STRONG DRINK — an intoxicating drink that is not wine. Wine (yayin) is from grapes; shekhar is everything else fermented, most often barley beer, which was the ordinary drink of the ancient Near East and is brewed in Mesopotamian texts centuries before Israel existed. The root is the one behind shikkor, drunk. ⚠ The word is almost always in a prohibition, which is what makes Deuteronomy 14:26 startling: priests may not drink wine or shekhar when they go into the tent of meeting (Leviticus 10:9), and a Nazirite may not touch either for the length of his vow (Numbers 6:3) — but here a statute tells an ordinary Israelite to convert his tithe to silver, carry it to the sanctuary, and spend it on cattle, flock, wine and shekhar, for a feast. ⭐ The shelf finds it awkward and shows it: ‘strong drink’ in the KJV, Geneva and Douay, ‘other fermented drink’ in the NIV, ‘intoxicating liquor’ in the NWT 1984 — and the TLB alone says the plain thing, ‘beer’. Every one of the older renderings is accurate; ‘strong drink’ simply sounds to a modern ear like spirits, which were not distilled anywhere in the biblical world. → first discussed at Deut 14:26