Any long time readers surely know that I’m a big fan of Randy Newman. I have, heretofore, wholly subscribed to his theory of the origins of the Judeo-Christian religions, as set forth by the devil as he addresses god, in Randy’s largely unappreciated Faust:
Some fools in the desert
With nothing else to do
So scared of the dark
They didn’t know if they were coming or going
So they invented me
And they invented You
And other fools will keep it all going
And growing
But it turns out that it may be something completely different that led those long ago men to set down their fever dreams in a collection of fables that, despite its internal contradictions and portrayal of a petty god, some people still insist is absolutely true, contradictions be damned. (See Tom Paine’s The Age of Reason for a rundown of the most glaring contradictions.)
Anyway, back to the main point, and all I can say, as I hearken back to the days when I some people ingested tons of the stuff: Heavy Man!
The Kingdom of Judah, an Iron Age civilization centered around Jerusalem, features prominently in the Hebrew Bible, distinguishing it as a site of widespread cultural enchantment.
But now, archaeologists have serendipitously solved a mystery that has probably never been broached in any Sunday school class: Yes, some Judahites deliberately inhaled cannabis vapor, and yes, they likely did so to get high.
This incredible find is the result of chromatographic studies of residue found on an altar that dates back to the 8th century BCE. The results represent “the first known evidence of hallucinogenic substance found in the Kingdom of Judah” and “the earliest evidence for the use of cannabis in the Ancient Near East,” according to a paper published on Thursday in the journal Tel Aviv.
“Our cannabis evidence is the earliest in our region,” study co-lead Eran Arie, curator of Iron Age and Persian Period Archaeology at The Israel Museum, confirmed in an email. The discovery “was naturally a huge surprise,” he added.
The limestone altar that preserved this charred cannabis was found in the “Holy of Holies,” a sacred space at Tel Arad, an ancient fortress in Israel’s Beer-sheba Valley. Excavations at Tel Arad began in the 1960s, and the odd altar residue was sampled at that time, but tests of its chemical content proved inconclusive. The Holy of Holies was transported to The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where it has been a main attraction for decades.
So, maybe it wasn’t fear of the dark that gave us Jehovah and all those stories. Turns out those were groovy times, and the boys smoking that weed probably engaged in some heavy philosophical thought while under the influence, just like we some people did, back in those halcyon days. If, in fact, the Bible is the collected ramblings of dope smoking Judahites, it must have been inferior weed, since in my humble opinion, the music that dope helped make in the sixties has it beat hands down.