Wine in Ancient Israel: From Canaan to the Byzantines

Few places have been soaked in wine as thoroughly as the strip of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Here, wine is not just an agricultural product but scripture, ritual, and national symbol. The Hebrew Bible mentions it hundreds of times; the Canaanites were storing it by the thousands of litres in palace cellars nearly four thousand years ago; and by late antiquity a sweet white from this coast was a luxury export shipped as far as Britain.⁸ Then it almost vanished — and, in the last century, came back.

The wine history of ancient Israel and the wider Holy Land runs like a thread from Canaanite kings to Roman-era rabbis to Byzantine desert monks, and finally to a modern laboratory reviving grapes that may not have been tasted in fifteen hundred years. It is a story of astonishing continuity broken by one long silence, and it is worth telling from the beginning.

A land of the vine

When the Bible wants to describe the promised land, it reaches for the vine. In the Book of Numbers, scouts sent into Canaan return carrying a single cluster of grapes so enormous that two men must bear it on a pole between them, cut from a valley named Eshcol — literally “cluster.”³ The image was potent enough that the modern State of Israel adopted those two grape-bearers as the logo of its tourism ministry, a three-thousand-year-old advertisement still doing its job.

Wine saturates the rest of the text too. The prophets promise a future in which everyone sits “under his vine and under his fig tree”; the Song of Songs is drunk on it; Psalms call it the drink that “gladdens the heart.” That symbolic weight became liturgy. Wine anchors the Jewish kiddush that sanctifies the Sabbath and the four cups drunk at Passover, and it carried directly into Christianity through the communion cup. In this corner of the world, wine was never only refreshment; it was a way of marking the holy.

The palace cellar at Tel Kabri

The hard archaeology is just as striking as the scripture. In 2013, excavators at Tel Kabri in the Galilee opened a storeroom in a Canaanite palace dating to about 1700 BC and found roughly forty large clay jars lying where they had fallen — a wine cellar with a capacity of some two thousand litres, enough to fill around three thousand modern bottles.¹ It is the oldest and largest palatial wine cellar ever found in the Near East.

Chemical analysis of the jar residues, published in PLOS ONE, revealed something more sophisticated than simple grape wine. The Canaanite vintners had laced their wine with a consistent recipe of additives — honey, cedar oil, juniper, mint, myrtle, cinnamon, and tree resins — repeated jar after jar, the mark of a trained hand following a house formula rather than improvising.² Nearly four thousand years ago, in other words, a palace on the Galilee coast was producing branded, spiced wine at scale for royal feasts.

Gaza wine: a vintage from the desert

Wine’s golden age here came in late antiquity, and in an unlikely place: the Negev desert. Between roughly the fourth and seventh centuries AD, Byzantine towns such as Avdat, Shivta, Haluza, and Nizzana turned bone-dry highlands into vineyards by capturing scarce winter rain through elaborate runoff channels, coaxing grapes from ground that looks incapable of growing anything.⁴ The payoff was a celebrated sweet white wine known across the empire as vinum Gazetum, or Gaza wine, after the port it shipped from.

Gaza wine was a genuine luxury brand. It travelled in distinctive tall, narrow “Gaza jars” whose shape suited the holds of ships and the flanks of camels, and archaeologists have dug those jars out of the ground as far away as Britain, Germany, and Yemen.⁵ Poets praised it; pilgrims carried it home. For a few centuries a desert on the edge of the Roman world ran one of antiquity’s most successful wine-export businesses, all of it grown on captured rain.

The long silence

Then it stopped. The Muslim conquest of the region in the seventh century brought a new faith that forbade wine, and the great commercial vineyards of the Negev withered over the generations that followed.⁷ The elaborate runoff farms fell out of repair, the desert towns emptied, and the export trade that had carried Gaza wine to Britain simply ended. Scholars still debate how quickly and why the collapse came — some evidence points to strains beginning even before the conquest — but the outcome is not in dispute.

For more than a thousand years, the land that had supplied the Roman Empire made almost no wine of note. Small quantities continued in Jewish and Christian communities for ritual use, and Muslim growers kept the region’s ancient table grapes alive as fruit rather than wine. But the vineyards of kings and exporters were gone, and the story of Holy Land wine went quiet for a very long time.

From Rothschild to Marawi

The modern revival began with money and philanthropy. In 1882 Baron Edmond de Rothschild, owner of Château Lafite, bankrolled the first large modern wineries in Ottoman Palestine, founding what became Carmel and planting French varieties in the coastal plain and the hills.⁶ A century later, ambitious estates in the Golan Heights and Upper Galilee proved the region could make wine of real international quality, and Israel returned to the world’s wine map.

The most poignant chapter is the newest. At Ariel University, the oenologist Eliyashiv Drori has been extracting DNA from ancient grape pips found at archaeological sites and matching it to vines still growing in the region, hunting for the actual grapes of antiquity.⁶ In 2014 the Recanati winery used one of them to release “Marawi,” also called Hamdani — the first commercial Israeli wine from an indigenous Holy Land grape, a variety documented in the Talmud and long cultivated by Palestinian farmers. Marketed, half-seriously, as something close to “the wine of King David and Jesus,” it is really a shared inheritance of the whole land: proof that after the long silence, the region’s oldest vines still had wine left in them. (For the deeper backstory, see our guide to the origins of wine.)

This day in wine history

From Canaanite kings to a modern revival.

• c. 1700 BC
  The Tel Kabri palace cellar

  A Canaanite palace in the Galilee stores some 2,000 litres of spiced wine in 40 jars — the oldest palatial wine cellar in the Near East.

• c. 13th c. BC
  The cluster of Eshcol

  By biblical tradition, scouts carry a grape bunch so huge two men bear it on a pole — an image Israel still uses as its tourism emblem.

• 4th–6th c. AD
  Gaza wine conquers the empire

  Byzantine desert towns ship sweet “Gaza wine” from the Negev as far as Britain, Germany, and Yemen.

• 7th century AD
  The long silence begins

  After the Islamic conquest, wine is forbidden and the great Negev vineyards decline into ruin.

• 1882
  Rothschild funds the revival

  Baron Edmond de Rothschild bankrolls the first modern wineries, planting the seed of today’s Israeli wine industry.

• 2014
  The return of an ancient grape

  Recanati releases Marawi, the first commercial Israeli wine from an indigenous Holy Land variety.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• The origins of wine, where winemaking began
• Georgia: the cradle of wine
• Areni-1, the world’s oldest winery, in Armenia
• Hajji Firuz Tepe, the Iranian jar that once held the record

References

1. A. Koh, A. Yasur-Landau & E. Cline, “Characterizing a Middle Bronze Palatial Wine Cellar from Tel Kabri, Israel,” PLOS ONE 9 (2014). plos.org. ↩
2. “Huge Wine Cellar Unearthed at a Biblical-Era Palace in Israel,” Smithsonian (2014). smithsonianmag.com. ↩
3. Numbers 13:23 (the cluster of Eshcol). ↩
4. “Alcohol Through the Ages: Desert Wine,” Archaeology (2020). archaeology.org. ↩
5. P. Mayerson, “The Wine and Vineyards of Gaza in the Byzantine Period,” BASOR 257 (1985). ↩
6. “Israel aims to recreate wine drunk by King David and Jesus,” and Times of Israel on the Drori/Recanati Marawi project (2015). ↩
7. G. Bar-Oz et al., “Middle Byzantine collapse of Negev viticulture,” PNAS (2019). ↩
8. Patrick E. McGovern, Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture (Princeton University Press). ↩

Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture
Patrick E. McGovern (Princeton University Press)
The deep prehistory of wine across the ancient Near East, including the Levant.

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