let's move away now from the primarily political and religious history that we have explored up
until this point and um let's look a little bit more closely at the daily life of the large mass
of anonymous jews living in the land of israel in the biblical period and we're going to focus
uh in this little lecture on the economic life and then there we're going to look at family life and
that ritual life but for now economics and let's have a closer look at this remarkable painting
by nicholas poussin which is titled the summer and then in brackets ruth and boaz and obviously it's
taken from the biblical story that is described in the book of ruth where the wealthy landowner boaz
shown here in the center with that magnificent yellow cloak meets ruth who is there as a very
poor woman and she is engaged in the gleaning that is the biblically mandated leaving behind of
various sheaves and whatever happens to fall on the ground during the harvest season and you get
this kind of bucolic feel of the farmland and things like that it's really very beautiful
by the way i have a son named boaz and we once went to the post office and the clerk there was so
amazed an african-american woman that that uh we had a son named boaz she said what do you call an
unmarried boaz and we said i don't know what she said ruthless at any rate the problem with using
the bible as our source for economic history is that as salah with my urban the great 20th century
historian but it it's more about the zolan than design meaning it tends to talk a lot more about
how the ancient jews should behave than really giving us a clear picture about how they did
the bible is rife with data about for example like in this picture how they're mandated
uh or i should divine mandates of specific kinds of tithes and charitable donations of
of a whole variety of uh of types and the talmud goes on great length uh you know categorizing
these and talking about the stipulations of who is eligible and who is required to give
and all kinds of things maybe we'll get to that a little bit more when we get to the talmudic
period but nevertheless you know the bible is a tremendously rich source we just have to sort
of read it backward to get a sense of what the economic history must have been like as long as we
understand that the primary thrust of the biblical text is ultimately to bring people closer to god
ultimately to make them more compliant with divine mandates and so on so we do have however many
other sources outside of the bible for economic history in the period that we're discussing here
but they tend to be really quite fragmentary and you know cryptic like for example there are
102 scraps of tax receipts written on um pieces of clay that were found in an archaeological dig
around the city of samaria shomron believed to be associated with the palace of king achav and these
are essentially sort of tax notations it appears that when various taxes were brought to the
king like let's say an amphora of wine or a big container of wheat or something like that then the
the the probably the person who was giving the tax would write you know how much wine was in here
and who is giving it to whom i presume which tax collector or something like that and the date
and so on and it was kind of like a primitive tax collection record system uh unfortunately of the
102 scraps only a little more than half of them are legible and they're all like broken up like
this so it's very difficult to tease out really detailed um analysis of the economic life except
that a there were taxes which you know as they say in hebrew yeshua we knew there were taxes that's
pretty much a permanent aspect of human the human condition but at least we get some sense of how
it must have been delivered from one place to another however as uh uh dr barron also goes on
you know israel is one particular area and it's true that we have this very dense text called
the bible to give us some you know insight into the economics of the region but we also
have much data from the surrounding region particularly the region of ugarit for example
which would be in contemporary syria lebanon where if we put together all of this economic data we
can get at least some better sense of how jews lives economically how they support themselves
let's try and understand a little bit about what we know so one of the the most uh profound
shifts that we see in the israeli economy or the economy of the jews of ancient israel
is the shift from animal husbandry to agriculture um in this portrait not a
jewish portuguese obviously it's a christian project from bhatticelli the trials of moses
moses is shown here in a yellow robe and there's kind of like a sort of
like a comic book panel with all kinds of adventures that moses had in his life
and you can see he's reproduced several times over and in several of them he is shown as a
shepherd and in fact the identification of jewish leaders with shepherding is quite profound and has
you know philosophical ramifications as well but david is a shepherd abraham is a shepherd
moses is a shepherd over and over again we see animal husbandry as a feature particularly of
jewish leaders when the jews enter israel however it's clear that there is a shift from animal
husbandry to agriculture and that makes sense because israel is after all quite a diverse area
there are 40 distinct geographic units of the economy in ancient israel and the the way that
the jews were settled at time and i'm now sort of generalizing by the way over like a little over a
thousand years there are four hundred settlements which are called array in hebrew we would
translate that as cities but with less than a thousand people in each of those cities to be sure
there are essentially farming communities that would have some kind of village settlement perhaps
with some kind of wall around it to protect them from marauders if you have a look at the the map
of ancient israel you can see that it is dotted with a wide variety of economic resources looking
from the north which would be closer to the region of lebanon you have timber of course the cedars of
lebanon you have mines for iron and copper will be especially important once uh coinage begins to be
produced you have the so-called tyrion purple in hebrew known as aragaman which is produced from a
particular kind of sea creature that lives on the shoreline and it's it is it's essentially um uh
harvested for its blood or some other um you know bodily fluid that is then made into the tequila
the the specific color that is used orchards you have textiles are very big produce iron salt
metalwork mines and of course dates especially around jericho very very important export the jews
were known especially for the date palm and so you can see there's all kinds of different industrial
activities going on in ancient israel in terms of commerce i mean obviously that flows from the
variety of goods that are available in the area uh biblical text refers to what we might call guilds
artisans individuals uh sometimes especially in the talmud period you there are particular
um towns that are devoted to particular crafts like for example villages that are filled with
tenors that all they do is they tan leather and so on we do have biblical references to jews engaging
in international trade especially during the high point of the united monarchy under solomon
when of course they moved to the divided monarchy and their civil war the the northern kingdom of
israel in particular begins to lose its sway it's international sway over the region and
so they're cut off from a lot of their natural markets and a lot of their natural resources but
we see the economy gradually growing from that original animal husbandry through
industry and then converse and ultimately you have regular coinage produced by the
6th century before the common era and i just want to show you this one great image this was
just discovered this month a 2 shekel weight from the first temple period obviously it's the stone
on the left there uh can you imagine what it must been like to deal with these weights and measures
in your daily uh shopping runs okay i hope you found that interesting and we'll
continue by looking at family life and the the next short video thank you for watching
you