[03.10.08] A study by Israeli professor Benny Shanon, suggests that Moses was high on a hallucinogenic plant when he came down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments reports MSNBC.
According to Shanon’s article, originally published in the British philosophy journal Time and Mind, the Israelites were also high as a result of the hallucinogenic plants.
He pointed out that two plants in the Sinai desert contain the same psychoactive molecules found in plants from which the powerful Amazonian hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca is prepared.
Shanon, who is very familiar with the affects of the ayahuasca plant, having “partaken of the brew about 160 times,” says that the thunder and lighting described in Exodus may have been no more than drug-induced visions of people in an “altered state of awareness,” MSNBC reported.
Shanon concedes he has “no direct proof.”
Scholars are less than impressed.
Rabbi Yuval Sherlow told Israel Radio, “We have to fear not for the fate of the biblical Moses, but for the fate of science.”
