If you have a natural history museum nearby or where you vacation, that would be a good place to visit with such good questions.
As a young boy I used to visit the Carnegie Museums. Their dinosaur display admittedly was all bogus with fictional dates pushing the religion of Evilution.
However other favorite areas were ancient anthropology.
What was interesting were the remains of ancient tools and utensils.
It gets you thinking about how people survived before the industrial revolution of machines, industry and mass production.
What existed throughout history that did not require specialized equipment, assuming that machines and forgings did not exist?
Bamboo: a simple container for beverages is already designed by God and ready to use! The nodes seal the top and bottom. The cut top node just needs a stopper.
There are different materials, but you are already familiar with cork. That's been in common use for a long time, as bees wax, pitch resins from trees. Genesis 6:14 KJV
"Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch."
All the bottles from that far back would be broken and no longer remain, especially since the flood destroyed all remains of mankind. Using reasoning we can conclude that if God provided the instructions for such an amazing marvel of engineering, it would be a small matter to use the technique to seal other items that required to be airtight.
Louis Pasteur was given credit for modern pasteurization. This was for the extra sure/quick high production for canneries. That doesn't mean that people didn't know how to heat beverages and food. The just needed to sterilize the containers and seal them. No real requirements for Ball Mason Jars, although they do make it much more sure for large quantities. Other methods were doubtless discovered and lost through the ages as was the case for everything but God's preserved Word.
What other materials were also created by the Lord for containers (bottles/jars) that could be sealed?
2. Clay
3. Glass (heated silica from volcanic flows would reveal this.)
4. Soap Stone
5. Hard woods
6. Various metals (there are many biblical records of cups, etc.)
There are many more, but that's a few off the top of my head.
Keep in mind that sealed containers oxidize, get brittle and lose their integrity. People destroy and build over developed areas of other structures constantly, so there really are relatively few ancient remains intact. If anything was worth anything to anyone, they'd sell, trade or use them.
A beeswax sealed stopper would not likely show anything resembling wax after a few thousand years. The same with any other soft materials like cork.
Even modern construction materials like adhesives degrade as do petroleum based polymers/plastics. These even have the benefits of major chemical engineering.
I just pulled a cracked jar out of my freezer today that I put cheese in. It was at a constant temperature for months.
If the modern glass was outside in the elements exposed to thousands of cycles of freezing and thaws, it would not contain ancient cheese if buried under rubble. That's cheese stored in a climate controlled box in a modern cannery jar that benefits from all the tech we have for food storage. If this is the case, it's a wonder that anything like wine bottles remain from way back.
This isn't THE Oldest, but rather the remains of the oldest discovery of a sealed bottle.
Isn't this cool?
3,000 Year Old Sealed Bottle of Wine
Keep in mind that there are people making new doctrines based on their lack of knowledge of Scriptures as well as history and archaeology.
This bottle is likely from around the time of Christ on Earth.
Thanks for the article, definitely interesting! History is so cool
.Storing already fermented wine and vinegar is way different from storing non-fermented because the sugars are still present in the non- fermented and all it takes is one spore or bacteria missed in the sterilization to completely spoil the batch.
I do agree that it COULD have been possible (especially if we assume the ancients somehow possessed knowledge not know in modern times until the 1800s), but nothing I have been able to find indicates that it was likely, especially as a means of preserving an entire grape harvest.
There's just so many variables, you'd need a bunch of vessels resistant to heat shock (glass at the time wasn't, ceramic maybe possible if it was well-made). Wood and bamboo are too porous and the acids in the grape juice would react with most metals. Mason jars actually DO have special requirements, they are made out of borosilicate glass similar to Pyrex so they can handle the shock of heat sterilization. Normal glass would shatter. Borosilicate glass wasn't invented until the 1800s.
Plus there's just the hassle of it all and the risk of ruining a lot of your harvest if one tiny step doesn't go right. I see it as theoretically possible but practically extremely unlikely. Especially since Jewish culture had no issue with fermented wine drunk in moderation, so why would anyone have gone through the risks and extra labor to not ferment it and hope it doesn't rot? And if NOT fermenting it was important to God then why isn't there a separate word for non-fermented in the Bible?
Anyways, I don't expect you to answer all that and again I'm not arguing lol. Just stating why I don't think it was likely. I do know that in those days wine was typically watered down quite a bit before it was consumed and I'm sure whatever Jesus drank was very low in alcohol. I'm also certain He was never impaired in any way by it.
Anyways, I'm still open to new info if you come across any! Best!
