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ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE BIBLE | ||||
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WORK Bible Study Resource |
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| WHAT | Work, especially food production, was necessary for survival. No-one was exempt. | ||||
| WHERE | Most of the population worked in their village or on the land around it - even children worked beside their parents in the fields and in the home. | ||||
| WHEN | There were tasks for every month of the year (see the Gezer Calendar at BIBLE ARCHAEOLOGY: AGRICULTURE), but work of any kind was forbidden on the Sabbath, which was a day set aside for God. | ||||
| BIBLE LINKS | Genesis 38:27-30, Proverbs 31:10-31, Psalm 23, Joshua 2:6, John 11, Mark 4:1-20, Matthew 13:1-23, Luke 8:1-15, Mark 4:35-41. Jesus' parables are filled with references to farming and working on the land. | ||||
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INTERESTING WEBSITES SCROLL DOWN FOR IMAGES |
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FARMING
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Farming
was the main work of the Israelites, necessary for their survival - without it they would have starved
to death. Farming methods evolved over the period of Israelite settlement. At first, they could use only the inhospitable hill country, which meant back-breaking work. Only later in their history were they able to use the rich plains of the valley land for intensive farming. For full information about the tasks |
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OLIVE OIL PRODUCTION
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Olives were
picked in September through until November. In earlier times, they were
then placed in open stone vats and pounded with a pestle. Another method
was to place the olives on a grooved circular stone with another stone on
top; this second stone could be rotated, to press the pulp down and force
the oil out (see below). Later still, a millstone olive press was developed (see example at left). The olives were places in a stone sink or bowl, given an initial pounding, then a large stone was placed on top of them. Additional stone weights were loaded onto one end of a beam fixed in a wall, and the full weight of all this stone flattened the fruit and forced the oil from the olives. |
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MILLING FLOUR
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When
the grain had been winnowed, (see BIBLE ARCHAEOLOGY: AGRICULTURE) it had to be ground to separate the hard outer shell from the flour. In earlier times, and in many small communities, this work was done by women. They ground the grain into a course flour using a pestle and mortar, before preparing the dough and baking it. In later periods this task was done on a larger scale, usually by men using special equipment to could produce a large quantity of flour. The photograph at left, while obviously taken at a much later period, shows the sort of milling equipment that has been in use for many centuries. |
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FISHING
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Fishing
is only mentioned sporadically in the Old Testament, perhaps because the
writers were Jerusalem-based, and fishing was not an important industry
there.
However, there were many towns clustered around the Sea of Galilee in the north, and a flourishing fishing industry there. The New Testament describes fishing as a normal industry employing many people. This meant they did all the normal tasks of a fisherman: catching fish of course, but also mending nets and sails, repairing boats, and selling their catch. We can get a good idea of the sort of boat they used from the ancient boat dated back to the 1st century AD, discovered buried in mud near the town of Magdala. This boat is nine meters in length and two and a half meters wide (see left above, with a reconstruction of the boat at bottom left). Fishermen used bone or iron fish-hooks, though fishing by hand was not much in use since it only yielded a small amount of fish. In New Testament times there were two kinds of net in use. One was a net thrown by hand from the shore, which would yield small amounts of fish. The other was a large net called a dragnet, thrown out over the water from the side of the boat. This large net had floats and weights attached so that it sank down into the water, collecting any fish below the boat. When the fisherman judged there were enough fish in the net, they (there were usually four fishermen to a boat) sailed or rowed into shallow water where the fish could be pulled up out of the water. |
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THE SHEPHERD
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The life of a shepherd was a lonely one, and it could be dangerous as well. He led the sheep and goats, who were always herded together, to an area where they could get food and water. He knew each one of the animals, and watched over them night and day. For all these reasons, Jesus was portrayed as the Good Shepherd. A shepherd carried a staff, which was a curved piece of wood, usually a sapling, with a piece of side-growth that formed a V-shape suitable for hooking an animal by its leg. He was also armed with a wooden club. This was to defend himself and his animals against beasts of prey on the look-out for a meal - this could be wolves and hyenas, jackals, or even in the early period lions and bears. He also had to contend with human animals of prey - thieves who sought to relieve him of some of his herd. The shepherd had to give an accounting for every animal in his care. If someone stole an animal, the shepherd had to give the owner of the animals its current value. If a wild animal took one of his flock, the shepherd had to provide evidence of what had happened. At night, animals were kept in a sheep-fold - an enclosure with a circular stone wall and one small entrance, just wide enough for one animal to pass through. At night, when the animals were inside the enclosure, the shepherd was expected to sleep lying across the entrance, his body providing a gate for the enclosure so that nothing could get in or out.
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BUILDING
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The Israelites were not, at first, great builders. They preferred the mobility of living in tents, and many did not wish to live in settlements as the Canaanites did. In fact, the story of Cain and Abel is about the conflict between the two different ways of life - settled village life that depended on agriculture, and nomadic life that focused on the flocks of animals that sustained a clan/tribe. Gradually, however, they adapted to the settled life of farming and agriculture. This of course did not come without disadvantages - kings and taxes probably being the worst of these. King Solomon had an impressive building program, and imported Phoenician masons and joiners to produce top quality work for the Temple and Palace he built in Jerusalem. A thousand years later, King Herod the Great did much the same, though on a much more impressive scale. The town of Sepphoris, just a few miles from Nazareth, was built in this period, and it is feasible that Joseph and possibly even Jesus of Nazareth were builders on this site. Building included constructing houses and city walls, digging wells, water tunnels and grain storage caves. This could involve a whole range of building skills: carpenters, stonemasons, plasterers, metal-workers, quarry workers, and unskilled labor. Many villages had cisterns hollowed out underneath the houses, to store rain water. These were excavated from the solid rock then lined with slaked lime to prevent water leakage. Animals were also housed in cavities cut out of the stone - a space like this, rather than a stable, would have been the birth place of Jesus. See BIBLE ARCHITECTURE: HOUSING for more on this subject
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FOOD PREPARATION
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WOMEN'S WORK We tend to imagine ancient women confined to their looms and their kitchens, and these tasks of course occupied a large part of their time, but they also did many other forms of work. You can get an idea of these tasks by reading Proverbs 31:10-31, a poem describing the ‘Woman of Worth’. This poem lists all the tasks a woman should, ideally, perform. They included: finding a respected and well-to-do man to be her husband spinning and weaving cloth for family's clothing and in the earlier period the tents they lived in making and selling finished items of clothing designing and making suitable clothing for all members of the household, for winter and summer dressing herself well and attractively keeping herself physically and mentally strong and fit giving religious instruction to her children: she was their first teacher gathering food and assembling a varied and healthy diet for the members of the household administering the finances of the family and overseeing the family business buying investment property wisely supervising investments then re-investing the profits performing charitable work and caring for the poor organizing and supervising the tasks of all servants overseeing the emotional and physical well-being of all the members of the household being available at all times to anyone who needed her. You will notice that the list
hardly mentions children. This is not because children were
unimportant, in fact quite the reverse. It was taken for granted
that children were the central concern of a woman’s life. Children
were the great blessing given by God. Not having children was
counted as a very great misfortune. The tasks listed in Proverbs 31 were those of the main woman of the house, but there were many lesser tasks that women and girls were expected to perform. As well as working in the fields alongside the men, they were expected to prepare all the food that the family ate. They milked the goats and sheep, then produced yogurt and cheese from the milk. They spun wool, wove and dyed fabric, and made clothes for the family. They collected water every day from the village well - very few houses had their own well. |
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CHILDBIRTH
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Hebrew women gave birth in their own tents or houses. During labor they were surrounded by other women: a midwife, their relatives and friends, and female servants of the family. They would certainly have seen other women give birth, so they knew what to expect and what to do.
Midwives were highly skilled.
Giving birth could be a dangerous business, and mothers sometimes died.
But the Book of Genesis describes a difficult birth when Tamar has her
twin sons - the midwife's skill is evident. See
the story in Genesis 38:27-30 |
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WEAVING
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Clothe was made from flax
(linen), and wool (from sheep and goats). Sheep were shorn in the spring, when the weather began to warm up. The fleece was washed, then dried in the sun. Then it was combed and spun into yarn, using a simple hand spindle made of stone or clay. The looms could be vertical or horizontal, but the vertical ones seem to have been favored (see examples at left). The weaver stood in front of the vertical loom - the threads were held taut by the stone or clay weights, and the weaver could make quite large pieces of cloth, or even the strips of thick coarse cloth used for tents. Processing the flax used to make linen was a complicated process. The strips of flax were often dried on the flat rooftops (see the story of Rahab the prostitute, who hid spies from the soldiers by putting bundles of flax on top of them, Joshua 2:6). When they were completed, the strips of cloth might be dyed - the colors were made mostly from vegetable dyes, but costly purpose was made from the crushed shells of mollusks. There were a variety of colors used: blue from wood, yellow from pomegranate, lilac from myrtle, etc. Even the poorest Jewish women used vegetable dyes to get a range of colors for the family’s woolen clothes. Flax did not take dye well. Women were largely responsible for production of clothing in all stages of manufacture. They |
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PREPARING THE DEAD
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It was the women’s task to prepare a dead body for burial. The body was washed, and hair and nails were cut. Then
it was gently wiped with a
mixture of spices and wrapped in linen strips of various sizes and widths. While this was happening, prayers from the Scriptures were chanted.
The body was then carried to a tomb and laid on a long shelf carved into the stone. It could be wrapped in a shroud, but was otherwise uncovered.
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_______________________________________________________________________________________ INTERESTING WEBSITES - photographs, reconstructions, information The farming methods
may have been primitive by modern standards, but the food was certainly
organic.... A builder like
Joseph, and possibly Jesus also, would have been multi-skilled Burial customs
and practices, care of the dead body and of the grieving family Childbirth, which was
difficult for some of the women mentioned in the Bible: Tamar survived,
Rachel died
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