Sodom and Shechem: Villages, Not Cities

While some scholars question this translation practice, scholarly treatments of Israelite ʿarim (the plural of ʿir) customarily employ the word “city” to describe them. See the summary in Alison R. Gray, “Reflections on the Meaning(s) of `iyr in the Hebrew Bible,” in The City in the Hebrew Bible: Critical, Literary and Exegetical Approaches, ed. J. K. Aitken and Hilary Marlow, LHBOTS 672 (T&T Clark, 2018), 17–34 at 19.

TDOT XI: 51–65.

The closest we find to families living independently, outside of settlements, were probably the חֲצֵרִים (chatzurim) of Lev 25:31, usually translated as “unwalled villages.” Avraham Faust (“The Jubilee Real Estate Law,” TheTorah 2014) argues that these were more farmsteads than villages, likely consisting of a very small number of buildings amid family property.

David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Updated and expanded edition (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2014), 59–60, 292–302.

Verse 3, expressing thanks for bringing the redeemed from foreign lands, persuades most scholars for the post-exilic provenance of this psalm.  See Jason Byassee, Psalms 101-150, BrTCOT (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2018), 54; Nancy L. DeClaissé-Walford, Rolf A. Jacobson, and Beth LaNeel Tanner, The Book of Psalms, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 813.

Genesis 4, 10, and 11 may have been a contiguous writing that was later broken up, though this is far from certain. For a recent reconstruction of Gen 4, 10, and 11, see Mark Harold McEntire, Not Scattered or Confused: Rethinking the Urban World of the Hebrew Bible, first edition (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2019), 70, 225–26. For comments on Gen 11, see Konrad Schmid, A Historical Theology of the Hebrew Bible (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2019), 158.

The picture of a small village is enhanced by the inventions of Cain’s descendants, herding and metalworking. Herders, somewhat less self-sufficient than farmers, visited ʿarim to sell wool and other products from their flocks and to acquire needed grains and tools. And the metal worker was the one essential specialist that most ʿarim would want nearby, as metal tools helped both farmers and herders to work efficiently.

V. Gordon Childe, Town Planning Review XXI (1950), 3–17.

Woolf describes them as follows:

Cities are more complicated social worlds than villages.  If one of our early farmers were to walk through one of the world’s first cities, she or he would immediately notice that there were more kinds of buildings and more kinds of spaces than at home. …The details varied from one culture to another, but early cities all expressed the sense of a social world that advertised differences between urban residents.

Greg Woolf, The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History (Oxford University Press, 2020) 4–5.

More and more, historians have been giving up on the idea that barter economies were ever prevalent.  Instead, they theorize models based on cult coinage, as described below.  See David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Updated and expanded edition (Melville House, 2014) 37–62.

The apparent benefits of specialization have historically led scholars to regard ancient Israel as a surplus society. See Aharon Sasson, Animal Husbandry in Ancient Israel: A Zooarchaeological Perspective on Livestock Exploitation, Herd Management and Economic Strategies, Approaches to Anthropological Archaeology (London: Routledge, 2014), 6–7, for examples of works that have promoted this view in the past.  However, surplus economies rely on the availability of trade that enables specialists to acquire all their needs. The sudden loss of trade, perhaps from adverse environmental or political conditions, would spell disaster. This risk is heightened when major trading partners (Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt) are distant and therefore unreliable. Therefore, for most Israelites, the inherent uncertainties involved in production for trade made self-reliance the best option.

George Modelski, World Cities: -3,000 to 2,000 (DC: FAROS2000, 2003); Tertius Chandler, Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 1987).  While estimated populations of ancient cities vary wildly, the cited estimates lean conservative.  

In the early Iron Age, the Philistine sites of Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath (part of the modern State of Israel but not the ancient kingdom), were large cities as well, far larger than anything Israel had in that period.   

Douglas A. Knight, Law, Power, and Justice in Ancient Israel, 1st ed, Library of Ancient Israel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011) 161–70; William G. Dever, The Lives of Ordinary People in Ancient Israel: Where Archaeology and the Bible Intersect (Eerdmans, 2012), 47–105 [48–49].

The data from excavations show that half of the space of the typical ʿir appears to have been devoted to housing, and a single large area, usually thought to be designed for cultic use or storage, takes up a large percentage of the rest. Knight, Law, 163–67. Some sites feature structures that could have been used for royal administrators, and military sites have space for military installations; perhaps these could be classified as “towns.” But we do not see clear evidence of room for marketplaces or numbers of tradespeople. Sasson, Animal Husbandry, 8–12; Roland Boer, The Sacred Economy of Ancient Israel, LAI (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 52–53. In the 8^th-7^th centuries BCE, Israelite connections to Assyria began to engender significant trade so that Israel was exporting large quantities of olive oil and wine under Assyria-administered trade routes, and even established small ʿarim for craft specialists (Herzog lists Giveon, Tell Beit-Misrim, and Tell en-Nasbeth. But none of these specialist ʿarim had more than 1,000 residents, and their products appear to have been destined for the elites and the state, not the marketplace. Therefore, these ‘arim should also be classed as villages, designed only to host living and working quarters, and space for storage.  See Zeʾev Herzog, Archaeology of the City: Urban Planning in Ancient Israel and Its Social Implications, Monograph Series, no. 13 (Tel Aviv: Emery and Claire Yass Archaeology Press, 1997) 246.