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“4 rms, hillside view,” an apartment ad would have stated in the Ancient Israelite Bugle. With the development of this style of housing, the ancient Israelites can be said to show their own cultural characteristics, according to Dever. In its simplest form, the four-room house consisted of a long, narrow room (1, at bottom of plan), with three rooms jutting from it separated by two rows of pillars. The middle of the three rooms (3) was probably not roofed over but was left open and served as a courtyard; it likely contained an oven. The four basic rooms were often subdivided, and additional rooms were added along the periphery. Dever sees these structures as farmhouses and believes that most of the earliest Israelites were agricultural people who had been farmers and stock breeders elsewhere in Canaan.