Is it calamus or cannabis in the anointing oil?

[LaurenTM]

seems a lot of people ask this question...it's all over the net

it also seems that some people are streeeeeeeetching the meaning of words and misquoting and oh just a whole lotta stuff that props up the answer they want to hear

well, enough toking...here's a site that explains it...will post the rest in consecutive posts cause too long for just one

[h=1]Marijuana in Scripture[/h][FONT=&quot]Question from a Site Viewer
I have come across the question of marijuana use in the Bible. There are a lot of people claiming to be Christians that are using Scripture to justify the use of marijuana. How do you defend that subject?
Tim’s Answer
You state that there are Christians who use Scripture to justify the use of marijuana. There are also people who claim to know Christ and use Scripture to justify everything from racial hatred towards others to turning a deaf ear to the cries of the immigrant and the poor. Not everyone who says “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of God (Matthew 7:21).
Paul tells us in Titus 1:16 that there are people who profess to know God but in their works they deny Him. I say this, not to state that everyone who uses marijuana is going to hell, but to say that people have long twisted the words of Scripture to their own destruction (2 Peter 3:16).
There are two fundamental ways of approaching Scripture. The first way is to seek to find in Scripture support for what we want to do. The second way is to seek to find in Scripture how we should be changed (see 2 Corinthians 3:18). For those who follow the first way, I suspect there is nothing that I or others can say to change their minds. For those who follow the second, I offer the following.
Scripture never mentions marijuana directly. You will not find it on the pages of either the Hebrew or the Greek texts. But then, neither are oranges, bananas, peaches, asparagus, spinach, artichokes, potatoes, tomatoes, rosary peas, castor beans (perhaps the most poisonous plant known to man), yews, poison ivy, poison oak, and numerous other plants both good and bad for health.
There are some who see Exodus 30:23 as a direct reference to marijuana. They cite Sula Benet, an etymologist from Poland who concluded in 1936 that the Hebrew words “q’nah-bosem” found at Exodus 30:23 were etymologically related to “cannabis” and then reached the further conclusion that the anointing oil included marijuana. She noted the similarities with words from other Middle Eastern language groups. She noted that the word could be used to reference a reed plant or a hemp plant, but she reached the definite conclusion that in the Exodus passage it meant the hemp plant. (I realize this was not the main point of her treatise, but it is the point that most impacts the present debate.) Others have stated that the Hebrew University supports this view, although no one apparently has been able to come up with a definitive source at that university for this statement. If you check out the Wikipedia article on cannabis (etymology), Raphael Mechoulam of the Hebrew University suggests a different etymology for the word “cannabis.” [Please note that people differ on the way to transliterate the relevant Hebrew words (to show the Hebrew word using English characters). I use “q’nah-bosem” for the passage in Exodus (the only place where the basic Hebrew word “qaneh” appears with the Hebrew word “bosem”) and “qaneh” elsewhere. Some might use “kaneh” or other transliterations. The underlying Hebrew word “qof,” “nun,” “hey” (the three letters of the Hebrew alphabet used for “qaneh”) remains the same.]
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[LaurenTM]

In my view Dr. Benet’s evidence falls far short of proving the conclusion that “q’nah-bosem” was marijuana. The problem with her conclusion is at least seven-fold. First, there are no clear references that I have been able to find to cannabis in ancient Hebrew before the time of the Mishnah. The word “qaneh” is not associated with traditional aspects of hemp, either as rope, medicinal use, food use, or narcotic use in any of the ancient Hebrew texts, at least that I can find. Given this paucity of evidence, I do not think that anyone is able to reach a definite conclusion that the Hebrew word “q’nah-bosem” was a reference to cannabis.


Second, the fact that the Mishnah used a different word spelled with different Hebrew characters to reference marijuana lends support to a conclusion that the rabbis did not think that the word “q’nah-bosem” was a reference to marijuana. This is not a situation where the words “qaneh” and “bosem” ceased to exist and were replaced by “qanabos.” The words “qaneh” and “bosem” continued to be used by Hebrew writers at the same time that “qanabos” came into the Hebrew vocabulary. And the words “qaneh” and “bosem” in post Biblical writings are not associated with hemp. Dr. Benet’s thesis that “q’nah-bosem” over time became “qanabos” is undermined by this continued use of “qaneh” and “bosem” to mean something other than “qanabos.”


Third, the support for linking “qanabos” to “q’nah-bosem” is not particularly strong. Of the six letters in the two Hebrew words “q’nah-bosem” (Hebrew words do not include the vowels), that is, the letters “qof,” “nun,” “hey,” “bet,” “shin,” and “mem,” only three of them appear in the word “qanabos.” The letters shared are qof, nun, and bet. The letters hey, shin, and mem are not shared. Further, the word “qanabos” contains the letters “vav” and “samech,” letters not contained in the earlier “q’nah-bosem.” Given that three letters from the earlier word are left out and two letters are supplied, in a five letter word, does not provide great confidence to me that the source word for “qanabos” is “q’nah-bosem,” even if the sounds are somewhat the same. While I acknowledge that the loss of the “hey” and the inclusion of the “vav” may be due to shifts in spelling, and while I acknowledge that the letters “shin” and “samech” sometimes cross over into each other’s territory, I am at a loss to explain the loss of “mem.” The “mem” in “bosem” is not a plural or other additive to a stem as it is in “elohim,” as some sites wrongly state. It is the basic stem of the word.

 

[miknik5]

Rachel

are you on any other forums?

 

[LaurenTM]

[FONT=&quot]But an even bigger problem exists when one realizes how shaky the historical connection really is. Once, in the 15th century B.C., if one accepts a traditional dating for Moses, or in the 5th or 6th century B.C., if one accepts a post-exilic view of the dating for the Torah, the term “q’nah-bosem” is used. This is the only use of this term ever cited. The term does not appear again in ancient Hebrew. Somewhere around 200 A.D., in the Mishnah the word “qanabos” appears in the tractate Kil’ayim and in the tractate Nega’im. There is no evidence that the term “q’nah-bosem” or any intermediate forms of the term were ever used by the Hebrews during the intervening 7 to 17 centuries between the time the term was used in Exodus and when the new term appeared in the Mishnah. But we are asked to believe that the similarities of sounds in a word used centuries before supports a conclusion that it was the derivative of the word “qanabos.” Borrowing from the prophets, this is a shaky reed. To make matters worse, Dr. Benet ignores the most obvious source of “qanabos,” that is, the Greek word “cannabinos” widely used at that time to mean “hemp” (Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, published by Oxford press). The Mishnah was composed when the prevalent language in the area was Greek. Speculation this thin is hardly the stuff to warrant hard conclusions.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Fourth, as a general rule, one can spot foreign words in ancient Hebrew by the number of letters in the stem of the word. The Hebrew language is marked by words with three letter stems. Both “qaneh” and “bosem” have three letter stems. the word “qanabos” is a five letter stemmed word. As such, the possibility of a foreign origin for the word must be seriously explored. Given that the word in the surrounding culture for marijuana was “cannabinos,” it seems more likely to me that the Hebrew “qanabos” is simply a transliteration of the Greek word into the Hebrew language, rather than a derivative of an older Hebrew form.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Fifth, cannabis or hemp has long been a source of rope and yet the words for rope or cord in the Hebrew have no correlation to the term “qaneh.”[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Sixth, Dr. Benet’s speculation is perhaps the best an etymologist can do, but it is hardly “proof” of the conclusion that “q’neh-bosem” is the source for “qanabos.” Several web sources state that Dr. Benet’s conclusions were confirmed by the Hebrew University in 1960; but no one seems to be able to say who at the Hebrew University provided the confirmation. Hebrew University is a big place. Unverifiable facts do not build credence to claims. As stated above, Raphael Mechoulam of Hebrew University suggests a different etymology, though he is far more cautious in asserting that his conclusion is the definitive statement on the issue (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_(etymology)).[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Seventh, even if the modern word “qanabos” should be properly traced back to the words “q’nah-bosem,” a position I do not accept for reasons stated in this article, the conclusion that the ancient meaning of “q’nah-bosem” was cannabis is a leap. This is especially true given the continued use of “qaneh” in Hebrew to mean something different than “qanabos.” Word etymology is interesting, but hardly conclusive as to what a word meant in ancient times. Our modern word “dynamite” comes from a Greek word “dunamis,” but one should never read “dunamis” in the New Testament and think the ancient author meant “dynamite.” Even within languages, the meanings of words change. One would be foolish to transpose the modern usage of the word “gay” to its intended meaning in 18th century documents. The modern word “matzpun” in Hebrew means “conscience,” but the ancient Hebrew word meant “treasure.” The word did not slowly change into another meaning. The modern word meaning “conscience” entered the Hebrew vocabulary in the Middle Ages as a new word, displacing the old word of the same spelling. This and other examples of changes in meaning in Hebrew words can be found in an article by Professor E. Y. Kutscher, Professor of Hebrew Philology at Hebrew University (Words and their History by Kutscher). Even if one were to accept Dr. Benet’s conclusions as the etymological source for the modern word “cannabis,” which I do not, I have found no evidence, outside of what I see as a weak conclusion drawn from etymology, that the word “qaneh” ever meant hemp in ancient Hebrew. However, the fact that the word can mean the reed plant seems to be admitted by all, including Dr. Benet.[/FONT]

 

[LaurenTM]

Outside of these seven reasons to question Dr. Benet’s conclusion, the ace in the stack of evidence continues to be the Septuagint. In the third century before the time of Christ, the Hebrew Torah was translated into the Greek in Alexandria, Egypt. The Jews who did the translation used the word “calamou” to translate the words “q’nah-bosem.” If the Jews who did the translation thought that the anointing oil was made of “cannabinos,” the word at that time that meant “hemp,” (Liddell and Scott), they would not have used “calamou.” “Calamos” (the nominative form of the word “calamou”) is a reed plant. Later scholars in the second and first centuries before Christ, as they translated out the remainder of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek, also continued to use “calamos” to translate the word.
Moreover, a second factor against the Benet hypothesis is that Josephus, who lived in the first century A.D., also refers to the spice as “calamus,” which he calls a sweet spice. Again, Josephus clearly does not see the spice as “cannabinos,”” the Greek word for hemp.
Dr. Benet addresses this argument by stating that the translators of the LXX mistranslated the word. This conclusion has no support, except that their translation does not fit with the argument of her paper. The Jewish scholars who translated the LXX certainly had reason to know whether the word referenced “cannabinos” or “calamos.” For the translation of the the Torah, which included the Exodus passage in question, Ptolemy (Philadelphus II) wrote to the Jewish chief priest, Eleazar, in Jerusalem, and asked for six translators from each of the twelve tribes to do the translation. The collective outcome of this massive work was the Torah written in Greek. That these seventy-two people chose to use the word “calamus” rather than “cannabinos” was not something lightly done by one person in a corner. Their choice of words provides compelling direct evidence of what the term meant in the third century B.C. and what the term continued to mean in the first century A.D., when Josephus wrote. If the plant used in the holy oil was “cannabinos,” the seventy-two scholars could have easily used this word. Cannabis was readily available in the world of the Middle East, as Dr. Benet notes. Calamos would most likely have had to be imported (see Jeremiah 6:20; Ezekiel 27:19). The fact that the Jews before and after the time of Christ did not think that the Hebrew word “q’nah-bosem” constituted “cannabinos” is the only direct evidence we have of what the word actually meant in ancient Hebrew. Dr. Benet’s later reconstructions of possible etymological sources is a weak reed compared to the compelling direct testimony of the contemporary meaning supplied by Jewish scholars at a time when the oil was still being made and by people drawn from the tribes of Israel , appointed by the high priest of Israel, who had every reason to know what the Hebrew word meant. I accept the collective opinion of 72 Jewish scholars who lived when the actual meaning of the term would have been known over the speculation of scholars 2,000 years after the fact.


well of course she does

anyway...that is one whopping long article...you can read the rest from the link in my first post or

for convenience, here it is again

THUS ENDETH OUR LESSON FOR TODAY

 

[NewWine]

I must be out of touch, because....HUH? Why is this a thing?

 

[miknik5]

Please don't answer his poll

 

[Patinthehat]

No one but a priest before GOD has a right to this. And anyone who is a priest before GOD doesn't need it

How does that even make sense? Yahweh gives a recipe, but it can't be used?
1. Who decides if someone is a "priest" or not?
2. Who can use the oil that Yahweh told us to use for anointing if the priest has no use for it?

 

[miknik5]

I must be out of touch, because....HUH? Why is this a thing?

Read exodus 30. Apparently people are trying to duplicate the holy anointing oil This is the second time that I have personally come into a discussion about this

 

[LaurenTM]

I must be out of touch, because....HUH? Why is this a thing?

google it....news to me also, but then I don't do brownies or smoke...so...

 

[miknik5]

People. Is GOD confused and will HE be fooled by the aroma before HIM

 

[LaurenTM]

I don't actually expect any but a few to read the article, let alone the link

so much more fun to argue and throw punches in the air

whatever and ta ta

 

[Patinthehat]

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How many times have you been told that the use or consumption of the cannabis plant is a sin or of the Devil? The next time someone says it’s the Devils weed, correct them, for they know not what they say.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]With the Hebrew words for “calamus” and “cannabis” so similar, and the fact that calamus is of lesser value and also toxic, we must question the validity of the term “calamus” in English versions of Scripture. The word calamus is found in the KJV three times:

Exodus 30:23 God telling Moses the formula for the anointing oil (250 shekels worth.)
KJV-sweet calamus
NKJV-sweet-smelling cane
ESV-aromatic cane
NASB-fragrant cane
Song of Solomon 4:14, speaking of it in a refreshing garden
Ezekiel 27:19 speaking of cane as merchandise.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]The KJV translates the Hebrew word “qaneh” (pronounced kaw-naw’) into “calamus.” Per Strong’s Concordance, “qaneh” means “a reed (as erect); by resemblance a rod (especially for measuring) shaft, tube, stem, (the radius of the arm) beam (of a steelyard): – balance, bone, branch, calamus, cane, reed, spearman, stalk.”[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]The Hebrew word for “calamus” is “kanah bosm,” which is plural. The singular for this is “kaneh bos,” which sounds remarkably close the modern word “cannabis.”[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]According to Webster’s New Hebrew dictionary, the current Hebrew word for cannabis is “kanabos.”
Thus, contentions that the KJV possibly interpreted the Hebrew word incorrectly as “calamus” warrant consideration.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]

If Exodus 30:23 is referring to a monetary value of calamus or cannabis, the “250 shekels” is approximately $125.00 worth (which is 2.5 cents/gerah X 20 gerahs/shekel X 250 shekels in Ex30:23) which is a considerable amount.
* Per the ATS Bible Dictionary (and others), a shekel is a term for either weight or currency (a coin.) A shekel is worth 20 gerahs. A gerah is the smallest weight or coin among the Jews, and worth about two and a half cents.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]If the 250 shekels is referring to weight, instead of coinage, it is a considerable amount of whatever it is the KJV is referring to as “calamus.”[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]While cannabis is non-toxic (not a single death has ever been directly attributed to it, despite much effort being given to document such a fatality), calamus is most definitely a toxin. The FDA banned calamus from uses in food and medicines in 1968 as calamus contains more than 75% asarone. Asarone is a poison which has been shown to cause cancer, and has ill effects on heart, liver and kidney functions. This toxin in calamus is used for pest control. Why would God specify a large quantity of a poison be used in holy anointing oil?[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]In 1936, Sula Benet, a Polish etymologist from the Institute of Anthropological Sciences in Warsaw revealed solid evidence of the Hebrew use of cannabis. The word “cannabis had previously been thought to be of Scythian origin as Scythians first brought the plant to Europe, but Benet showed it has much earlier origin in Semitic languages like Hebrew.

“In the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament there are references to hemp, both as incense, which was an integral part of religious celebration, and as an intoxicant.” Benet demonstrated that the word for cannabis is “kaneh-bosm”, and in traditional Hebrew “kaneh” or “kannabus.” The root “kan” here means “reed” or “hemp”, while “bosm” means “aromatic.” This word appears five times in the Old Testament (Exodus, Song of Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel) and has been mistranslated as “calamus”, a common marsh plant with little monetary value that does not have the qualities or value ascribed to “kaneh-bosm.” The error occurred in the oldest Greek translation of the Hebrew bible, the Septuagint in the 3rd century BC, and was repeated in translations that followed.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]It is illogical to assume that a plant as important as cannabis, which is such an incredibly useful source of fiber for textiles, loaded with nutritive oils and medicinal properties while also being non-toxic and ridiculously easy to grow, would have gone unnoticed and would have been ignored by the Judaic religion.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]With as many benefits (medicinal and utilitarian) that cannabis has to offer humanity, I contend humanity needs to expedite the end of prohibition of this non-toxic plant, and have it removed from the governments drug scheduling listing. There is no valid reason to have our brothers and sisters jailed for consuming this “NON-TOXIC” plant. There is no need to have lives ruined for trying to be healthy.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Bible-believers, specifically, need to thoroughly examine this issue in light of the etymology (the origin of a word and the historical development of its meaning), and the likelihood of mis-translation of “qenah” in the King James Version. WHAT IF God intended cannabis (as opposed to calamus) to be part of the anointing oil?[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]What do you truly know about this plant?[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]It’s time we talk about this.

Here is one of our write-ups.
https://patinthehat00.wordpress.com/cannabis-the-wave-of-the-future/[/FONT]

 

[miknik5]

I don't know if you are a troll or even the same " Believeume" but the more and more these topics come up the more and more I am beginning to see that you do know what you are trying to accomplish and are in clear rebellion against GOD purposely trying to sow in seeds of confusion and purposely doing the work of the "wrong master"

 

[RachelBibleStudent]

so i can eat a poison ivy and deadly nightshade salad because genesis 1:29?

neat!

 

[LaurenTM]

and there we have it

the agenda made manifest

you know, I actually don't care if you smoke, imbibe, juice or bake it all day long

but don't say the Bible tells you to do that

 

[Lynx]

Ah good. I was worried, Patinthehat, that you weren't really trying after the first post. You seemed to make a great opening statement, but then your subsequent posts were one- or two-liners just to take potshots at people who replied, so I thought you were perhaps a lazy troll after all. But this last post was great!

Keep up the good work.

 

[blue_ladybug]

STOP FEEDING THE TROLL..

 

[LaurenTM]

Ah good. I was worried, Patinthehat, that you weren't really trying after the first post. You seemed to make a great opening statement, but then your subsequent posts were one- or two-liners just to take potshots at people who replied, so I thought you were perhaps a lazy troll after all. But this last post was great!

Keep up the good work.

too lazy to read the article I posted that explains how that supposed bad translation is the work of one crazy Polish person with a now avid following of pot people waving a joint in one hand and the Bible in the other

you know, if smoking is the only thing that relieves some people's pain...I have nothing to say...you know...smoke at home...Christian or not...between you and God

but pat here has an agenda

 

[LaurenTM]

STOP FEEDING THE TROLL..

what no brownies?