(Page 7 of 8)

For five centuries settlements increased. No doubt there were some groups that fit the classic idea of the Israelites as a tent-dwelling pastoral people following herds of goats and sheep, Bedouin-like, as they wandered in the desert. But many were settled in peasant villages, and the towns included a rich, armed, priest-ridden urban elite.

All these people ate bread, making it from grain grown by rain agriculture. Wheat grew best in the lowland plains and highland valleys, while barley tolerated the drier semideserts and arid hills. They dipped their bread in olive oil, which besides having needed calories served as ointment, cosmetic, and lamp fuel. Peas, beans, lentils, and chickpeas complemented the grains, largely meeting protein needs and restoring nitrogen to the soil. Vineyards produced wine and raisins, and orchards yielded dates, figs, apricots, pomegranates, carobs, almonds, walnuts, and pistachios. Milk from goats and sheep was made into cheese and yogurt, and the same animals supplied occasional meat. Dove, quail, antelope, wild plants, and honey came directly from the land.

We know the yearly rhythm of life from one of the oldest Israelite inscriptions, the Gezer calendar.7 A sort of to-do list etched on a limestone slab the size of a handheld computer, it itemizes farmwork month by month. Its significance for us today is that it describes the foundation of the Jewish calendar used ever since. In China, Texas, or Ecuador many centuries later, Jews are still celebrating holidays and marking seasons according to the rhythm of Israelite peasant life three millennia ago. It is fundamental to Jewish culture.

"Two months: ingathering," the list begins, meaning the harvest of grapes and olives in late summer and early fall. This is the start of the traditional Jewish year, the harvest itself still marked by Sukkot, the Feast of Booths, when religious Jews eat in temporary wooden structures that recall the makeshift huts of the ancient autumn harvest. "Two months: sowing" meant late fall, when the rains began, and "Two months: late grass," the continued sowing of winter. A month of "cutting flax" followed around March, when seeds were gathered to eat or press into oil. Barley harvest came next, and then a month of "harvesting and measuring" wheat in May and June.

This was the most important harvest, the one described in the biblical book of Ruth and celebrated in the Jewish Feast of Weeks, Shavuot. The corners of the fields were left uncut by Torah law, so poor people like Ruth could eat. "Measuring" meant counting portions of grain on the threshing floor, vital for both businesslike farming and tax collecting. This same threshing floor was the site of Ruth's sweet seduction of Boaz, leading to the line of Davidic kings. "Two months: pruning" meant preparation of vines for harvest, and finally "One month: summer fruit," the harvest of figs and pomegranates, after which the cycle began again with grapes and olives.

We know a good deal about life in Israel at this time. Peasants lived in four-room houses built of limestone blocks cut from the rocky landscape. Pillars inside the entrance on one side held a thin wall separating the stable from the living area. The wall might have a built-in trough for livestock in stalls paved with stone. The rest of the house was the family's living space. The main room, often plastered, had a hearth, an oven, and cisterns. Pottery found in many of these houses - storage jars, cooking pots, oil lamps, dishes and bowls, and figurines - tells us the ethnic affinity of the inhabitants. Grain pits show that grain was the staff of life, specific to the period of settlement, with its small-scale, decentralized agriculture, unlike the silos and storehouses of kingdoms. The pits were up to ten feet wide and six deep, lined with stone, plaster, ash, clay, or dung, and bell- or bottle-shaped. They protected grain from rats, mice, dampness, and bacteria. In the wake of Egyptian rule there could not be so brutal an exercise of power. There were still elites, but they were local, and they shared a common culture with the peasantry. Arable land was communally shared and rotated, and kin and clan ties tempered political power. Still, villagers were sometimes ravaged by extortionists, and depended on patrons, sheikhs, headmen, estate owners, and local lords for protection from enemies, access to vital resources, even propitiation of the gods that most people throughout the region believed in.

Who were these gods? A pantheon of strange and wondrous superhuman characters, some indigenous, others imported from Egypt or Mesopotamia, with its own shifting divine council, from time to time joined by the gods of conquered peoples.8 El was a pastoral, nomadic, chieflike god in a class by himself, traversing wild paths of desert, mountain range, and sea, sometimes along with his consort, Asherah. Baal was a high god of war and governance, who had Anat and Astarte as his sexy, magical consorts. Reshep, friend of warriors in life, and Horon, who guarded them in the underworld after death, made a life of endless risk tolerable for fighters. And Shamash, the sun, the ultimate giver of life, delivered his daily pulse of light and warmth, never taken for granted.

These were the gods of official cults, elites, and power, but they were also the gods of the weak peasant households. Still, they had to live at least as well as kings and chieftains, so they were given large quantities of burned animal flesh, the most precious food. Their priests and wealthy human allies shared in it, of course, and these human friends of the gods needed jewels, gold goblets, silver breastplates, and the best imported, decorated garments so that they could converse with the gods in style. Poor homes were also full of imps, sprites, and spirits, household idols, local saints and witches, ghosts of ancestors dangerous and caring, and countless other ways of giving the world meaning.

Sometime during this era there arose the seemingly preposterous idea that there was only one god. We don't know when it appeared, who among the Israelites believed in it first, or why it made sense to them. But we know that the rest of the gods and spirits did not die quickly or quietly, and the story of Israel's priests and prophets is largely one of combating idol worship for the next thousand years. The oft-repeated biblical phrase "a stiff-necked people" referred in the first place to their tendency to backslide toward idols. Abraham may have smashed his father's gods, but the people he founded returned to them again and again.

Before the settlement period the whole pantheon must have seemed very much alive and real. The people were a collection of tribes - some pastoral wanderers, some settled villagers, some urban elites, some priests and warriors. Virtually all adults were married, had children, and, except for the elites, worked at farming, herding, or crafts from childhood to old age. Feasts and festivals full of worship, saga, song, and dance marked the annual round. Women were subordinate to men, but as men were to their betters. Supernatural forces - God or gods, imps, sprites, and ghosts - were as real and present as the rock you stubbed your toe on or the unseen mouse scurrying in the grain pit.

But this static picture doesn't capture the dynamic, threatening course of life. Women died in childbirth, infants and young children were routinely lost to illness, and the specter of infectious disease clouded the whole of life. Fights, accidents, and drunkenness punctuated household calm. Overall, this was a less violent era than the brutal epoch of Egyptian exploitation. But peace, that sacred, hoped-for state, was invariably provisional, a pause between raids and wars. In fortunate times it might persist as much as a generation or two, but no one could have expected it to endure.

© 2004 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

Tags: Judaism

About the Author

Melvin Konner, Ph.D., M.D., the author of nine books, is a Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology at Emory University in Atlanta, where he teaches in the anthropology, human biology, and Jewish studies programs. He has written for The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, Science, and the New England Journal of Medicine.