With & Without Straw: How Israelite Slaves Made Bricks - The BAS Library
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With & Without Straw: How Israelite Slaves Made Bricks

By Robert Littman, Marta Lorenzon, Jay Silverstein

“Pharaoh charged the taskmasters and foremen of the [Israelites], saying, ‘You shall no longer provide the people with straw for making bricks as heretofore. Let them go and gather straw for themselves. But impose upon them the same quota of bricks as they have been making heretofore; do not reduce it, for they are shirkers’ … So the taskmasters and foremen of the people went out and said to the people, ‘Thus says Pharaoh: I will not give you any straw. You must go and get the straw yourselves wherever you can find it, but there shall be no […]

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Endnotes

1.

For a general introduction to mudbrick in ancient Egypt, see Barry Kemp, “Soil (including mudbrick architecture),” in Paul T. Nicholson and Ian Shaw, eds., Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 78–103. See also Charles F. Nims, “Bricks Without Straw?” The Biblical Archaeologist 13 (1950), pp. 21–28. Coauthor Jay Silverstein was instrumental in developing our conservation project. We are also grateful to Dr. Fred Hiebert and the National Geographic Society for their support of our excavation and conservation.

2.

The chemical analysis of the mudbrick was conducted under the direction of the late Dr. Adel Harfoosh of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Egypt.

3.

Maury E. Morgenstein and Carol A. Redmount, “Mudbrick Typology, Sources, and Sedimentological Composition: A Case Study from Tell El-Muqdam, Egyptian Delta,” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 35 (1998), pp. 129–146; Robert S. Homsher, “Mud Bricks and the Process of Construction in the Middle Bronze Age Southern Levant,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 368 (2012), pp. 1–27.

4.

Kemp, “Soil,” p. 80.

5.

Iron Oxide (Fe2O3), commonly known as red ochre.

6.

For the Louvre leather scroll, see Kenneth Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 247–248, 553. For the Anastasi papyri, see Ricardo A. Caminos, Late Egyptian Miscellanies (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1954), pp. 105–106, 188–189, 225.

7.

Kitchen, Reliability of the Old Testament, pp. 247–248. Kitchen does not argue that these are Hebrews but points out the similarities of the description.