"The one the cause of intoxication, of violence, and of woes;
"The other the occasion of comfort and of peace.
"The one the cause of irreligion and of self-destruction;
"The other the devout offering of piety on the altar of God.
"The one the symbol of the divine wrath;
"The other the symbol of spiritual blessings.
"The one the emblem of eternal damnation;
"The other the emblem of eternal salvation."—Bible Wines.
"The distinction in quality between the good and the bad wine is as clear as that between good and bad men, or good and bad wives, or good and bad spirits; for one is the constant subject of warning, designated poison literally, analogically, and figuratively; while the other is commended as refreshing and innocent, which no alcoholic wine is."—Lees' Appendix, p. 232.
Tirosh is another Hebrew word that is often used in the Old Testament for grapes and the juice of grapes, like our word must, but it is rarely if ever applied to the juice after fermentation has commenced. We read: "They shall gather together corn and new wine (tirosh), they shall eat together and praise Jehovah, and they who are gathered together shall drink it in the courts of my holiness."—Isaiah lxii, 9.
And again, in regard to tirosh, we read: "That thou mayest gather in thy corn, thy wine (tirosh), and thine oil." (Deut. xi, 14.) "Thus saith the Lord, as the new wine (tirosh) is found in the cluster, and one saith destroy it not, for a blessing is in it." (Isaiah lxv, 8.) "And thou shalt eat before the Lord thy God in the place He shall choose, the tithe of thy corn and wine (tirosh)." (Deut. xiv, 22.) Here we see that tirosh was to be eaten.
The word tirosh occurs thirty-eight times in the Hebrew Bible.
It is translated into Greek, in the Septuagint, by [seventy] distinguished Hebrew scholars, about three centuries before the Christian era, as follows: "The LXX renders tirosh in every case but two by oinos (the Greek word for wine), the generic name for yayin."
Now, are we for a moment to suppose that the above seventy distinguished ancient scholars did not understand as well what was included under the name of wine in their day, as does the writer in the Christian Union to-day, when they classed the unfermented juice of grapes with wine, and called it wine? How can the above writer say that "there was but one kind of wine known to the ancients—fermented grape juice"? Unfermented wine not known to the ancients, indeed! How utterly contrary to the truth, and to well-known facts, is such a statement. Just look a moment, gentle reader—
"Aristotle ('Meteorologica,' iv, 9) says of the sweet wine of his day
([Greek Text]), that it did not intoxicate ([Greek Text]). And Athenaeus
('Banquet,' ii, 24) makes a similar statement."—Oinos.
"Josephus, the Jewish historian, paraphrasing the dream of Pharaoh's butler, who dreamed that he took clusters of grapes and pressed them into Pharaoh's cup, and gave the cup to Pharaoh, repeatedly calls this grape-juice wine. Bishop Lowth, 1778, in his 'Commentary' (Isaiah v, 2) says: 'The fresh juice pressed from the grape' was by Herodotus styled oinos ampelinos, that is, wine of the vine."—Wine of the Word.
The celebrated Opimian wine, which Pliny [born A. D. 23] tells us (xiv, 4) had in his day, two centuries after it was made, the consistency of honey, was unquestionably an inspissated article. Such was the Taeniotic wine of Egypt, which Athenaeus, in his "Banquet" (i, 25), tells us had such a degree of richness that "it is dissolved little by little when it is mixed with water, just as the Attic honey is dissolved by the same process."