Beverages in Bible Times

Writing in Everyday Life in Old Testament Times, E. W. Heaton tells about beverages used by the Israelites: “Since water was scarce and not very palatable, a good deal of milk was drunk. It came from goats and sheep. Hebrew has a word for fresh milk, but in the climate of Palestine it cannot have been used as much as another term meaning sour milk or curds. As soon as the fresh milk was put into the goat-skin bottle, it thickened slightly and went sour. All the better, it was thought, for quenching the thirst. . . .

“The drinking of wine was universal. Taking it with water or luxuriously iced with snow from the mountains were later customs and even then the latter can hardly have been a part of everyday life. The ordinary Israelite in our period took his wine in its natural state or (like the Assyrians) mingled with spices and drugs to increase its ‘headiness.’ It is not surprising that the Old Testament contains so many warnings about drinking to excess. The men of Israel also drank pomegranate wine. . . . They do not appear, however, to have been great beer-drinkers. In this respect, they differed from their neighbours, the Philistines, whose beer mugs with strainer spouts have been found by the hundred.”