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

1871.] of Bible Land8, and of the Lord's Supper.
the taste, very exhilarating; and some of them will keep for a
long time. They were therefore preferred by those who were
addicted to drinking, and commonly selected for the tables of
kings. Their inebriating quality is alluded to by the prophet
Isaiah:' I will feed them that oppress you with their own flesh,
and they shall be drunken as with sweet wine' (Is. xlix. 26).
"' The testimony of travellers respecting the spirituous nature
of the wines of Palestine accords with that of the sacred
writers.... It is observed by Thevenot, that the people of the
Levant never mingle water with their wines at meals, but drink
by itself what water they think proper for abating its strength.
While the Greeks and Romans by mixed wine understood wine
united and lowered with water, the Hebrews, on the contrary,
meant by it wine made stronger and more inebriating by the
addition of powerful ingredients.
"' The wines of Palestine are generally kept in bottles made of
leather, or goat-skins, sewed or pitched together. In these the
process of fermentation took place, and the wine acquired its
proper degree of strength.
"' In the absence of anything like chemical analysis, these are
the data from which we must draw our conclusions concerning
the nature of the wines referred to by the sacred writers.
Some of them are represented to have been sweet wines, which,
if not the strongest, are known to have been very strong. The
grapes from which they were produced were remarkable for
their richness and excellence; the climate of the country being
such as to favor the growth and development of those principles
which, during fermentation, were converted into alcohol. And
as the grapes of that country are now known to furnish very
rich and spirituous wines, we may infer that the ancient were
similar in their character; since there is abundant evidence
that the climate has not suffered any material change for three
thousand years.
" I should not omit, in confirmation of this view of the spirituous nature of the wines of Palestine, to advert to the modes
in which they were kept. It is now well known that when
mixtures of alcohol and water are put into bladders, the water
evaporates and leaves the alcohol in a more concentrated form.
And it is asserted that wine which has been kept in bottles
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