Queries & Comments

Cheers!

A letter to the editor suggests that Hershel Shanks’s mistaken identification of Jeroboam as the son of Solomon resulted from the editor’s having guzzled a jeroboam of champagne to celebrate the millennium (Queries & Comments, BAR 26:03). Your readers may be interested to know that a jeroboam (4.5 liters of Bordeaux or 3 liters of Burgundy or champagne) is not the only Biblical measure of bottle size. Here are others:

Rehoboam = 4.5 liters of Burgundy or champagne

Methuselah = 6 liters of Burgundy or champagne

Salmanazar [Shalmaneser] = 9 liters of Burgundy or champagne

Balthazar = 12 liters of Burgundy or champagne

Nebuchadnezzar = 15 liters of Burgundy or champagne

Only the jeroboam is ambiguous; one must know the type of wine in the bottle to know how much wine it contains.

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