Books in Brief

006

Numismatic Must

Guide to Biblical Coins

David Hendin

(Six Hills, NY: Amphora, 1987) 224 pp., 16 plates, numerous line illustrations, $35.00

“Buy the book before the coin” was the slogan of a well-known dealer in numismatic books. It still applies. Beginners and advanced collectors alike should obtain numismatic expert David Hendin’s Guide to Biblical Coins.

More than a revision of Hendin’s earlier Guide to Ancient Jewish Coins (1977), this is a new book containing encyclopedic detail. Although designed for any collector of Jewish coinage, it serves especially well as a quick reference for those who lack years of experience and training. It opens the door to useful information and provides key bibliographic sources.

This well-arranged volume gives word descriptions of the coins, accompanied by photographs and line sketches; beside the sketches, it prints the coins’ Hebrew legends both in ancient Hebrew script and in the modern, square Hebrew script more familiar to most readers. One wishes for better photographs, but ancient bronze, usually poorly struck, is difficult to photograph well. In addition, line sketches reused from Hendin’s earlier book would have benefited from redrawing, but the cost may have been prohibitive.

Useful charts include dynastic genealogy, time lines, an alphabet chart and a parallel index to the various numbering systems. (The two numbering systems of Dr. Yakov Meshorer, however, need clarification.)

This book does not claim originality, but it is a compendium that students and collectors of Biblical coins will use often. The estimated coin prices depend on day-to-day availability and condition. The prices seem generally realistic, but sometimes on the low side for the real rarities. Readers should remember that pricing is not easy. For example, although the book reports a price of $155,000 for the last sale of a “Year 5” shekel (First Jewish Revolt), the sale of a 14-coin hoard was recently reported with prices supposedly driven down to $50,000.

While this well-bound and durable volume may not make you an expert in ancient Biblical coins, it provides a fine way to start and should be a part of your library.

Biblical Economics

Economic Structures of the Ancient Near East

Morris Silver

(Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Books, 1986) 209 pp., $28.50

Economic Structures of the Ancient Near East is a useful addition to the growing literature on ancient Near Eastern material life.

Morris Silver contends that markets, in the more or less modern sense of the term, did exist in the ancient Near East at various times and in several places. Scholars who have extensively studied the old Assyrian trading colonies in Anatolia would probably agree with Silver that institutions containing some modern market functions (i.e., a focus for value/price-making decisions) existed in Old Kanesh (the old Assyrian trading colony in Anatolia, c. early second millennium B.C.). But we do know that even there the central Assyrian authorities did have some role in manipulating the prices and relative values of the traded commodities. Was the Karum (“quay,” “trading station,” “community of merchants,” etc.) a market in the modern sense, or was it a state institution? It is my impression that Silver may not be completely right that the Karum operated by modern market practices.

I think we are faced with the same oversimplified analysis when Silver uses Biblical quotations and evidence from Mesopotamian culture to claim that the city gate functioned like a modern marketplace. It may have done so in the early Persian period. However, in ancient Mesopotamia or in ancient Israel, the gate may have functioned more like a deed-recording center and less like a modern market.

In general, it seems that Silver succeeds in showing that the idea of a monolithic, never changing, centrally governed, Near Eastern state is probably not valid anymore. It really may have been a multifaceted, pluralistic system. Ideas and concepts of institutions (markets, deeds, mortgages, legal exchange, credit letter, insurance) were invented, as were material inventions (plow, screw, sail, etc.), in different places and diffused at variable rates. Sometimes the flowering of market ideas may have occurred very far (in time and place) from the site of the original humble conception. In all probability, such innovations may have been made in border areas where the power of the state had waned and where new exchange mechanisms were devised to facilitate trade between representatives of alien cultures. Future study may help to pinpoint such seminal places and situations. Indeed, Silver’s success lies in stimulating 057such ideas and in furnishing data for future study.

Economic Structures of the Ancient Near East is a stimulating book with many novel insights. In addition, its citations of other works are numerous and comprehensive. Silver’s book will continue to be useful for a long time.

Ancient Farming

Agriculture in Iron Age Israel: The Evidence from Archaeology and the Bible

Oded Borowski

(Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1987) 215 pp., $20.00

What was Gideon up to when he was beating out wheat in the wine press to hide it from the Midianites (Judges 6:11)? What sort of a “wine press” was he using? Why was he “beating” wheat, and what kind of “wheat” must it have been? Where did he store it when he was finished, and how did he grow it to begin with?

Students of the Bible are now fortunate to possess a resource for answering these questions. The publication of Oded Borowski’s beautifully produced volume Agriculture in Iron Age Israel offers tremendous help in illuminating the abundant references to farming in Biblical stories, law codes and metaphorical writings. Borowski provides a comprehensive study of the agricultural terminology from the Hebrew Bible, which he correlates with archaeological data from the time of Israel’s settlement in the 13th century B.C. to the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C. Borowski also calls on his experience with modern agriculture in Israel to help integrate Biblical data and archaeologically recovered implements, installations and plant remains. The result is a rich catalogue of the components of ancient Israelite agriculture.

A careful analysis of the tenth-century B.C. Gezer calendar inscription undergirds Borowski’s helpful and informative description of the operations of the farming year, from plowing and sowing to harvesting and storing. Numerous illustrations drawn from ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian sources and traditional agriculture in Palestine help to portray the farmer’s work.

Gideon’s task, to return to the opening example, was to thresh harvested wheat by beating it with a stick. For a workplace he chose a wine press (Hebrew, gat) located within the village and constructed of stones and mortar, like those uncovered recently in the Iron II stratum at Tell Qiri, on the rim of the Jezreel valley. The usual threshing floor (Hebrew, goren) would have been outside the village and threatened by the Midianites. Gideon probably stored his grain, in or near his house, in a grain-pit such as those excavated at numerous sites (e.g., Shechem and Tell Beit Mirsim). Borowski helpfully classifies the various storage facilities used in the Iron Age and suggests standard terminology for future archaeological reference.

Gideon’s wheat was probably hard (durum) wheat. A second major focus of this book is the crops that provided the livelihood of ancient Israelites. Borowski does an excellent job of describing all the field crops, fruit trees and vegetables cultivated in Iron Age Palestine, everything from barley, vetch and cumin to almond, olive and pomegranate to cucumber and onion. Each is associated with its Biblical terminology, its botanical properties and its archaeological representation. Borowski also describes the fairly recent archaeological interest in identifying plant remains. The catalogue is especially helpful in describing the processing of olives, with its discussion of the innovative beam press that figured in the development of the olive-oil industry in Iron Age II.^a

Borowski is at his best when portraying the material aspects of Israelite agriculture: installations and facilities, implements from the toolshed and seeds from the pantry. Where archaeological evidence is nonexistent or more tangential, as in the case of land use, land tenure and the maintenance of soil fertility, Borowski is less successful. In these areas, Borowski relies on deductions from Biblical data that is itself anything but clear. For example, did fallowing one-seventh of a farming family’s land each year of the seven-year sabbatical cycle satisfy both the legal stipulation and the need for restoration of nutrients, as Borowski suggests? A peek into the ethnographic literature concerning pre-industrial farming communities shows that this reconstruction is highly unlikely. Operating a high-intensity farming system with a total of only one year of fallow out of seven to restore fertility was simply not achievable on any significant scale in the technological, social and demographic circumstances of Iron Age Israel. Because Borowski does not appeal to anthropology, nor to a holistic perspective on farming, he cannot know whether his suggestions for farming practices that are not evidenced archaeologically have any chance of being accurate.

Borowski correctly notes the incomplete record of agriculture preserved in the Bible and recovered by archaeologists. This incompleteness means, among other things, that it is impossible to present a sketch of the history of Israelite agriculture. But are we then justified in presenting the six centuries of Iron Age agriculture as a unified portrait? Borowski does attend to developments where there is clear evidence (as in the case of the beam press), but overall he writes assuming that all the archaeological and Biblical data can simply be merged. I would argue that this is not the case and that distinctions between Iron I and II, as well as between the various sectors of the economy (for example, commercial enterprise versus village subsistence farming), are necessary. Such an undertaking, of depicting the history and diversity of Iron Age agriculture (and pastoralism), is a high-priority task. It can now move ahead with the resource that Oded Borowski has provided in this volume.

BAR readers may order the books reviewed above directly from the Biblical Archaeology Society. Send a check or VISA/Mastercard information for the listed amounts to 3000 Connecticut Avenue N.W., Suite 300, Washington, DC 70008.

Numismatic Must

Guide to Biblical Coins

David Hendin

(Six Hills, NY: Amphora, 1987) 224 pp., 16 plates, numerous line illustrations, $35.00