Drunkenness
The UPDV does not condemn wine as such. Wine is a creation gift that "makes glad the heart of common man" (Ps 104:15); it is poured out as drink-offering at the altar (Ex 29:40); Melchizedek brings bread and wine to Abraham (Ge 14:18); the Deuteronomic feast at the central sanctuary makes room for "oxen, or for sheep, or for wine, or for strong drink, or for whatever your soul asks" (De 14:26); Jesus' first sign in John supplies wine for a wedding (Jn 2:3); Paul tells Timothy to "use a little wine for your stomach's sake and your often infirmities" (1Ti 5:23). What the texts indict is the condition — being overcome by drink, the loss of judgment, the surfeited heart — and the practices that produce it. Wisdom warns the young man away from the cup; the priestly law forbids drink in the tent of meeting and consecrates the Nazirite away from grape products; the prophets read drunkenness as a national symptom; the named episodes — Noah, Lot, Nabal, Uriah, Elah, Ben-hadad, Ahasuerus, Belshazzar — show what wine reduces a man to; and the apostolic letters set drunkenness on the kingdom-exclusion lists and oppose it directly to the Spirit-filled life.
Wine as gift, drunkenness as condition
The benediction over wine is unambiguous: "And wine that makes glad the heart of common man, [And] oil to make his face to shine, And bread that strengthens common man's heart" (Ps 104:15). Wine sits beside bread and oil in the trio of staple blessings. It is offered with the daily lamb: "the fourth part of a hin of wine for a drink-offering" (Ex 29:40). Israel's wilderness diet, by contrast, was a deliberate deprivation pedagogy — "You⁺ have not eaten bread, neither have you⁺ drank wine or strong drink; that you⁺ may know that I am Yahweh your⁺ God" (De 29:6) — but the settled-land tithe meal restores wine to the table (De 14:26). Ben Sira balances both sides cleanly: "Like living water is wine to man, If he drinks it in moderation" (Sir 31:27); "Joy of heart, gladness and delight, Is wine drunk at the [right] time and in sufficiency" (Sir 31:28); but in the same chapter, "Moreover, when at wine, exercise restraint, For wine has destroyed many" (Sir 31:25), and "Much wine is a snare to the fool, It diminishes strength and increases wounds" (Sir 31:30). Drunkenness is not the use of the gift but the loss of the user.
Wisdom's verdict on wine
The wisdom books treat wine as a thing that personifies, deceives, and overpowers. "Wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler; And whoever errs by it is not wise" (Pr 20:1). It is loved for the wrong reasons: "He who loves pleasure will be a poor man: He who loves wine and oil will not be rich" (Pr 21:17). Folly speaks through it: "[As] a thorn that goes up into the hand of a drunkard, So is a parable in the mouth of fools" (Pr 26:9).
The set-piece is Proverbs 23. The opening warning is plain: "Don't be among winebibbers, Among gluttonous eaters of flesh: For the drunkard and the glutton will come to poverty; And drowsiness will clothe [a man] with rags" (Pr 23:20-21). Then the chapter slows into a six-verse anatomy of the drunkard's morning:
"Who has woe? Who has sorrow? Who has contentions? Who has complaining? Who has wounds without cause? Who has redness of eyes? Those who tarry long at the wine; Those who go to seek out mixed wine. Don't look on the wine when it is red, When it sparkles in the cup, When it goes down smoothly: At the last it bites like a serpent, And stings like an adder. Your eyes will see strange things, And your heart will utter perverse things. Yes, you will be as he who lies down in the midst of the sea, Or as he who lies on the top of a mast. They have stricken me, [you will say], and I was not hurt; They have beaten me, and I did not feel it: When shall I awake? I will seek it yet again" (Pr 23:29-35).
Ecclesiastes makes the comparable measurement at the level of a kingdom: "You are happy, O land, when your king is the son of nobles, and your princes eat in due season, for strength, and not for drunkenness!" (Ec 10:17). And Proverbs holds out self-rule as wisdom's own counter-image: "He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty; And he who rules his spirit, than he who takes a city" (Pr 16:32).
Ben Sira is in the same school. "Do not be a squanderer and a drunkard, Or else there will be nothing in your purse" (Sir 18:33). "Wine and women cause the heart to be lustful" (Sir 19:2). "A drunk woman causes great wrath; She does not cover her own shame" (Sir 26:8). "Like a furnace which tries the work of the blacksmith, So is wine in the quarrelling of scorners" (Sir 31:26). "Headache, derision, and shame, Is wine drunk in strife and anger" (Sir 31:29).
The priestly prohibition
Inside the sanctuary the law removes wine entirely from the officiant's hand. After the deaths of Nadab and Abihu, Yahweh speaks directly to Aaron: "Drink no wine nor strong drink, you, nor your sons with you, when you⁺ go into the tent of meeting, that you⁺ will not die: it will be a statute forever throughout your⁺ generations" (Le 10:9). The command is bound to the priest's discriminating work — the rest of the chapter charges him "to make a separation between the holy and the common, and between the unclean and the clean," which a fogged head cannot do. When Isaiah finds the priest in the same condition as the people, the indictment is therefore especially heavy: "even these reel with wine, and stagger with strong drink; the priest and the prophet reel with strong drink, they are swallowed up of wine, they stagger with strong drink; they err in vision, they stumble in judgment" (Isa 28:7).
The Nazirite separation
Where the priestly law fences off the sanctuary, the Nazirite law fences off the person. "He will separate himself from wine and strong drink; he will drink no vinegar of wine, or vinegar of strong drink, neither will he drink any juice of grapes, nor eat fresh grapes or dried" (Nu 6:3). The vow of separation from grape products from juice to vinegar is a whole-vine abstention — even the raw grape is excluded — for the duration of the consecration. Samson's mother is brought under the same regime before his birth: "Now therefore beware, I pray you, and drink no wine nor strong drink, and don't eat any unclean thing" (Jud 13:4). The Rechabites carry an analogous family discipline: "We will drink no wine; for Jonadab the son of Rechab, our father, commanded us, saying, You⁺ will drink no wine, neither you⁺, nor your⁺ sons, forever" (Jer 35:6) — Jeremiah uses their fidelity as a foil to Judah's faithlessness.
Lemuel's mother on kings
Proverbs gives the command from a queen mother to a king. "It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine; Nor for princes to desire strong drink: Or else they will drink, and forget the law, And pervert the justice [due] to any who is afflicted" (Pr 31:4-5). Strong drink belongs to a different room: "Give strong drink to him who is ready to perish, And wine to the bitter in soul: Let him drink, and forget his poverty, And remember his misery no more" (Pr 31:6-7). The moral is not that wine is poison; it is that the man who has to remember the law and judge the afflicted cannot afford to forget anything.
Old Testament instances
The earliest named instance is the patriarch of the renewed earth. "And Noah began to be a husbandman, and planted a vineyard: and he drank of the wine, and was drunk. And he was uncovered inside his tent" (Ge 9:20-21); the unraveling that follows touches three generations and ends with the curse on Canaan (Ge 9:22-25).
Lot's flight from Sodom ends in a cave, in two nights of incest:
"And the firstborn said to the younger, Our father is old, and there is not a man on the earth to come in to us after the manner of all the earth: come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will plow him, that we may preserve seed of our father. And they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in, and plowed her father; and he didn't know when she lay down, nor when she arose. And it came to pass on the next day, that the firstborn said to the younger, Look, I plowed my father last night: let us make him drink wine this night also; and you go in, and plow him, that we may preserve seed of our father. And they made their father drink wine that night also: and the younger arose, and plowed him; and he didn't know when she lay down, nor when she arose" (Ge 19:31-35).
Moab and Ammon descend from those two nights (Ge 19:36-38).
Nabal's drunkenness costs him his life. After Abigail intercepts David's strike-force, "Abigail came to Nabal; and, look, he held a feast in his house, like the feast of a king; and Nabal's heart was merry inside him, for he was very drunk: therefore she told him nothing, less or more, until the morning light" (1Sa 25:36). The morning telling kills him.
David exploits the same effect. To cover Bathsheba's pregnancy, "David had called him, he ate and drank before him; and he made him drunk: and at evening he went out to lie on his bed with the slaves of his lord, but didn't go down to his house" (2Sa 11:13) — Uriah's loyalty in drink defeats the cover-up, and the king proceeds to murder.
The Northern monarchy supplies its own series. Elah son of Baasha is assassinated in his cup: "his slave Zimri, captain of half his chariots, conspired against him. Now he was in Tirzah, drinking himself drunk in the house of Arza, who was over the household in Tirzah" (1Ki 16:9). At noon at Aphek, "Ben-hadad was drinking himself drunk in the pavilions, he and the kings, the thirty and two kings who helped him" (1Ki 20:16) — the Syrian coalition is shattered the same afternoon.
The Persian and Babylonian courts close the catalogue. "On the seventh day, when the heart of the king was merry with wine, [Ahasuerus] commanded Mehuman, Biztha, Harbona, Bigtha, and Abagtha, Zethar, and Carcas, the seven chamberlains" (Es 1:10) — the demand for Vashti issues from a wine-merry king and unmakes the queen. And in the night of Babylon's fall, "Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand" (Da 5:1) — the temple vessels are profaned, the writing appears on the wall, and the city is taken before morning. Daniel's own discipline stands against the same court: "Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the king's dainties, nor with the wine which he drank" (Da 1:8); in the mourning for Jerusalem, "I ate no pleasant bread, neither came flesh nor wine into my mouth" (Da 10:3).
The prophets on national drunkenness
Isaiah opens the prophetic indictment with a double woe. "Woe to those who rise up early in the morning, that they may follow strong drink; who tarry late into the night, until wine inflames them! And the harp and the lute, the tabret and the pipe, and wine, are [in] their feasts; but they do not regard the work of Yahweh, neither have they considered the operation of his hands" (Isa 5:11-12). The companion oracle rounds on the connoisseurs: "Woe to those who are mighty to drink wine, and men of strength to mingle strong drink" (Isa 5:22). The Ephraim woe pictures the kingdom as a garland of drunkards: "Woe to the crown of pride of the drunkards of Ephraim, and to the fading flower of his glorious beauty, which is on the head of the fat valley of those who are overcome with wine!" (Isa 28:1); "The crown of pride of the drunkards of Ephraim will be trodden under foot" (Isa 28:3); and as already noted, the priest and prophet reel with the same drink (Isa 28:7). Even after exile the diagnosis recurs: "Come⁺, [they say], I will fetch wine, and we will fill ourselves with strong drink; and tomorrow will be as this day, [a day] great beyond measure" (Isa 56:12).
Hosea names the mechanism: "Whoring and wine and new wine take away the understanding" (Hos 4:11) — three nouns yoked to one verb. The princes of the Northern kingdom illustrate it: "On the day of our king the princes made themselves sick with the heat of wine; he stretched out his hand with scoffers" (Hos 7:5). Joel calls a national lament: "Awake, you⁺ drunkards, and weep; and wail, all you⁺ drinkers of wine, because of the sweet wine; for it is cut off from your⁺ mouth" (Joe 1:5). Amos targets the leisured class: "who drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with the chief oils; but they are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph" (Am 6:6). Nahum fixes Nineveh's end with a single image: "For entangled like thorns, and drunk as with their drink, they are consumed completely as dry stubble" (Na 1:10). And Habakkuk turns the accusation back on the supplier: "Woe to him who gives his fellow man drink, mixing your strong wine, and make him drunk also, that you may look at their nakedness! You are filled with shame, and not glory: you also drink, and show your foreskin; the cup of Yahweh's right hand will come round to you, and foul shame will be on your glory" (Hab 2:15-16).
The Mosaic code has already provided the household sentence behind these national figures. The stubborn-and-rebellious son brought to the elders is identified by a pair of charges: "This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard" (De 21:20).
Jesus' watch-word
The Gospels carry the warning forward into the eschatological frame. The wicked slave's collapse is precisely a drunkenness scene: "if that slave will say in his heart, My lord delays his coming; and will begin to beat the male slaves and the female slaves, and to eat and drink, and to be drunk" (Lu 12:45). And the Olivet exhortation makes drunkenness one of three things that hide the day:
"But take heed to yourselves, lest perhaps your⁺ hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness, and cares of this life, and that day come upon you⁺ suddenly as a snare" (Lu 21:34).
The prodigal at the far end of his journey is the picture of the same self-loss, "wasted his substance with riotous living" (Lu 15:13).
The apostolic catalogues
Paul's vice-lists place drunkenness on the kingdom-exclusion roll alongside the named sexual and economic sins. "nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, will inherit the kingdom of God" (1Co 6:10). The Galatian catalogue runs through the works of the flesh and ends, "envyings, drunkenness, revelings, and things similar to these; of which I forewarn you⁺, even as I did forewarn you⁺, that those who participate in such things will not inherit the kingdom of God" (Ga 5:21). Paul has already made the disciplinary application: "I wrote to you⁺ not to associate with any man who is named a brother if he is a whore, or greedy, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; do not even eat with such a one" (1Co 5:11). Peter writes the past in the same register: "the time past may suffice to have worked the desire of the Gentiles, and to have walked in sexual depravity, erotic desires, winebibbings, revelings, carousings, and horrible idolatries" (1Pe 4:3); and of the false teachers, "[men] that count it pleasure to revel in the daytime, spots and blemishes, reveling in their deceptions while they feast with you⁺" (2Pe 2:13).
The Roman exhortation joins drunkenness to the day/night figure: "Let us walk becomingly, as in the day; not in reveling and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and sexual depravity, not in strife and jealousy" (Ro 13:13). The Thessalonian one is identical in image: "For those who sleep, sleep in the night; and those who are drunk, are drunk in the night" (1Th 5:7) — the church belongs to the day. And the Lord's Supper itself can be made into a drunken table; Paul rebukes the Corinthians, "for in your⁺ eating each takes before [another] his own supper; and one is hungry, and another is drunk" (1Co 11:21).
The pastoral letters bring the standard inside the office. The overseer must be "temperate, sober-minded, orderly ... no brawler, no striker; but gentle, not contentious, no lover of money" (1Ti 3:2-3); the deacons "[must be] grave, not double-tongued, not given to much wine, not greedy of monetary gain" (1Ti 3:8); the elder/overseer in the Cretan letter is again "blameless, as God's steward; not self-willed, not soon angry, no brawler, no striker, not greedy of monetary gain" (Tit 1:7); and the older women are charged "that aged men be temperate, grave, sober-minded, sound in faith, in love, in patience" (Ti 2:2). Paul's stumbling-block ethic governs the use of even what is permitted: "It is good not to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor [to do anything] by which your brother stumbles" (Ro 14:21).
Spirit-fullness as the contrast
The Pauline summative line replaces drunkenness with its ecclesial opposite. "And don't be drunk with wine, in which is riot, but be filled with the Spirit" (Eph 5:18). The two clauses set the choice cleanly — the same person is filled with one or the other; the church's own filling is the Spirit, and the verses that follow (singing, thanksgiving, mutual subjection) describe what that filling looks like in practice. The Spirit is not the believer's intoxicant but the believer's right inhabitant. Drunkenness is therefore not only excluded but displaced.