The ancient Jewish sects certainly had contact with cannabis and cannabis-using cultures and there is much debate as to their own use of it as a sacrament. The Semitic word kanbos and the Scythian cannabis are too closely linked to be purely coincidental.
It was concluded at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1980 that the Old Testament word Kineboisin in fact translates as cannabis, a severe embarrassment to both Judaic and Christian scholars, as God commands Moses to employ its use (Exodus 30:24). If this conclusion is correct then the Bible itself tells of the ritualistic use of cannabis until about 300BC.
