Friday, March 04, 2016

Juicing in the DSS?

COOKING - ANCIENT EDITION: Select: 2,000-year-old bread and a brief history of the kitchen.The history of some of our most ubiquitous kitchen gadgets (Aoife McElwain, The Irish Times). The bread in question was a carbonized loaf preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius, but Google flagged up this article for me because of the following paragraph in it:
Juicing has got to be a new trend, though, right? Nope. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of nearly 1,000 texts discovered between 1946 and 1956 in the West Bank, thought to date from 300BC to AD100. One of these texts mentions a “pounded mash of pomegranate and fig” resulting in “profound strength and subtle form”. Possibly the world’s first documented example of juicing advocacy?
The date range for the scrolls is a little off; let's say from the third century BCE to around 68 CE. More frustrating is the typical failure to cite a specific text. I doubt very much that this quote represents ancient juicing advocacy, but I would be interested to know what it was actually about. Does anyone have the reference?