WINE AND WORDS
It’s a fundamental mistake to assume that because God tolerated and even regulated widespread practices that he approved
of them. It’s nonsense to think God approved of slavery, polygamy,
concubinage and the widespread “divorce for any cause” culture of Israel
even though he gave laws regulating them.
The
law-lords in the various nations often have to tolerate and regulate
existing conditions that they personally disapprove of and there’s a
multitude of judges who commit to carrying out those laws though they
personally are opposed to many of them. The specific reasons for this
are occasionally hard to uncover but it’s imperative for leaders to
temporarily settle for the realisable best rather than try to force
through the unattainable ideal.
Because
everybody’s doing it (and have always been doing it) and because the
law regulates “it” we’re tempted to think that “it” is morally
acceptable, whatever it is. To believe that to be “law-abiding” is the
height of moral and spiritual attainment can be a profound mistake at
the personal and national level. We all know (or we’re sure we do) of
people who are “law abiding” but are greedy rascals to take advantage of
the poor beneath them. Prominent church-leaders came to Jesus armed
with texts of scripture to debate what “law-abiding” really meant so as
to justfy themselves and Jesus called down a pox on their entire way of
thinking; called it “adulterous” (Matthew 19).
Societies
need a whole lot more law-abidingness, don’t you know, and to be
law-abiding is no bad thing and we should expect people to be (at least)
law-abiding; but to line up our lives with specific laws and make that
the pinnacle of moral and spiritual aspiration isn’t how Jesus read
scripture. To understand the laws of scripture in such a way that the
poor and the diseased, the emotionally troubled and the vulnerable young
are under threat and/or left without champions is how the worst of the
Pharisees understood scripture. To use the laws of scripture to justify
the support of some ruinous business or practice just so we can exercise
our “freedom” is risky business.
To
give the modern booze industry, as an industry, a clean bill of health
should require more than some dabbling with a handful of biblical words
and the universal practice of imbibing intoxicating drinks (or
substances). What a marvellous signal to the world it would be if
Christians everywhere made it clear that they freely choose not to drink
a drop of what the booze industry produces so long as families and
marriages and homes and cities and nations suffer widespread ruin as a
result of their engagement with the filthy rich booze industry. How fine
it would be if no boy or girl ever had their first acquaintance with
the booze industry in their own homes. How wonderful it would be if
parents made it clear that the issue isn’t only about “my rights as an
individual to drink whiskey or wine as long as I don’t get drunk.”
Moving on.
To
help us think straight, John Stuart Mill, felt the need to remind us of
something obvious but something that in practice even scholars forget.
“The tide of custom first drifts [a] word on to the shore of a
particular meaning, then retires and leaves it there.” The word “gay” is
used less and less frequently of cheerfulness or light-heartedness
because people don’t wish to be misunderstood so the recently adopted
use of the term by homosexuals may well become the exclusive use. Pagan
used to mean a villager but no more, intoxicate used to mean to poison
but (sadly) no more. “Kaffir” used to be a harmless description of a
community of people who lived in a particular area of South Africa
but it’s now nothing but an ugly insult. “Heathen” used to speak of
those who lived on the heaths, away from towns and cities and the last
to hear the Christian message. Not any more—call someone a heathen and
see the blood-pressure rise. “Wine” used to be the juice of the grape
but now it is (almost) exclusively fermented and intoxicating juice of
the grape. (My Concise OED has no other definition listed.) “Coffee”
came from a Turkish and earlier Arabic term (a wine) “drink”.
It’s
difficult sometimes not to be fooled by present usage. “Drunk” didn’t
always mean “intoxicated” and wasn’t always associated with intoxicating
drinks. “Inebriate” didn’t always mean intoxicated with alcohol (or
some such drug) but because that’s all we’re used to, we find it
difficult to change gears. “Wine” which was the juice of the grape and
was used of that juice in various states now refers to only one state,
the fermented and intoxicating state. So when we read the word “wine”
in the Bible we think, “Of course it’s intoxicating because that’s what
the word ‘wine’ means!” [How many people when they read the word
“baptize” in the NT immediately have an image of a baby being baptized?]
Insects
and animals develop through various stages just as developing humans
do. Specialists come up with words to describe the various stages of
that development—this is helpful and important. The word “baby” or
“insect” isn’t precise enough to cover the various stages of development
so words are invented to aid in precision. (What do you call a
butterfly when it’s in the cocoon? What do you call a just recently
conceived animal in the womb of its mother—say a cow?)
It’s
no crime to call a developing human “an embryo” or a “foetus” though
trouble arises when we make moral and civil decisions about the human in
those early stages. The same is true about “wine” and a million other
things. The Hebrews, Greeks and Romans had various words for wine
(“vinum” or “oinos” or “yayin” as the juice of the grape) and other
words for wine in different states (ahsis, gleukos, mustum, protropos,
shemarim, mesek, tirosh and others).
It’s
too easy to ignore all this and in light of the universal custom of
drinking intoxicating wine to quote Psalm 104:15 and say, “God gave
intoxicating wine to humans as a gift.”
Do you know the difference between “yitzhar” and “shemen”? Does it really matter whether you do or don’t?
(To be continued, God enabling)