When Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai, he may have been high on a hallucinogenic plant, according to a new study by an Israeli psychology professor.

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The thunder, lightning and blaring of a trumpet which the Book of Exodus says emanated from Mount Sinai could just have been the imaginings of a people in an "altered state of awareness," [Benny Shanon of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University] hypothesized.

Lurking behind this story seems to be the assumption that if Moses was on hallucinogens, then he wasn’t experiencing the divine. But what’s the basis for that inference?

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