Agriculture

Why are Israelites blessed with agricultural abundance while the Edomites live in a semi-arid land and are forced to hunt? Isaac’s blessing is an etiological story to explain this reality from an Israelite perspective.

The agrarian import of Deuteronomy 11:14‒15, found in what Jewish readers know as the second paragraph of the Shema prayer, may not be self-evident to modern readers, the majority of whom live in urban and suburban settings. The text speaks directly to both those who grew crops and those who engaged in animal husbandry.

The Bible focuses on questions of religion and politics, overwhelmingly emphasizing city life at the expense of rural life. Archaeology, in contrast, can help us to better understand the life of most Israelites, who did not live in cities, and supplies a better understanding of such mundane questions as what they did for a living and what they ate.

The Hebrew calendar marks multiple news year’s days to express different values: nature and history, universal and particular.

To mark the new year of grain and ensure the bountiful wheat harvest to come. But why do we remove all our chametz (leaven)?

Deuteronomy gives broad permission to eat your fill from a neighbor’s vineyard and grain field, so long as you don’t gather in a vessel or cut with an implement. Famously, the disciples of Jesus gather grain on the Sabbath, earning the Pharisees’ wrath not for theft but for violating Shabbat. Commentators debate the reason for this law and whether it has any limits.

A look at the Torah and Mishnah’s treatment of the mitzvah of bringing bikkurim (first fruits) to the Temple and its associated requirement to recite a historical confession through five prisms: phenomenological, historical, anthropological, feminist and liturgical.

The connection between the Israelite festival of Sukkot in the temple and the Ugaritic new year festival and its dwellings of branches for the gods.  

Reading Cain’s murder of Abel and the account of Cain’s descendants as a metaphor for the trajectory of human development and the change in patterns of human behavior.

Originally the Festival of Matzot was an agricultural holiday but through its association with the Pesach sacrifice, it became historicized and connected to the exodus story. This shift prompted the redaction of several biblical passages and the question “how indeed does eating matzah commemorate the exodus?”

The exodus story, which is presented as the basis for many of the Torah’s rituals, is a secondary insertion in many of these contexts.

A new insight based on archaeology

Early biblical laws demand a cessation of labor every seven days, but that was unconnected to Shabbat, which was originally a full moon celebration.