The Wine of the Bible, of Bible Lands, and of the Lord's Supper [pp. 564-595]

5The Wine of the Bible,
Lees, is Rev. Isaac Jennings, a Congregational minister of
England, whose paper on this subject is the best evidence of
his fitness to prepare it. We insert this article at full length,
without, of course, endorsing every sentence of it, not only
as argument, but as a testimony of present Christian scholar ship. And we shall corroborate it by numerous other equivalent
witnesses, which we think will evince the absolute fatuity, it
nothing worse, of attempting to conduct the temperance refor mation on the platform that the permitted wines of Scripture
are unfermented, and of stigmatizing those who deny this, even
though total abstainers in their practice, as the allies of drant sellers and drunkards. We are constrained to this treatment
of the subject on account of the persistent, disingenuous attempts to represent the view we maintain as a special Princeton, or Princeton Review idiosynacrasy, an old and stale
device of the opponents of the doctrines of our standards pure
and simple. We think it easy to show that the consensus of
the great body of respectable scholarly and Christian authorities is with us.
Mr. Jennings begins by saying: "This subject requires to be
treated in this place as a purely Biblical question, independently
of all party controversies which have arisen on the wine question, as it is called, in connection with total abstinence. The
writer, a total abstainer for many years, is fully persuaded that
the theory or practice of total abstinence has no legitimate
connection with the investigation in hand.
"I. Wine, denoting properly the fermiented juice of the
grape, is used in the A. V. as the rendering of several Hebrew
and Greek words. To these our attention must, in the first
place, be directed.
"1. l?., yayin, according to Gesenius, from l,, yon, an unused root, having the force of fervendi, cestuendi; according
to Fiirst, from vin, like the Arabic vayin, Aeth. ven, Greek
rot'vo, et sic porro ceteris in linguis, Arm. gini; Lat. Vinum;
Eng. wine; LXX. olvo, aa-K,o, 7Xeficoo. Others take the word
to be of Indo-European extraction, from the root we, to weave,
or wan, to love. The meaning of the word, therefore, is re
570
[OCTOBER,