Biblical Archaeology 101: The Ancient Diet of Roman Palestine
029
What did people eat in Roman Palestine?
The Mishnah, Tosefta, and Talmuds—compilations of Jewish laws and lore written by rabbis from the third to the seventh centuries C.E. in Palestine and Babylonia—are rich sources of information about everyday life, including many details about food. Looking at them, together with the archaeological evidence, gives us an excellent picture of everyday food eaten in Late Antique Palestine.
By the third century C.E., Palestine had long been a Roman province, and Jews had taken on many Greek and Roman practices related to the production and consumption of food, in spite of established Jewish dietary (kosher) restrictions. Indeed, many foods in the Jewish sources have Greek names (and some Latin ones).
The Mishnah gives details of the minimum diet for a week for a woman separated from her husband: “Not less than two qabs of wheat or four qabs of barley [a week] … He must also give her half a qab of pulse and half a log of oil and a qab of dried figs or a mina of fig-cake, and if he has none of these, he must give her other produce instead.” A qab (meaning “measure”) is equivalent to 4 logs, and 1 log equals the contents of six eggs. It should be clear from this that the half log of oil, for example, equivalent in the Mishnah to the contents of three eggs, is very little indeed.
030
The calories in this diet would barely suffice, and the woman would have had to grind the flour and bake the bread herself. While these Mishnaic prescriptions do not include food for the Sabbath, a section describing what was due to a beggar reveals that Sabbath food would include enough oil, pulses (e.g., chickpeas, beans, lentils, or peas), fish, and vegetables for three meals.
Let us now consider individual foods.
Scholars calculate that at least 50 percent—and perhaps as much as 75 percent of the diet of ordinary people—was bread. Bread was made by grinding031 flour in stone mills. Roman cities had large bakeries where the flour was ground in mills the height of a man, but in the country grain was usually ground by women at home with small hand mills of coarse stone, or even more primitive saddle querns.
Grinding grain was a backbreaking but essential task carried out by the lowest-status women. In fact, the Mishnah puts it first in a list of the work a woman is obliged to do: “These are the works which the wife must perform for her husband: grinding flour and baking bread and washing clothes and cooking food and nursing her child and making his bed and working in wool. If she brought him a maid, she need not grind or bake or wash.”
Stone mills normally left residues of grit in the bread. The Mishnah allows for up to 10 percent of impurities when buying grain, so it is clear that there were often more. The grit in the bread left its mark: Skeletons of people from this period show teeth ground down by years of eating gritty bread.
Wheat bread was considered better than barley bread, which was the food of the poor. Bread was also graded according to the fineness of the flour: There was “clean,” that is, white, bread made with fine, sifted flour and coarse bread with lots of bran—and grit. The papyrus accounts left by Theophanes of Hermopolis, a tax official who traveled from Egypt to Antioch in Syria in the fourth century C.E., show him buying expensive bread “for us” (himself and his friends) and coarse bread “for the boys” (his slaves). The Mishnah forbids making this distinction, which must mean that many people did so.
Not everyone would have had fresh bread every day. Fuel was expensive to buy or took many hours to forage. The Tosefta records that ordinary people baked once a week, professional bakers in villages032 baked once every three days, and only bakers in cities baked more often. Bread was often dried in the sun to stop it going bad. When eaten, it was dipped into a liquid—water, wine, vinegar, fish-sauce, oil, or stew—or crumbled into liquid for children. If, in spite of careful drying, bread still went moldy, it may have been eaten all the same: There is a Talmudic discussion of what blessing should be said over moldy bread.
The Gospels depict Jesus eating fish by the Sea of Galilee. The bones of freshwater fish from the Sea of Galilee from this period, including carp, St. Peter’s fish, and the nonkosher catfish, have been identified in local archaeological excavations. So we can assume these fish were available and consumed locally. But there would have been problems with transporting fish without modern refrigeration: How far could they be brought from the sea without going bad in the Middle Eastern heat? And would not the cost of transport have added to the cost of the fish? Presumably, then, fresh fish would have been eaten only by people near a sea or river.
Everyone else would have had to eat other fish products. Fish could be dried, smoked, or salted, and the first-century Roman author Strabo tells us that there was a salting industry on the shores of the Sea of Galilee at Tarichaeae (which means “salt fish” in Greek) or Migdal Nunia (“the tower of fish” in Aramaic). Additionally, archaeologists excavating at Migdal think they may have found some signs of fish-salting there. As of yet, no salting installations have been identified along Palestine’s Mediterranean coast.
In the Talmudic literature, salted fish is a common food, and the salty fish-flavored liquid left over from the salting process, called tzir, was often used as a dip for bread. The Roman fermented fish sauce called garum seems to have been a luxury, out of reach for the poor—a labeled jar was found in excavations at King Herod’s palace at Masada, specially imported from Spain. However, a by-product of the garum fermentation process, the much cheaper fish sauce called allec in Latin or hiliq in the Talmudic literature, has also been found at a number of sites, identified by the large number of tiny bones that033 remained. Processing the fish would have solved problems of varying availability, too, so that the large catches would not go bad, but could be saved for times of scarcity.
Scholars disagree as to how much meat was eaten in Late Antique Palestine. Many think it would have been eaten only rarely—for example, lamb at Passover and meat at occasional weddings and other feasts. In Second Temple times, we can presume, there was also meat at the other two pilgrimages to the Jerusalem Temple. But animals were needed for work, as well as milk and wool, so that every animal killed represented a considerable loss, which meant that meat was clearly very valuable.
Every scrap was used. The Jerusalem Talmud gives details of making sausages. The Mishnah even discusses whether people need to look for the owner of goods found lying in the street, or whether finders could be keepers. It rules that unidentifiable goods, such as “scattered fruit, scattered money, cakes of figs, bakers’ loaves, strings of fish, pieces of meat,” belong to the finder.
In other words, people were sometimes so poor that they were prepared to eat meat picked up off the ground, which was unlikely to be fresh—but clearly too valuable to be thrown out.
One unusual food eaten by Jews was locusts. Most “creeping things” are forbidden in the Book of Leviticus, but an exception is made for locusts. When they have destroyed all the crops, eating the locusts can make the difference between life and death. Talmudic literature mentions locusts frequently, and the laws about eating them are similar to regulations about fish. However, Rabbi Judah says you should not say a blessing over them, as they are really a curse.
The Talmudic literature mentions eggs frequently, mostly of domestic birds—hens, geese, and pigeons—but also foraged eggs of small wild birds. Raising hens for eggs seems to have been a woman’s occupation, and the hens clearly ran around the house and courtyard. As always, the poor made do with the worst. The Tosefta says that only someone with034 a strong stomach should eat addled eggs. Eggshells were used as measures of small quantities of food, as they were widely available.
Talmudic literature mentions a wide variety of vegetables, pulses, and fruits, both wild and cultivated. Foraging for wild plants to supplement the diet in the winter and spring was common. Many vegetables and pulses (and a few fruits) also appear in the Rehov inscription, a list of plants quoted from the Jerusalem Talmud, which was found on a Late Antique synagogue floor mosaic in northern Israel. The inscription, which tells local people what to do about plants in the sabbatical year when it was forbidden to cultivate the soil, is the earliest extant example of any Talmudic text.
The rabbis appear to have been like their Roman contemporaries, who scorned vegetables. A list of “all the good things in the world” contains bread, meat, fish, and even locusts—but not vegetables.
But miqpah, bean and/or lentil stew, was a common dish. Miqpah is literally “something solidified,” which is what happens naturally to a liquid mass of cooked lentils when left to cool. Solid lumps of food were easier to scoop up with the hands and bread, for the poor would not have had many eating utensils. Miqpah was usually flavored with garlic; other vegetables, such as cabbage, were sometimes added.
The main fruits available were figs, which could be easily dried and preserved, and dates, which provided date-honey.
Food could be flavored by a variety of herbs. Dill (anise), cumin, and black nigella are common in the sources, but imported spices, like pepper, were expensive. Mustard was cultivated but also grew wild in Roman Galilee. It was roasted or made into a sauce with honey. Tongue with mustard was considered food fit for a king.
Pure water could be scarce in Late Antique Palestine. Natural water sources were liable to contamination from dead animals, washing, industry, and sewage. Channeled water was supplied to large Roman cities—through lead pipes. Water was often collected in uncovered cisterns, which were liable to all sorts of things dropping in and polluting them. If covered, they could grow algae. The Sea of Galilee was a source of relatively pure water, but elsewhere people would have relied on local springs and cisterns, with all the accompanying problems. Water was often reused; the Mishnah mentions recycling water used by a baker, which might ferment.
Even before the discovery of bacteria, people were aware that polluted water could kill. One common solution was to add wine to the water, relying on its antiseptic qualities to eliminate many of the lethal bacteria.
Wine vats and oil presses from this period are common all over the country. Various oils were available, but the preference was for olive oil, which was used for lighting, fuel, and cleaning the body, as well as for food. Grapes were trodden in vats, and the035 juice was then fermented to produce alcohol, which would prolong its shelf life.
Even then there was a risk of the wine going sour. The Mishnah tells us that one barrel in ten of sour wine was acceptable. If this was what was allowed, we can be sure there were often higher proportions of sour wine.
Interestingly, wine was not included in the minimum diet presented above. The Tosefta reports that a woman “has no claim for wine, for the wives of the poor do not drink wine.”
Thus, while many might consider the stereotypical Mediterranean food triad to be bread, wine, and olive oil, based on the evidence provided by the historical Jewish sources, the basic diet in Roman Palestine seems to have consisted of a daily portion of bread made from wheat or barley; a portion of lentils, peas, or other pulses; some olive oil; and a portion of dried or pressed figs or other produce. Add to this some wine and meat for wealthier families, and we have an idea of what culinary life looked like in the Holy Land two millennia ago.
What did people eat in Roman Palestine? Milk and honey? Olive oil and wine? Food historian Susan Weingarten takes readers on a culinary adventure through historical and archaeological remains to reconstruct the diet of the average person in Roman Palestine.
You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.
Already a library member? Log in here.
Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username