For almost four thousand years, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and his wives, and the other biblical characters have walked alongside us, their stories and deeds forming the backbone of Judeo-Christian culture. The ocean of time that separates us from these ancient heroes has not tarnished their images, nor has the tumult of the modern age obliterated them from our minds. They stand beside us today just as they stood beside our ancestors before us, and just as they will stand beside our children and the generations of the future.



Yet although the hand of time has not erased the biblical characters from our minds, it has obscured the customs of their days that reveal why they acted in certain ways and not others. As a result, their story stands alone, disconnected from where they lived and the way of life they followed in ancient times. We know the story of what they did, but most of us are unaware of the way of life that dictated their actions.



Daily Life in Biblical Times brings the well-known stories that have wandered afar back to their place of birth and to the ground from which they sprouted. This book carefully shakes the dust of time from a world that was, but that ended and is no longer. It reconnects the stories to the cultural reality, social norms, and legal systems that were in place during the eriod when the biblical characters lived, but that no longer exist in Western culture.



Today we live in cultures with government institutions that have replaced the traditional roles of the family. We live in a society with armies, police forces, legal systems, and educational and social welfare institutions. Each of us is represented by a name and identification number appearing on a computer screen in countless offices and institutions of which we may be unaware. All our lives, we purchase from and supply services to people whom we do not know, who for us are no more than dry data on a computer screen. This is the framework within which we live and in which we raise our children – but this is not the life people experienced during biblical times.



The biblical patriarchs and matriarchs lived in a world that had not yet established any government institution. In ancient times, the family, not the state, was the supreme body in society. The family was responsible for the safety of its living area and the welfare of each of its members. It was society’s only economic and legal system. It also served as the main pool of brides and grooms from which the fathers selected partners for their children. Because life took place entirely within the family, a person who was expelled from it found himself in an ungoverned space in which he had no defense, no means of economic support, and no social network.



The fact that the family was the highest body in society, duty-bound and defined by the blood relationships among its members, explains why all the social laws in the Bible are laws of family, not state. It explains why the elders who led the family fulfilled the role of the legal authority and judged their relatives, which would be unacceptable in our time. In the case of severe crime, the elders permitted a blood redeemer to  take revenge against the criminal, and this redeemer fulfilled the role of today’s executive authority. The redeemer, in most cases a brother of the murder victim or of a raped girl, was responsible for executing the criminal. This explains why, for example, after Tamar was raped, her brother Absalom was responsible for killing the man who had harmed her (II Sam. 13).



In modern, enlightened society, the law considers that women have rights equal to those of men, and this situation seems natural to us. We are oblivious to the fact that equal rights for women, as well as the feminist principles that underlie this concept, are new ideas, unknown to people in the ancient world and in a traditional society that functioned according to strict behavioral codes.



In the period in which our foremothers lived, a girl was married at age ten or eleven. Before she even began to menstruate, she was married to a man chosen by her father. From the day of her wedding, she became the absolute property of her husband, who paid her father a dowry, thus in effect purchasing her from him. Her body, her sexuality, and the children she bore belonged, of course, to her husband.



The stories of Tamar (Gen. 38) and Ruth and Orpah (in the book of Ruth) reveal that even when the husband died, his family continued to hold the power of ownership over the wife. The biblical characters lived in a society that permitted and even encouraged men to marry numerous women, an act prohibited in modern, Western society. A polygamous household operated according to a strict hierarchy in which each woman had her place. This book explains why it was preferable for a man to take many wives, and defines the code that determined the status of the wife in her husband’s home. This code demonstrates that in contrast to what many of us may have been taught, Leah, not Rachel, was Jacob’s senior wife and the one with the higher status.



The sole function of the woman in the ancient world was to bear children to her husband. The stories of Sarah, Rachel, and Hannah reveal that women who had difficulty becoming pregnant occupied the lowest rung on the social ladder. A barren woman was a disgrace to herself and to her husband. His other wives exploited her weakness, mocking her and bolsting their own superior status.



The Bible makes only brief, casual mention of several issues that are fundamental to understanding it, whose influence transcends the boundaries of the book and continues to our day. One example is the story of the journey of Abraham and his family from Ur, known to many as Ur of the Chaldees, to Canaan, the modern State of Israel. The idea has taken root in our minds that the forefathers of Genesis came to Canaan from the area of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers (in today’s Iraq). On the basis of this distant collective memory, a tradition developed within Judaism and Christianity that the journey to Canaan represented the watershed between the pagan worldview and the concept of a world ruled by one God.



Is there any foundation to this collective memory? Was it really possible for Abraham and his family to walk thousands of miles, carrying all their possessions with them? Could people really cover such an enormous distance in one lifetime? Or perhaps, as many Bible researchers argue, the story of the journey to Canaan is a myth, not an event that ever really happened?

In order to offer an authoritative answer to these questions, I examined every detail that the Bible provides about the journey. I measured the walking distance, solved the question of how the walkers obtained food and water, and took into account the difficult conditions of the path and the ravages of the climate. Finally, I determined a key according to which I calculated the number of years the journey must have taken, if it did really happen.



To my surprise, and in contrast to what I had first conjectured, my reconstruction returned a positive answer: it was possible for people to make this journey in one lifetime! The journey stands the test of time and logic, contradicting the argument that the story is a myth and not a real-life event. If we accept this conclusion, then the section that reconstructs the journey illuminates one of the most heroic and mysterious adventures that ever took place during the biblical period. In addition, the reconstruction shows that Sarah’s protracted barrenness resulted from a combination of the exertion of the journey, her poor diet, and the young marriage age practiced in the ancient world.



Another major question that the Bible leaves unanswered is the issue of what lay behind the choice of central characters. Why was it important to the biblical author to write about shepherds and simple farmers like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Judah? Why did a work with such a clear masculine orientation bother to record the stories of the foremothers and other women such as Ruth and Naomi? What was so special about these women, who at first glance seem so unimportant? Chapter 15, which addresses this question, reveals the fact that from creation until the “end of time,” the Bible follows the story of one specific dynasty: the Davidic line.

The forefathers and foremothers belonged to this noble dynasty, and their story is part of David’s story. The New Testament also asserts that Jesus belonged to this dynasty. The characters that did not belong to this important dynasty mounted the stage of history for a fleeting moment, but their sons did not inherit their positions. The Bible does not mention them, and therefore we do not know what became of them. Following in the footsteps of David’s dynasty reveals that although Rachel belonged to the family of this dynasty, she was not one of David’s forebears. This explains Rachel’s low status in comparison to Leah, and explains why Jacob’s mistaken love for her led to disaster instead of blessing.



This book also presents a new analysis of the period of David’s ascension to kingship. The Bible does not explain the reason for the strained relationship between Saul and Jonathan, Saul’s eldest son, who was supposed to inherit his position. We also find no explanation of why Saul, who loved David at first, later tried to kill him, nor why Jonathan joined David and helped him flee from his father. This book offers answers to these questions, and proves that Saul’s endless wars against the Philistines were a grave mistake, and almost led his nation to ruin. I argue here that Saul fought until his dying day against the wrong enemy, and that this almost led to a fatal error. I also show that in order to save Saul’s kingdom from destruction, David had to replace him – and this is the reason why Jonathan joined his side.



The forefathers and foremothers, prophets, judges, and kings lived on a strip of land measuring just 37 by 60 miles (60 by 100 km). On this microscopic spot on the globe the Bible was recorded in the original Hebrew, and from that it was translated into every language in the world.



It is a well-known rule that while a translation of a written work from one language to another may aspire to be exact and high in quality, the range of meanings enabled by the original language is inevitably lost. This rule is especially applicable to translations of the Bible, which was written in a language as elegant as it is ancient.



The stories in the Bible are very short, often comprising only several verses. The longer stories may take up several chapters. In order to broaden the scope of the story, the biblical authors often used wordplays and double, even triple entendres which allow multiple interpretations of the story. These wordplays expand the story, adding a depth possible only in the original Hebrew. Because translators of the Bible were careful to translate word for word, the reader who relies on a translation of the Bible into his own language misses the wordplays and the range of meanings present in the original language.

For this reason, I and the translator of the book, Jessica Setbon, dedicated substantial space in the English translation of the book to translation of selected wordplays that have double and triple meanings, and to the special role they play in the stories in which they were integrated. In this book, the reader will be exposed, probably for the first time, to these wordplays and the range of meanings that are lost in translation. In addition, the reader will find here a comprehensive explanation of the biblical writing style, which is completely different from our modern method of writing.



Finally, I would like to add one point that is relevant to the opinions of many present-day Bible scholars. I will also return to this idea in the last chapter of the book. The belief in the existence of one God Who created and rules the world developed from within a pagan environment that believed in the existence of multiple gods. Above all else, the purpose of the Bible is to declare to the world the existence of one God. Three major religions have developed from it: Judaism, Christianity, and much later, Islam. This fact, singular within human history, is enough to indicate its enormous importance.



Yet despite the importance of the Bible, in the last few decades, most Bible researchers at the world’s major universities have asserted that the family stories that took place before the time of David never really took place. Extremists among them argue obstinately that everything written in the Bible, from beginning to end, never happened at all. Both the extremist researchers and their more moderate colleagues agree that the family stories in the Bible are legends, and thus we cannot learn anything from them about the biblical period.



This consensus is largely due to the many legendary elements in the stories that are unacceptable to scientific logic. Examples of this are the statements that the forefathers lived hundreds of years, or the story that Sarah was ninety years old and Abraham one hundred years old when Sarah became pregnant. The academic opinion is also strengthened by the fact that we have no archeological evidence from the period of the patriarchs and matriarchs, which might somehow authorize their story.



But when we carefully peel away the legendary overlay from the stories, we find a social picture recognizable to us from other traditional societies, including some that persist today. The new layer that emerges from the mythical covering reveals a reliable and logical picture of a living, breathing society, a picture that is appropriate to the biblical period and to the way of life practiced during that time. This picture exactly fits the scorched landscape in which the biblical characters lived, and no other place in the world.



The thousands of years separating us from the time of our forefathers, as well as the lack of any archeological evidence that might support the biblical text, ensure that we will never be able scientifically to prove the veracity of their story. Still, this absence of proof does not change the fact that ever since human beings began to draw on the walls of their cave dwellings, they have recorded their stories. Because humans have told their stories in every time and in every place where they have lived, there is no reason to assume that they stopped doing so only in the biblical period. There is no reason to presume that the biblical authors wrote myths, while other peoples who lived during the same time wrote about events that took place in reality. Just as in our time people write legends alongside descriptions of important contemporary issues, such was the case with all ancient peoples, including the biblical authors.

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A society that recounts the reality of its time is no myth or legend. Rather, this is a society that truly existed and recorded its story in its own unique style and language. Thus even if we cannot prove the truth of each individual story, as a whole the collection of stories in the Bible offers fascinating and credible testimony about the beginnings of a nation on its land.