I don’t think of myself as naive. But I was too innocent to foresee the reactions to an academic essay I published recently. It suggested that Moses and the early Israelites might have used psychoactive plants.

After I gave an interview to an Israeli newspaper about it, the story was picked up by news wires all over the world. Hundreds of people wrote to me because they’d seen headlines like “Was Moses high on psychedelic drugs?” Some of them called me a sinner or an idiot, others heaped praise on me because they thought I was some kind of 1960s Timothy Leary counter-culture figure advocating hallucinogenic drugs. Just to be clear: I’m not.