Part III - No Crisis in Yehud

Summary

There is no doubt that farmers did not like paying taxes and had to cope with all sorts of challenges. Yet, there is no reason to suppose that the fifth and fourth centuries BCE were particularly critical for Palestinian farmers. In light of the previous chapters, the helpless farmer crushed by absentee landlords belongs to the ‘crisis’ literary genre that provides a backdrop for the self-presentation of biblical exegetes as modern prophets. Without a good crisis, prophetic fulminations lose much of their bite. Terefore, catastrophic depictions of the situation of biblical farmers are crucial to the social-scientific approach. Clues to a continuing structural crisis are found in the Bible, even if the notion of a structural crisis is nonsense (§7.2.6). Albertz was particularly thorough in the compilation of crisis texts. The admission that ‘Unfortunately, it is impossible to give an exact date to the texts mentioned’ helps to make the crisis endless. The financial difficulties mentioned in Nehemiah 5 (see §7.2) are a good prop for ‘a far-reaching and long-lasting social crisis which shook post-exilic Judah to the core. The creeping decline of increasing numbers of population, which at times became acute, to a level below the minimum needs of existence, grew to an abuse which could no longer be overlooked by anyone who held a position of responsibility in the community’ (Albertz 1994: 497).