For
the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks
of water, of fountains and springs, that flow out of valleys and
hills. -Deuteronomy 8:7
For
years I’ve heard the claim by otherwise intelligent people, “You can’t drink
the water in Israel. The water is
contaminated. Therefore, they had to
drink alcoholic wine. They had no choice.”
Or,
a variation of this, “They had to have alcoholic wine to kill the germs or
pathogens in their water.”
These
claims are simply, false. False for
several reasons.
1. The expense.
Wine is expensive. Imagine having
to pay for wine for all your drinking and hydration needs. It gets hot in Israel and they worked
hard. They would have needed a lot of
liquid.
2. If alcoholic wine is all they had to drink,
the men, women, children of Israel would have been drunk 24 hours a day every
day. That just doesn’t make sense.
3. If they could not drink the water, what would
have happened if their yearly supply of wine ran out, was stolen, or
destroyed? What if they had a crop
failure in the vineyard? And, could they
consistently grow that many grapes? It
would take a lot of grapes to provide a family with enough wine for all, not
part, of their thirst for an entire year.
4. They knew how to make and preserve both
alcoholic and nonalcoholic wine. They
called both wine (Isaiah 65:8, etc.). Much
like today, they had a choice of what to drink.
See articles below and the book “Ancient Wine and the Bible” for more evidence.
5. Israelis were masters on the subject of
water. They had to have drinkable water
or not survive. They dug wells, both shallow
and deep. They maintained them for
centuries (John 4:5-11; etc.). They knew
about springs and how the water from them was generally safe and good. They dug cisterns, and used natural cisterns
(Genesis 21:25;
Leviticus 11:36;
Deuteronomy 8:7;
2 Kings 18:31;
Nehemiah 9:25;
James 3:11; etc.). Of course they also used rivers and
streams. They valued running water. They collected rain water. They even knew the value of dew. They knew bad water, probably both by
training and by experience (Proverbs 25:26). By the way, modern day Israelis are still
exceptional in the areas of water, irrigation, farming, agriculture.
6. In Bible times, while they did not know about
micro-organisms, they certainly knew clean water from dirty water. They knew how to find clean water. Also, to some extent, locals can build a
tolerance for some defects in water.
8. Alcoholic wine does not sterilize impure
water. It just doesn’t. I’ve never seen a modern or ancient scientific authority
recommend you take a bottle of wine on your next camping or hunting trip so you
can make the water safe to drink. Alcoholic
wine does not disinfect water to make it drinkable.
It
should also be noted that even the alcoholic wine in Bible times was of a
rather low alcohol content, making it even less likely to sanitize contaminated
water. Distilled alcohol, which can
dramatically increase alcohol content, was unknown in Bible times.
The
word “water” is used 634 times in the Bible (NKJV). This does not even include related words such
as well, drink, spring, river, cistern… So there are many more biblical
references than those listed above.
In
short, the oft repeated claim that they had to drink alcohol because the water
was undrinkable is a false claim. Don’t
buy it. Also, the oft repeated claim
that you can make contaminated water safe by adding alcoholic wine is a false
claim. These are some of the weakest
arguments by social drinkers. Arguments
that do not hold up to a valid investigation.
Parenthetical Note: That there be no
misunderstanding. while we may disagree
on details, I’m on the side of all who wisely choose to abstain from alcoholic
beverages.
-David R. Brumbelow, Gulf Coast Pastor, December
6, AD 2016.
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