Introduction

Summary

This volume seeks to render biblical exegetes more familiar with ancient farming and its techniques by integrating some of the growing body of knowledge derived from economic studies of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. As a body of literature written by scribes who grew most of the food they ate, the Hebrew Bible presupposes a world that is beyond the immediate reach of academics who live in affluent post-industrial urban settings where hunger is absent and the relation between work and food is entirely mediated through money.

For the last few decades, social-scientist exegetes have led the way in reaching behind the biblical text and the results are impressive. Combining insights from archaeology, sociology and anthropology has greatly sharpened our figuration of actual conditions in ancient Canaan and provided a wider perspective against which the biblical texts can be read. Yet, social-scientific exegesis seems to me bogged down by the repetition of a number of slogans. Ingrained ideological reflexes elevate untested assumptions to the rank of evidence. Particularly problematic is land ownership, often considered as the prerequisite to freedom, freedom as the prerequisite to abundance, abundance as the proof that the ‘rich’ are oppressing the ‘poor’, and loans as the first step towards slavery (see §4.5 for other slogans). The present study challenges some slogans in the hope to give a new impulse to the study of farming in ancient Palestine.