Beer and Wine: The Bible’s Counsel
By William H. Shea, Associate Director, Biblical Research Institute
Doesn’t the Bible refer in a number of places to wine and strong drink? Don’t we quite often find people drinking alcohol in the Bible? Can’t we assume, then, that Scripture generally does not condemn drinking alcoholic liquor?
It’s true that we often find people drinking alcohol in the Bible and that Scripture speaks of alcoholic beverages, but we need to be careful not to read too much into a superficial look at such texts. When our English Old Testaments refer to alcohol, they generally use the words wine or strong drink. So any examination of the Old Testament’s attitude toward alcohol must take into account the different Hebrew words translated into these two English terms.
The term strong drink presents no major translation problems because only one Hebrew word, shekar, lies behind it. But even so, the translation strong drink is more general than it ought to be. Modern readers may well think of strong drink as distilled liquor. But that is not what the Bible means by the term shekar….
