Hm. I just searched for:

hallucinogenic plants in the ancient middle east

& came up with this site, among others:

http://www.ancientworldreview.com/psychedelic_plants/

Which has this to say:

Notes: Mandrake, aka Mandragoria or "Satan's Apple" -- its Arabic name -- is a "native of Southern Europe and the Levant," according to Botanical.com.

A member of the nightshade family, Mandrake "contains deliriant hallucinogenic tropane alkaloids ... and the roots sometimes contain bifurcations causing them to resemble human figures," according to Wikipedia.

Also this from the same website:

Pre-Neolithic Mushroom Cults Of The Sahara

"Abstract--The idea that the use of hallucinogens should be a source of inspiration for some forms of prehistoric rock art is not a new one. After a brief examination of instances of such art, this article intends to focus its attention on a group of rock paintings in the Sahara Desert, the works of pre-neolithic Early Gatherers, in which mushroom effigies are represented repeatedly. The polychromic scenes of harvest, adoration and the offering of mushrooms, and large masked ‘gods’ covered with mushrooms, not to mention other significant details, lead us to suppose we are dealing with an ancient hallucinogenic mushroom cult. What is remarkable about these ethnomycological works, produced 7,000 – 9,000 years ago, is that they could indeed reflect the most ancient human culture as yet documented in which the ritual use of hallucinogenic mushrooms is explicitly represented.(As the fathers of modern ethno-mycology and in particular R. Gordon Wasson) imagined, this Saharian testimony shows that the use of hallucinogens goes back to the Paleolithic Period and that their use always takes place within contexts and rituals of a mysticoreligious nature." Source: Artepreistorica. The article originally appeared in Integration: Journal of Mind-Moving Plants and Cultures.

And more to the point, this search:

hallucinogenic plants in the ancient near east

Which produced this link, among others:

http://asorblog.org/2014/07/11/psychedelics-and-the-ancient-near-east/

And I suspect that this is the original Wikipedia article you may have read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_bush

Benny Shanon, professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem wrote a paper, "Biblical Entheogens: a Speculative Hypothesis", in the philosophy journal Time and Mind, which suggests Moses may have been under the influence of a hallucinogenic substance when he witnessed the burning bush.[21][22] In the abstract, Shanon states that entheogens found in arid regions of the Sinai peninsula and in the south of Israel (i.e. Negev) were commonly used for religious purposes by the Israelites though he says "I have no direct proof of this interpretation," and "such proof cannot be expected."[21][22] The plants he suggests may have caused the vision are Peganum harmala,[21] used by the Bedouin people in present times but not identified with any plant mentioned in the Bible,[22] and acacia, mentioned frequently in the Bible, and also used in traditional Bedouin and Arab medicine.[21][22]

Alexander and Zhenia Fleisher relate the Biblical story of the burning bush to the plant Dictamnus.[23] They write:

Intermittently, under yet unclear conditions, the plant excretes such a vast amount of volatiles that lighting a match near the flowers and seedpods causes the plant to be enveloped by flame. This flame quickly extinguishes without injury to the plant.