The Early Term, "Blood of Grapes." 49 hammedan rule, the grape-juice, so abundant in the valleys north of Hebron, was converted into a syrup which forms an important article of commerce. This connection, as well as the wording of Moses' record, explains Jacob's blessing on Judah, who was afterward to inherit the valleys which his ancestors from Abraham had occupied; where the vines, besides yielding an abundance of grapes for man's consumption, would furnish food for the beasts of burden that bore the products of the vintage to the winevats; Judah "binding his foal unto the vine, even his ass's colt unto the choice vine;" while "he washed" or saturated "his garments in wine and his clothes in the blood of grapes." No impartial student of this record of history, which Moses made an introduction to his laws, can fail to learn the lessons which the laws of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Indians, as well as of Moses, are adapted to impress.

In the poem of Job, whose life, extended to the age of the earlier ancestry of Abraham (Job xlii. 16), and whose residence was in or nigh to the land of the "Chaldeans," from whose chief city Abraham's father migrated (Job i. 17; Gen. xi. 31), the history of wine as used by religious men in the earliest patriarchal times is illustrated. At the opening of the history, preceding the poem proper, Job's children, sons and daughters,

are described as "drinking wine" at their birthday feasts; while Job, watchful and anxious, fearing, "after their feast-days," that they may have "sinned" by indulgence, calls them to the sacrifices then offered in propitiation (Job i. 4, 5, 13, 18). The "grape," the products of "vineyards, of vintage, and of the wine-presses," are reckoned among Divine gifts (xv. 33; xxiv. 6, 11, 18); while their perversion by those "drunken with intoxicating wine, is pictured by Job as a debasement which the instinct of "beasts" avoids; the beasts being more wise than "kings" when wine "takes away the heart of the chief of the people" (xii. 4, 7, 24, 25). Most important of all, in this record of an age among the earliest historically described, the modes of preparing and guarding wines in their ferment, as well as the import of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin terms, as explanatory of each other, is fixed for all future history. In the record (xxxii. 19), “My belly is as wine which has no vent; it is ready to burst like new bottles," the Hebrew for "wine" is yayin, the Greek of the Hebrew translators is gleukos, and the Latin of Jerome is mustum; thus establishing the fact that the Hebrew yayin is a generic word, including unfermented grapejuice as well as fermented wine. Again, in the statement as to the defrauder (xx. 15), that he who has "swallowed down riches shall vomit

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Wines Used in Chaldea and Egypt. them up again—God shall cast them up again," as we shall see, the word yarash, “cast up," from which tirosh is derived, gives the first and clearest intimation as to the distinction made by the Hebrews between two kinds of wines-the laxative and the intoxicating. In fact, in all important particulars, these plain distinctions made in the patriarchal age as to wines, both in their witnessed effects and in the study of preparations by which intoxication may be prevented, give the key to solve the complicated statements of writers on Old Testament wines in all subsequent ages.

WINES IN EARLY CHALDEAN, EGYPTIAN, AND INDIAN USAGES AND LAWS

Historians of all modern schools, alike the rationalist, Bunsen, and the traditional Wilkinson, agree in making the early seat of Asiatic civilization to have been in the valley of the Euphrates, and thence to have extended to the valleys of the Nile on the west, and of the Indus on the east. Before the days of Abraham, as Chaldean and Egyptian historians, cited alike by the Greek Herodotus, the Roman Diodorus and Strabo, and the Hebrew Josephus agree, literature and laws had reached an advanced stage before Moses, the founder of the Jewish State, was "learned in all the wisdom of the

Egyptians." The marriage of Joseph to the daughter of the kohen or "president" of the College of On (Gen. xli. 45), two centuries before Moses lived, shows the Egyptian advance; the use by Moses, and by subsequent Hebrew writers, of more than one hundred words - more than one-tenth of all the roots, and one-third of all those expressive of spiritual conceptions-common to the Sanscrit or Chaldee, confirms the intimacy of national intercourse then existing; while his frequent allusions to literary works then existing (Num. xxi. 14, 27; Deut. iv. 8), with which his own are compared, shows that not only Moses, but the Hebrew people at large, were familiar with Chaldean and Indian letters through an Egyptian culture. The usages and laws of these early nations as to wines will throw a light, therefore, on the records and statutes of Moses, written as they were with those precedents before him. The use of wine among the Chaldeans, the first known cultured nation of the earth, growing up at the earliest seat of civilization on the Euphrates, begins with the records already cited from the book of Job; while their advanced culture is to be traced in later Hebrew, Grecian, and Latin historians. Modern explorations, begun by Layard, reveal the existence of implements for straining wine. Herodotus mentions the palm-tree as abounding in their

Apparently Conflicting Testimonies.

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country, and the use of palm wine; and Daniel refers to the drinking of wine at the feasts of their kings. The learned class, however, accorded in their ideas of the benefit of abstinence from wine with their Indian and Egyptian associates.

The records of Greek and Roman writers as to the use of wine in Egypt have been construed as conflicting, especially by German writers; but the calm judgment of such explorers as Wilkinson, and the principles we have above considered, give consistency to their statements. Herodotus states (II. 77) as an eye-witness, that in "that part of Egypt which is sown with wheat. . . they use wine made of barley, for they have no wine." The savans of Napoleon (Descrip. de l'Egypt, tom. vi., p. 124), who found the walls of monuments in Upper Egypt covered with representations of the culture of the vine and the making of wines, think Herodotus unreliable; an opinion shared by Hengstenberg (Egypt and books of Moses Introd.) Careful observers, however, find that the vine, like most products, cannot be indigenous to a soil covered three months in the year by the inundation of the Nile; that in Lower Eyypt it is found only in gardens shut out from overflow; while it is in Upper Egypt, five hundred miles south, that the precipitous river-banks make the Upper Nile,