacob became “limp on his thigh”, the same “Jacob’s thigh” that his sons went down to Egypt from (Exodus 1). Thigh, by the way, is a clean word for the genital organ in the Bible, so there is a reasonable chance that when it is said that someone came out of someone else’s thigh, it is simply a poetic way to say that it is his son. And then… Dionysus is the son of God. The next time you talk about the analogy between Christ and Dionysus, remember this.

PS It is not clear if the fact that Rebecca’s nurse was called Deborah (i.e a bee) is related to the honey diet that Nysa gave to Dionysus. But the fact is that the Bible bothers to mention her burial immediately after entering the Land.

In the Bible there are many words in Hebrew that describe the vine, the products of the vine and the processing of the vine. On the one hand, this proves the centrality of the grapevine industry in the Hebrew-speaking culture in ancient times, but also probably proves a meeting between cultures. The duplication of words in languages, several words that describe the same thing, does not necessarily prove the richness of the language but sometimes rather the meeting of cultures and the way in which each culture used its words to describe the same thing. We have such an example in the English language, where there are sometimes three or more forms to describe the same word, because in England the Latin, Germanic and Celtic languages ​​met. So also in Hebrew, it turns out, the Semitic languages ​​(Akkadian, for example), the Hamites (Egyptian) and the Indo-European languages ​​(Hittite, etc.) met.

In their book “The Land of Wine” (1988), Oded Feingersh and David Eitam trace the origin of wine, and come to the conclusion that although the earliest archaeobotanical evidence of the existence of the cultivated vine is in a drilling done at the bottom of the Sea of ​​Galilee in 1979, there is no single answer regarding the determination of the origin of the domestication of the vine. And since more archaeobotanical findings were found in Anatolia, the accepted opinion is that it was cultivated there as early as 7000 BC, and arrived in Israel in the early Canaanite period or the Chalcolithic period only 4000 years later. The cultivated vine was brought to Egypt in the middle of the third millennium BC and to the Aegean world hundreds of years later.

And since it seems that the origin on the culture of the vine is from this area of ​​West Asia, the speaker of the Indo-European language, it is understandable why there is so much similarity in the languages ​​derived from that ancient language. They bring the Hittite, Cypriot and Slavic languages ​​where the wine is called Wo-i-no, the Greek-Doric dialect where the wine is called “foinos” (ϝοῖνος), the classical Greek in which the archaic letter “digama” or “waw” marked as ϝ, has fallen out of use , and therefore it was omitted and the wine was called “Oinos” only οἶνος, or the Latin where there is still a remnant of the existence of the F which is supposed to be the equivalent of the phoenician “waw”, meaning the sixth letter in the alphabet, Vinum. We see such examples of F that became and was omitted in Greek also in other words as for example “I see” in Greek Oida οἶδα and in Latin “vidi”. Also in other languages ​​that are a little more distant but still of Indo-European origin there are remnants, such as the Slavic languages, the Armenian Gini, or the Georgian Gvino.

The question is, of course, what does the Hebrew word “Yayn” mean, is it Indo-European, is it a borrowed word? We see the word “Yan” ין in Akkadian and Ugaritic. We also see this word in Phoenician, or if we call it Canaanite, as it was discovered in Tel Afek. Before they added the second Y (i.e Yayn instead of Yan), this was also the case in ancient Hebrew. Samaria pottery testifies to this. The letter Y was added only as a sign of convenience to words whose Morpheme is “Ketel”. We see that Gezer Tablet also pronounces the word “Kaytz” this way, but writes it “Katz”.

Benjamin Noonan explains that wine is a “cultural word” and therefore wandered between cultures that came into contact. A cultural word is actually a word borrowed from one language to another, either through an intermediate language or through direct entry through a variety of entry points. Gerry Randsburg also calls these words so. Jonathan Thambyrajah in his book “Loanwords in Biblical Literature Rhetorical Studies in Esther, Daniel, Ezra and Exodus” deals with the appearance of the word wine in the book of Exodus, and distinguishes between certain parts in the book where there are a large number of words that are considered to be borrowed and places with few. The sources in which there are fewer borrowed words include the word “wine”, and then he wonders if the etymology of this word should even be considered a borrowed word, or whether at the time when Exodus was written it was already considered a full-fledged Hebrew word. Therefore, by the way, the opinion of the French Maurice Vernes in his book “Les Emprunts de La Bible Hebraique Au Grec Et Au Latin” (1923) that the word wine was borrowed from the Greek is rejected, since it is probable that the encounter between the Semitic and Indo-Europeans was much earlier, during the encounter between the Hittites and the Akkadians, In the third millennium BC and earlier.

There is of course also a third opinion, according to which the word “wine” originates from a language earlier than the Indo-European invasion, a “Mediterranean substrate” or a “pre-Greek substrate”. Behind this opinion stood Charles Autran in 1926 and Albert Cuny in 1910, a supporter of the Nostratic theory. Today this theory is not accepted, and it seems that languages ​​developed independently of each other, and similar words were created by chance or as a result of intercultural connections.

Appendix 1: The fruit of the vine (Hebrew: Enav) in Amharic is called a Anab (አናብ) and in Tigrania therefore wine is named after this grape word, “Nebit” ነቢት. The origin of the word vine (Hebrew: Gefen) came from Akkadian, Gapnu or Gupnu, and in Ugaritic and Aramaic “Gupna”. In Akkadian and Babylonian the vineyard (Hebrew: Kerem) is called “Karanu”. The wine is called “Khamra” (Aramaic. and Hebrew: Khemer), probably after its red-brown color like clay.

Appendix 2: Thamar Eilam Gindin claims that the word “mevusam”, for a drunk person, is derived from the Persian word for feast, “bazam”, and not from the Hebrew word for “perfume” (bosem). The proof is because it appears only in post-biblical Hebrew, and in the Book of Esther, many of whose words are of Persian origin.

The Guerewol Festival is a ceremony in which men from the Wodaabe tribe in Chad dance a dance called Yaake, as part of a tribal beauty contest in which the prize is the hearts of the tribe’s women, including the married ones. This is the way to find a match. If a married woman chooses you, you will have to get her husband’s permission. The dance is a trance state in which teeth are bared and eyes are wide open. To be able to dance like this for hours, the men drink a fermented concoction made from tree bark, which some claim is psychedelic. Its ingredients were not documented, I guess it has to do with the acacia.

Maximus of Tyre testified to the worship of oak trees by the Druids, and concluded that since these are the same trees of the oracle at Dodona, the Celts worship Zeus and liken him to an oak tree. Pliny the Elder also testified to the worship of the oak trees, and believed that the druids were actually named after the oak, since the word for oak in Greek is drus (δρυς), and it turns out also in the Celtic languages ​​(derw, dair).

Oak trees were usually sacred to thunder gods, Hector Munro Chadwick wrote about this in his study “The Oak and the Thunder God” in 1900. We see how St. Boniface uprooted the oak of Donar, the parallel of Thor, identified in Latin hagiography as “the tree of Jove” (i.e Jupiter). When the Saxons saw that nothing was happening to Boniface, they immediately all converted to Christianity. The Baltic thunder god Perkūnas is also closely related to the oak. And of course, in Hebrew there is also the connection between the god “El” and the tree of “Ela” or “Alon”.

You would say that the similarity to the worship of El is a nice coincidence, but considering that in Roman times there was a practice of worshiping “columns of Jupiter”, and such columns were found in a variety of Roman-Celtic sites such as Mainz, Maastricht and even Budapest – these columns actually symbolized the tree of the Axis Mundi, and were often have scales and bumps that resemble those on the surface of the oak trunk, which protect it from pests. These columns are the counterparts of the Hercules columns, or Melqart columns, which were placed in the center of Phoenician temples. The Celts met the Phoenicians in Spain or Ireland, and may have adopted this worship over time. One of the theories regarding the distribution of the Celts claims that all the Celtic languages ​​and all the peoples called Celtic are not necessarily genetically related peoples, but rather an elite that settled in trading stations on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean and the Celtic language was their lingua franca. Some of them may even be of Semitic origin, or at least those who founded the colonies. In any case, these pillars and the worship of the oak trees may be of the same origin.

Strengthening this claim that the Celts adopted local rituals may come from Arthur John Evans’ study of Stonehenge from 1889. Evans points out that Stonehenge was actually a place of worship around which the circles and stones were built, and this place may have been a sacred oak tree, symbolizing the same god as the father of all. Evans shows parallels in Greco-Roman art depicting sacred trees associated with stone pillars or trilithic structures (i.e megaliths built of 3 stones), and thus concludes that these monuments are generally associated with sacred trees. The remains of the sacrifices found in the area also strengthen his claim that the Celts adopted this form of worship that matched their cosmology. This is of course if we adopt the approach that the Celts were late invaders who preserved a cult that had existed in the place since time immemorial.

The god of thunder, the father of the Celtic gods is called Taranis, he is symbolized as a naked god carrying a wheel and lightning. The wheel symbolized his chariot of the sun crossing the sky. The wheel was a recurring motif in Celtic art, and was usually used as a protective and luck amulet among warriors. The warriors, by the way, fought like Taranis, naked, and painted themselves blue like the color of the stones in the pits of Stonehenge. Julius Caesar describes this blue color as the color of glass, and it is not clear why. One of the explanations is because when lightning strikes the sand, glass is sometimes formed in the form of thin tubes called Fulgurite, and their color is sometimes blue, which is of course related to a multitude of variables such as the type of sand, the intensity of the lightning, etc., but when you are a pre-scientific pagan, nothing is clear to you.

And more about the worship of the oak trees and the god of thunder: among the tools discovered in the Hallstatt culture were found decorations and ornaments of birds. Since this god is the god of the sky, whoever is able to fly and dwell in the sky is also holy, and we see many birds that are considered sacred in Celtic culture. The Celts used to practice divination based on the flight of birds, some also claim that traditional Celtic music tried to imitate birdsong. Birds were considered messengers connecting the sky and the earth, and represented the souls on their journey to the other worlds, or rather, the ability to fly symbolized for them the soul leaving the body and embarking on a journey.

The bird sacred to the druids was the wren, whose name also happens to be very similar to that of the druids Drwy, and it also usually lives among the branches of the oak tree. Harming this bird or its nest is considered a taboo, transgressing it brings bad luck. However, on one day a year it was allowed and even desirable to hunt these birds, on the day of the winter solstice, perhaps to hasten the return of the sun symbolized by the god. In fact to this day in the Isle of Man and Ireland there is a custom at Christmas to hunt these birds, which is called Wren Day. Celtic legends usually praise the skill of the warriors as a measure of how accurate their stone throw was, so much so that they were able to snipe birds.

According to historians, the use of coffee as a common drink began in Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula in the 12th century. Its systematic cultivation as a domesticated plant began in Yemen probably in the 16th century, and it was called “mocha” after a city in Yemen. To this day he is called “the Yemenite” “El Yamania” among the Bedouin in Sinai. In the 16th century, coffee became a kind of national drink for all Arabs, and soon the custom of drinking it spread to all Islamic countries, and its preparation became a social ritual. Drinking coffee was one of the great pleasures in Arab life in general and Bedouins in particular, and no hospitality ceremony is complete without it.

It seems that the Arabs adopted coffee so easily because it was a substitute for wine, the drinking of which was forbidden in Islam. They dedicated themselves to the serving of coffee to such an extent that they were no longer able to think of the Arab hospitality as an institution with the absence of coffee before the historic cultivation of coffee. And therefore, they brought forward the appearance of coffee to the days of Abraham the Patriach. Even before the appearance of wine. In fact, wine was invented as a substitute for coffee, by a competitor of the one who invented coffee. The one who invented the coffee is Allah, and the one who invented the wine is Satan aka Iblis. And furthermore, on a background of cheating, Lot the nephew of Abraham (Nabi Lut) got drunk and sinned and did whatever he did. Although in the Arab legend it is not specified exactly what he did, because in general the Quran does not indicate at all in the many stories about Lot what his sin was, or that he sinned at all, neither in drunkenness nor in fornication. A legend brought by Aryeh Yitzhaki in volume 3 of his book “The legend of the place” (1990) tries to apologyze Lot, he did not sin knowingly but went astray after the devil who took advantage of his innocence and kindness. His sin was only drinking wine, but it was done unknowingly.

According to the legend, after the destruction of Sodom, Lot sat destitute in a cave with his daughters, and suddenly a guest arrived. Lot wanted very much to host him but he had no coffee. He apologized to the guest, and the guest said he had brought a pot of coffee with him. What Lot didn’t know was that the guest was the devil, and coffee is wine. Lot got drunk. When he sobered up from the wine, he decreed that he would not drink wine anymore, and that the wine would be forbidden. He asked for atonement, and the angel Gabriel said that he would atone for him if he tended the tree above Adam’s grave in Hebron

Note that Adam was buried in Mecca according to the Muslims, but in the Hebron area there are plenty of maqams that were attributed to different figures from the Muslim tradition under political circumstances. For example there is Nabi Yaqin, which is considered such a maqam, and of course the Cave of the Patriarchs in the Jewish tradition is considered the burial place of Adam. What is this tree? First of all, above every maqam there is a sacred tree. Second, in Hebron specifically there are some ancient trees. One of them is Eshel of Abraham aka Oak of Mamre, which is considered according to local legends to be the same tree under which Abraham hosted the angels. There may be a mixing of traditions here, which is not uncommon.

You probably know that game of the Indians that reminds of basketball and you have to throw a rubber ball into a vertical ring. Right? So it turns out that it was played in temples and before games sacrifices were made. or offerings were given. In a temple in the Mayan city of Yaxnohcah in the Yucatan, offerings were found that included the psychedelic drink from Morning Glory/Ipomea (which has a similar effect to LSD) and chili peppers. Those who used it were probably priests, or they didn’t even use it but only “summoned the gods”. What is clear is that the players did not use it.

“The answers to many halachaic questions concerning the consumption of hashish and marijuana were tried to be given in 1981 by Rabbi Ephraim Zalmanovitz, rabbi of the local council of Mezkert Batya. Zalmanovitz conducted a comprehensive Torah study on the issue and published it in the book ‘Alcoholism and Drugs in Judaism’, published by the People’s and State Institute in Mezkert Batya. Alongside rubbish philosophy insights, which claim to reveal hidden meanings in the relationship between man and Shekhinah, alongside superficial reviews of topics that have a loose and vague connection with drugs and alcohol, and alongside information indicating ignorance at the basic level (such as “David became a hashish-smoking addict junkey”), the author cites many rabbinic sayings and rulings from the scriptures, which in his opinion point to the negative way in which the consumption of the various psychoactive substances was examined by the Torah elders. But in a few cases the opposite approach is represented in the name of the apparent objective truth. For example, in the chapter dealing with marijuana (page 43) it is written: There is nothing but incense that is used for atonement, and so many virtues have been said about incense that it is the elixir of life, and refer to Tractate Berakhot 43: Rabbi Zutra bar Tobiah said, Rabbi said: From where can we learn that we should be Thanksgiving forthe smell? As it is said, ‘All the souls shall praise Jah’ (psalms 150), and any thing that the soul enjoys and the body does not, is the smell’, and also on page 57: ‘Three things are there that make a person’s mind clear: sound, sight and smell.’ and perhaps this is why the sages said in Pesachim 26: “Sound, sight, and smell, there are nothing to be stolen in them, because they are things that the soul enjoys and not the body… because just as the wine makes the human heart happy, so does the smell and the incense product make the human heart happy”. (Motti Argaman, “cannabis, marijuana and hashish”, 2002)

Passover is a mystical ritual of cosmic significance designed to sustain the world and bring redemption. These two things are basically the same in Judaism – redemption and the sustaining the world. In fact, all aspects of this holiday, and the Jewish worship in general, are an obsessive issue with cosmology and cosmogony, in beginning and end (arche and telos), in the things that connect them, in the mystical sacrifice that sustains the world, and in the worship of grain and the ritual eating of grain.

We see the liguistic root S.M.R (i.e keep, sustain) appears in Exodus 12, seven times (in the original hebrew scripture), most of the times it appears next to the emphasis that this is a “cosmic constitution forever”. We also see that there is a great emphasis on the liguistic root A.V.D (i.e labor, creation, service), not only that the children of Israel were slaves (“Avadim”), but also that this entire constitution is called “service” (“Avoda”). What is the meaning of the repetition of the verbs S.M.R and A.V.D so many times in this context? The meaning is of course a reference to the creation of the world and to man’s role in the Garden of Eden, “And the Lord God took man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to serve and sustain it” (Genesis 2:15).

Midrash Rabbah emphasizes the parallel between the days of Passover and the days of the creation of the world: “‘And any leaven yeast will not be seen within seven days’, this is symbolized with the seven days between the Exodus and the splitting of the Red Sea. Just as in Genesis there are 7 days, and just as the Sabbath is held once in 7 days, so these 7 days will be held each and every year, as it is said, ‘And you kept this constitution for a period once and for all the next years’” (Exodus Rabbah 19:8)

It’s important to say that these are exactly the same words (משמרת, חוקת עולם etc) that the Torah is using at least in two more places: Leviticus 23 (the Omer sacrifice) and Exodus 16 (the manna affair). each symbolize the sustaining of the world and performing a sympathetic magic for the renewal of the grain. btw this practice was common to all the fertility cults in the ancient world. for example, we sea many parallels between this and Demeter worship.

The bee orchid is a type of orchid whose flower resembles a bee, and it also releases pheromones that seem like enticing the male bees to come and mate with the flower and thereby pollinate the flower without their knowledge, after the pollen sticks to their bodies and passes to other flowers. Orchids in general, and this specific orchid, were considered an aphrodisiac because of this property, and also because the bulb of this flower resembles a testicle. So is the name of the flower in Greek, from the word testicle, Orchis. Dioscorides claimed that the flower not only arouses love and strengthens the sex drive, but also determines the gender of the newborn. A study done on mice supposedly proved the increase in their fertility and sexual activity following the drinking of an extract of orchid bulbs. The German polymath Athanasius Kircher in his book “Mundus Subterraneus” from 1665 wrote about the bee orchid, that shepherds noticed that cattle, sheep and horses arouse in the field where these orchids were. According to him, orchids originate from the seed of cattle that fell to the earth, and bees originate from the corpses of these cattle, hence the similarity between the flower and the bee. If horse seed fell to the ground, the flower would resemble a wasp.