Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Women's work in ancient Israel

HAARETZ: What's changed? Nothing: In ancient Israel, women did all the work. How did the people of the ancient Levant really live? For women, it was grinding on their haunches. ( Miriam Feinberg Vamosh). The headline, for which the author is obviously not responsible, mischaracterizes the content of the article on a number of counts. The point of the article is that running a household in antiquity was vastly more work than today, and that work fell to women. Excerpt:
Grain can actually be eaten fresh, but only in early spring, when it’s still green and full of sugar. It can also be toasted, which is the way Ruth and Boaz enjoyed it on their first lunch date (Ruth 2:14: At mealtime Boaz said to her, Come over here. Have some bread and dip it in the wine vinegar. When she sat down with the harvesters, he offered her some roasted grain.) Turning it into bread was a lot harder. The earliest food processor in history was a grinding stone, the likes of which have been found in excavations going back many thousands of years. Scholars say that even though the baking itself took only a few minutes after plastering the raw dough on the inside walls of the oven, it probably took a woman about three hours to produce enough flour for a minimum-sized household of six.