Believe it or not, there are people who dedicate their free time to quite particular hobbies. If your passion for marijuana was something quite peculiar to you, imagine what it will be like to take it to such a spiritual plane that you are not only interested in knowing in depth the secrets of its cultivation but also that you are encouraged to study such profound questions as what it says the Bible about this plant, we take the opportunity to show you our books on marijuana.
Well, it turns out that some people invest their time in these types of questions and their findings in this area are curious to say the least. Would you like to know some of the aspects that have been made clear from all this?
“Everything that God created is good”
This is the quote from Timothy 4: 4 that serves as the main argument for many of those Bible scholars who want to justify the argument that marijuana, as part of Nature it is also part of divine Creation and therefore of his goodness.
It may seem a bit absurd to be looking for this kind of heavenly justification, but in such controversial issues as the legalization of marijuana, these kinds of arguments carry a lot of weight. Not in vain this was the biblical quote most used by the conservative and Christian David Simpson, representative of the state of Texas, in the fight for the regularization of cannabis in its medicinal aspect with certain types of epilepsy, something that was achieved in 2015 and that it is still trying to make its way to full legalization.
Sacred substance or work of sin?
The point is that if you were to review the entire Bible from Genesis to Revelation, you would not find any direct reference to marijuana in it. You can read things like “So the earth produced green grass, a grass that bears seed according to its nature, and a tree that bears fruit, whose seed is in it, according to its kind. And God saw that it was good ”(Genesis 1:12) that can be interpreted in many ways. But you will not find a single sentence in which something is said in the plan “And God created marijuana and said: ‘Smoke at ease, this is a good thing'”. So you don’t have to waste time looking for it, we already told you about it.
There is no doubt that cannabis is not a modern invention, so by the time the Bible was written (apparently between the 8th and 6th centuries CE), they should already have some knowledge of it. plant and its peculiar properties. Another thing is the name they gave it and what they used it for.
The fact is that if we change our perspective a bit and are somewhat more flexible in our analysis of the Bible in reference to what it says about certain psychoactive substances from silver, even without directly mentioning marijuana, we can intuit that indirectly it refers to this or at least to some type of species with very similar effects. And how the controversy over the use of psychoactive substances is something that has always accompanied the human being From the very beginning, it can also be clearly seen in biblical texts that some refer to them as something beneficial and others link them with what demonic. Apparently this is a classic that does not go out of style.
A possible translation error
Chris Bennett is one of the researchers who has studied the Bible most thoroughly from these controversial perspectives. His most famous book is titled Sex, drugs, violence, and the Bible and makes a detailed review of the most controversial aspects of some of the rituals and practices that are frequently reflected in the Bible.
In his research, Bennett discovered that scenes of how Christians anointed the sick with a healing balm that, in addition to olive oil, cassia, myrrh, and cinnamon, contained the extract of a mysterious plant named kaneh-bosm. In the researcher’s opinion, this plant could be what we currently know as cannabis.
Although the term cannabis is considered to have its origins in the Scythian peoples, Bennett is convinced that it could go back to a stage much earlier than this as references to the kaneh-bosm they are found in the Old Testament and in several of the New Testament books. In other words, in many of the texts that make up the Bible (Exodus, the book of Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, the Song of Songs …), a medicinal plant with very similar properties is frequently mentioned. to those of marijuana.
How is it possible then that throughout so many pages there is not even a direct reference to cannabis? In Chris Bennett’s opinion, the explanation is quite simple. If there are no more references to cannabis in the Bible, it is not because of a question of ignorance of this plant but because of a translation error. Currently the oldest Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible we have dates back to the 3rd century BC. It is what is known as the ‘Greek Bible’ or the ‘Septuagint’, that is, the Bible of the seventies, because the number of its supposed translators is rounded to this figure.
They did a good job with the Hebrew and Aramaic texts that they were up to, but Bennett assures that they made a mistake in the translation when addressing the term that concerns us here and that this mistake has been repeated historically to this day. This and no other is the only reason why cannabis is not named as such in biblical texts, despite the fact that it was not only already known, but was used regularly for various purposes.
