Holy Smoke! Archaeologists Find Cannabis Residue At Ancient Jewish Temple

(TRAVEL) JERUSALEM– In 1967, during San Francisco’s Summer of Love, some 100,000 hippies experimented with radical political ideas, drugs, sex and rock ‘n’ roll to create a counter culture. Among those who heard Timothy Leary’s clarion call to “turn on, tune in and drop out” was a disproportionate contingent of young and disaffected American Jews searching for the spirituality and meaning they felt was missing from their parents’ houses of prayer.

Some were attracted to Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach (1925-1994), a maverick troubadour who founded a commune-like synagogue called the House of Love and Prayer in the city’s Haight-Ashbury hippie haven. Unorthodox in his Orthodoxy, the Berlin-born outreach guru attracted a hybrid following that combined a tie-dyed haze of cannabis and observance of Shabbat. Some of his followers used marijuana as a mind-altering staple for the ritual of Kiddush — the blessing to sanctify the Sabbath or Jewish holidays — adding it to the traditional bread and wine.

Though the era of the flower children has long since wilted, for more than two generations some Jews have continued singing Carlebach’s haunting nigunim (spiritual melodies), including “Lord, Get Me High.” For many, an interest in combining marijuana use and Judaism took on a more serious and even academic turn. Books like Dan Merkur’s “The Mystery of Manna: The Psychedelic Sacrament of the Bible” (2001) and James Dure’s “Manna Magic Mushroom of Moses: Manna Botanical I.D. of a Biblical Sacrament” (self-published, 2000), were part of a greater movement linking Judaism and psychedelic drugs.

The earliest advocate of the religious burning of pot in early Judaism was Sula Benet (1967), who claimed that the plant kaneh bosem — which sounds like cannabis — is mentioned five times in the Hebrew Bible, and that  a component of the holy anointing oil of the Book of Exodus was hemp, which derives from the marijuana plant.

The theory that hashish, the plant’s resin, was widely consumed in ancient Israelite society received a major boost May 28, 2020, when the Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University published an article headlined “Cannabis and Frankincense at the Judahite Shrine of Arad.”

Based on their chemical analysis of the resin found on twin limestone altars at the entrance to an Iron Age shrine at Tel Arad — west of the Dead Sea, in southern Israel’s Negev Desert — Eran Arie, Baruch Rosen and Dvory Namdar posit that, 2,700 years ago, the ancient Israelites used hashish mixed with animal dung to spark a level of ecstasy during worship. More provocatively, the researchers’ study also suggests that priests at Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem used marijuana as a “deliberate psychoactive.”

Today, Tel Arad is a national park, divided into a lower city and an acropolis which holds the only “House of Yahweh” Hebrew-language inscription ever found in Israel. The fortress mound, which was occupied from the ninth to the sixth centuries BCE, was excavated during 18 seasons by archaeologists Ruth Amiran and Yohanan Aharoni. The latter, who chaired both the Department of Near East Studies and the Institute of Archaeology at Tel-Aviv University, discovered the site in 1962. He devoted the remainder of his life to excavating there and died in 1972.

As Miriam Aharoni, Ze’ev Herzog and Anson F. Rainey noted in their 1987 article “Arad—An Ancient Israelite Fortress with a Temple to Yahweh,” in the March/April 1987 Biblical Archaeology Review, King Solomon probably built the first fortress on the site in the 10th century BCE.

The Arad shrine was disassembled and rebuilt for display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, which opened in 1965. Tests half a century ago were unable to establish the dried out black goop’s chemical composition. Now, through using gas chromatography and mass spectrometry testing — high-tech tools unavailable when the site was first excavated in the 1960s and 1970s — Arie, the curator of Iron Age and Persian Periods archaeology at the museum, discovered traces of hashish mixed with animal dung on the smaller of the two altars found in the inner sanctum of the temple, known as the holy of holies.

Arie’s discovery is the first evidence of the use of mind-altering drugs in the practice of religion by ancient Israelites. “We know from all around the ancient Near East and around the world that many cultures used hallucinogenic materials and ingredients in order to get into some kind of religious ecstasy,” Arie told CNN. “We never thought about Judah taking part in these cultic practices. The fact that we found cannabis in an official cult place of Judah says something new.”

Arie’s finding was confirmed by independent researchers Rosen and Namdar, who is a chemist from the Agricultural Research Organization, Volcani Center, in Ben Shemen, Israel.

The discovery of traces of the psychoactive cannabinoids tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), cannabidiol and cannabinol, along with residue of animal dung, came as a great surprise to the three researchers. They at first wondered if Namdar, who is also researching marijuana’s medicinal use, might have accidentally contaminated the Arad resin sample. However, an independent lab confirmed the findings.

Arie, Rosen and Namdar suggest that worshippers at the Arad temple, which was connected to the royal House of David and its cult in Jerusalem, were using hashish to achieve a heightened state of consciousness. The dung and marijuana mixture allowed the cannabis to burn rather slowly at a relatively low temperature, allowing for multiple worshippers to inhale the mixture’s smoke. The frankincense likely was burned on the second altar because it releases its aroma best at a higher temperature, and the residue found there included animal fat, which would have generated the necessary temperature.

While the frankincense was imported from today’s Yemen, Arie believes the marijuana also was not grown locally. Hence, both commodities likely would have been quite expensive. “Importing cannabis and frankincense was a big investment that could not be made by some isolated group of nomads. It required backing from a powerful state entity,” Arie told Haaretz. “If they just wanted to make the temple smell nice, they could have burned some sage, which grows in the area of Jerusalem.”

The cannabis may have been imported from southeastern Russia, or even western China, where the burned remains of 2,500-year-old plants were discovered in an ancient cemetery in the Pamirs region last year.

The researchers’ report suggests the ritual use of cannabis was likely widespread throughout Israel at the time, as the shrine where they found the resin would have been run by a local garrison of soldiers from the tribe of Judah, sent south from Jerusalem.

How does all this tie back to Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach and his years in Haight-Ashbury? “He was giving the whole drug culture Torah and Shabbes (the Sabbath),” said Emuna Witt, a Carlebach disciple now living in Jerusalem, who has been transcribing Carlebach’s recordings for 30 years.

Carlebach was personally against marijuana use, she noted. But quoting Bob Dylan, she quipped: “Everybody must get stoned.”

Gil Zohar was born in Toronto, Canada and moved to Jerusalem, Israel in 1982. He is a journalist writing for The Jerusalem Post, Segula magazine, and other publications, though currently he is on leave from The Jerusalem Post as the newspaper struggles to survive during the coronavirus pandemic. He’s also a professional tour guide who likes to weave together the Holy Land’s multiple narratives.