2.1.1 Temples as Houses and Households

By the second millennium BCE, when myths with the labor creation motif began to be attested, palace and temple were both mature and complex institutions deeply engrained within the fabric of settled society. Structures identifiable as temples appear first in the archaeological record, beginning in the fourth millennium in southern Mesopotamia (Stone, Reference Stone and Crawford2013: 157–8). These preceded – and probably catalyzed – the development of large-scale urbanism. Indeed, it is probable that temples originated as (or as part of) sites used for the communal storage of grain for consumption and seed, with surplus banked against future misfortunes (Makkay, Reference Makkay1983; Pollock, Reference Pollack1999: 5, 87–93). Larger storage complexes were constructed as settlements grew, but temples remained administrative hubs that directed the flow of grain and other goods into and out of them. As such, temples were never sites of purely spiritual veneration – from their earliest appearance they also played a central role in the material economy.

Palaces appear later. Early towns and cities seem to have had a single ruler, a priest-king who served what we would call both religious and secular functions. In the third millennium, these two roles diverged, and so did their headquarters. Residences for city rulers begin to enlarge and separate as the institutions defined themselves against one another. Their roles and functions differed and they often competed for power and influence, but these great institutions remained inextricably bound in mutual dependence for resources and legitimation.

Compared to the surrounding domestic architecture, temple buildings were monumental and lavish structures, though they varied widely according to the size and wealth of their town or city (Bottéro, Reference Bottéro2001: 114–9; Figure 2). They were also richly appointed with decorations of the highest quality and rarest materials. The resident gods themselves were represented by statues constructed of wood overlaid with precious metals, clothed in luxurious cloth, and ornamented with expensive jewelry (Postgate, Reference Postgate1992: 109–19; Maggio, Reference Maggio2012). They were staffed by a host of officials and servants whose work revolved around the care, feeding, and entertainment of their divine masters. The scope and complexity of temple functions comes across clearly in the standard list of temple professions, which was finalized in the Early Dynastic period and copied for centuries thereafter (Westenholz, Reference Westenholz and Crawford2013: 247). It included more than 250 distinct titles for temple functionaries, ranging from the highest priests and ritual officiants to quotidian personnel such as bakers, weavers, watchmen, and sweepers of the courtyard. No temple employed someone in every office on the list, but the list gives a clear indication of the variety of roles necessary to maintain a temple’s daily operations.

Figure 2 Proposed digital reconstruction of the Eanna district in Uruk during the New Year’s Festival, as it would have appeared in the Ur III period (21st c. BCE).

© 2012, artefacts-berlin.de; Material: German Archaeological Institute.

Figure 2Long description

A computer-generated reconstruction showing the Eanna district in Uruk. The central focus is on the main ziggurat of the Eanna temple, a white step pyramid structure that towers over surrounding buildings. A gate in the center leads to a staircase that rises up the center of the ziggurat, and several chambers are visible on different stages of the ziggurat. The ziggurat sits in the middle of a large walled courtyard, surrounded by various other buildings of the city. People are gathered in the courtyard as well as outside to observe the festival. The king sits on a throne under a red canopy and is approached by celebrants.

2.1.2 The Temple Food service: Menu and Scale

One such regular activity was the provision of food to the deities in the form of their daily meals (Oppenheim, Reference Leo1977: 183–97; Postgate, Reference Postgate1992: 119–122; Lambert, Reference Lambert and Quaegebeur1993: 194; Bottéro, Reference Bottéro2001: 125–32; Scurlock, Reference Scurlock and Jean Collins2002, Reference Scurlock2006a, Reference Scurlock2006b; Linssen, Reference Linssen2004: 129–66; Pongratz-Leisten, Reference Pongratz-Leisten, Porter and Schwartz2012; Stackert, Reference Stackert2012; Abusch, Reference Abusch2020). Gods expected to be fed several times per day. The number of meals and their size and content varied according to local custom but always included at least one morning and one evening meal. Though some special terminology does exist for the gods’ provisions, they are just as often described in the same words as human meals (Lambert, Reference Lambert and Quaegebeur1993: 196–7).

Mealtimes could be elaborate events (Figure 3). Officiating priests placed the food on stands set before the statues of the gods in choreographed sequence, accompanied by ritualized recitations, music, and other entertainments.Footnote ⁴ The substance of the actual meal was dictated pragmatically according to local foodways and the size and wealth of the temple’s city. In general, the menu would have resembled the fine foods enjoyed by human elites: meat from cattle, sheep, goats, fish, birds, and game along with grains, vegetables, fruits, and large quantities of beer, wine, and dairy.Footnote ⁵

Figure 3 A Neo-Assyrian (ninth to eighth century BCE) cylinder seal depicting a cultic banquet scene.

Photo © 2024, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Figure 3Long description

A 1-inch-tall brown limestone cylinder seal next to a modern impression made from rolling it across soft clay. The main scene includes several figures around a table. Two women stand to the left, one of whom carries a large basket raised in offering. On the right, a man holds a plate with a piece of meat (perhaps a fish) on it. The table is set with bread and a goblet. Surrounding the scene are various symbols.

Enough prescriptive and descriptive texts concerning these ritual meals are attested from various times and places to prove their antiquity,Footnote ⁶ but some of the most detailed and complete examples come from late in the cuneiform tradition. One such group of texts details the proper service of Anu and the other gods in the Eanna temple at Uruk (Thureau-Dangin, Reference Thureau-Dangin1921: 74–86; Linssen, Reference Linssen2004: 172–83). One especially informative tablet (TU 38) was produced in the Seleucid Era (ca. 261 BCE), though it claims to have copied an early Neo-Babylonian original.Footnote ⁷ According to this document, all of the gods of the temple received four daily meals – one large and one small meal in the morning and the same in the evening. The obverse of the tablet specifies the required amounts of beverage (beers, milk, and wine), breads, and dried fruits, and the reverse is devoted to meat and changes for special calendrical occasions. Rather than reproducing the entire 100-line menu here, I present only a taste: the daily drinks for Anu alone and the daily meat total for all the gods (translation adapted from Linssen, Reference Linssen2004: 172–83).

The meat and drink were supplemented by grain and fruits: 168 loaves of bread from around 650 liters of barley flour and another 1,200 oil-fried cakes topped with around 650 liters of dates. On festival days, celebrated monthly, annually, and on significant occasions, these regular meals were bolstered further by special offerings (Robbins, Reference Robbins1996: 69–78; Linssen, Reference Linssen2004: 40–127; and see Scurlock, Reference Scurlock and Jean Collins2002: 391, for other times and temples).

The sheer quantity of food indicated in this text is breathtaking. And while it is true that the numbers in these prescriptive texts do not always match the totals in accounting and bookkeeping records (Robbins, Reference Robbins1996: 79), the Eanna seems to have routinely served approximately 4,300 sheep to the gods per year (Kozuh, Reference Kozuh2014: 1).Footnote ⁸ Eanna was a major temple in a large city, and others may not have matched its scale. The volume of daily meals would have varied widely from place to place and time to time. Nevertheless, the food given to the gods in Mesopotamian temples was usually sufficient to feed a large number of people – which is exactly what it did.

2.1.3 The Gods’ Leftovers, the Servants’ Food

The gods’ table was not the last stop for these dishes. Once the meals had been ritually prepared, served, and (symbolically) consumed by the deities, the “leftovers” were cleared away and distributed for consumption by temple officials and personnel (Linssen, Reference Linssen2004: 139; Brisch, Reference Brisch, Heffron, Stone and Worthington2017; Abusch, Reference Abusch2020: 59). The gods’ portions themselves went to the highest priests and, in many cases, to the king and his family in the palace (Beaulieu, Reference Beaulieu1990). Texts provide detailed information regarding who received which cut of meat and which portion of other dishes. Sometimes these instructions are appended to ritual instructions themselves and other times the information was relayed on its own. Take, for example, this brief extract from a longer Neo-Assyrian list of meat disbursals (Kataja and Whiting, Reference Kataja and Whiting1995: 81, lines 4–17):

The reverse contains different distributions to many of the same parties, suggesting their diets varied from day to day.

Temple food did not only go to gods, kings, and priests, however. As Brisch (Reference Brisch, Heffron, Stone and Worthington2017: 51) writes: “Temples were responsible for feeding the gods, but also for sustaining a substantial part of the city community.” Lower-rank temple personnel and dependents also received food income from the temple kitchens. Scholars refer to these distributions as “prebends,” job-specific entitlements to certain cuts of meat and specified amounts of bread, beer, and other staples (Waerzeggers, Reference Waerzeggers2010: 77–102). It was these workers who justified the amounts of food dedicated to the gods’ meals.

However, prebends were also hereditary and could be divided between inheritors. Over time, a large prebend could be divided into smaller and smaller parts that became insufficient to support one person, let alone a family. Those at the top of the temple hierarchy lived in luxury, but for those at the bottom possessing a prebend was no guarantee of wealth or comfort. As with many large, extractive organizations, the fact that they siphoned surplus from outside their walls did not mean they avoided exploiting those within.

The consumption of divine leftovers ties the symbolic and material functions of the temple together in a way that clarifies the institution’s rhetorical usefulness. On the symbolic plane, the gods were the heads of household, and the priests and kings were simply the top tier of their service staff – a kind of transmundane Professional Managerial Class. Materially, it was these priests and kings who benefitted first and foremost from the temple’s collection of resources from the broader society. In other words, those at the top of the social hierarchy placed themselves in the middle of a cosmic class structure in ways that justified their acquisitive tendencies and relieved them of responsibility for any of the system’s shortcomings. This proved very useful in the integration of the temple regime into the broader economy.

2.1.4 Supporting the Estate

The smooth functioning of Mesopotamian temples required that food and other resources of the right kind and sufficient quantity be available when they were needed. Like households of the human gentry, the gods’ houses were not supported through the activities of the household servants alone, but through their more extended holdings – the difference of course being that the gods’ estates encompassed all of human society. On a social and political level, the institutions of Mesopotamian society worked together to siphon surplus from the productive sectors of the economy using a variety of extractive means, from the voluntary to the coercive and the ambiguous in-between.

Temple extraction emerged from the very early (prehistoric) collocation of sacred sites with communal seed and surplus storage (Makkay, Reference Makkay1983). From there, the temple’s economic activities grew and diversified, incorporating a wide variety of revenue streams. These varied, of course, by time period, and I can only offer some representative generalities here.

In every period, temples welcomed voluntary gifts (Sumerian arua, Akkadian širku) from private citizens (Mieroop, Reference Mieroop, Behrens, Loding and Roth1989: 398–9; Kataja and Whiting, Reference Kataja and Whiting1995: 92–8). Some festivals seem to have occasioned such gifts (Lambert, Reference Lambert and Quaegebeur1993: 194–5), which could be scaled according to the offeror’s means (Oppenheim, Reference Leo1956: 340). Thus, gifts could range from a bird or basket of grain to entire estates with attached fields, houses, and resident laborers (Kataja and Whiting, Reference Kataja and Whiting1995: 98). Individuals given to a temple as arua or širku became bound laborers who were not free to leave the temple but could also not be bought or sold like chattel.

Many gifts came directly from the king. These included regular provisions for the daily food service as well as precious trade goods, valuable votive objects, and new or renewed temple construction (Lambert, Reference Lambert and Quaegebeur1993: 195). In the Neo-Babylonian period, for example, Nebuchadnezzar II described his increased food provisions to the head divine couple of Babylon, Marduk, and Zarpanitu, providing them with one fattened bull, five sheep, three fish, assorted birds and rodents, eggs, ghee, oil, honey, and wine “as plentiful as river water” (Langdon, Reference Langdon1912: 90–4). One-time gifts and bequests were commemorated as signs of exceptional piety or acts anticipating divine favor in return (Kataja and Whiting, Reference Kataja and Whiting1995: 86–91).

Temples that accrued significant wealth could then leverage it to their own advantage. They purchased slaves with rare skills, such as dyeing and weaving multi-colored cloth (Kataja and Whiting, Reference Kataja and Whiting1995: 94), and made loans that could be repaid in silver or in food/drink resources (Brisch, Reference Brisch, Heffron, Stone and Worthington2017: 48). Interest on these loans could provide profit for the institution, but they were also sometimes offered at zero percent interest as a form of public charity.

Such voluntary measures did not yield as much support as mandatory contributions backed by the threat of force, however. The freewill gifts of the king especially mask coercive and violent practices. Some precious goods were acquired by trade, but others (as well as staples) were collected through taxation or seized as plunder. At the end of the third millennium, the Ur-III state administered a system of rotational taxation known as bala, in which the provinces each took turns contributing to a central coffer for part of each year. This fund was used for several purposes: to support state dependents, to redistribute goods among the provinces, and to supply animals and other foodstuffs for the service of the central temples (Sharlach, Reference Sharlach2004: 19–22). A similar rotational system is attested from the Middle Assyrian period, where the palace organized contributions to the Assur temple from surrounding provinces and royal officials were informed when obligations were not met (Pongratz-Leisten, Reference Pongratz-Leisten, Porter and Schwartz2012: 295). Similar contributions were ordered through royal decree in the Neo-Assyrian period (Kataja and Whiting, Reference Kataja and Whiting1995: 71–4).

These taxes were backed by force, but they were also justified rhetorically. It was important for kings to represent themselves as humble servants of the gods, undertaking domination, extraction, conquest, and plunder as acts of piety and service rather than ambition or greed. Kings boasted of their extravagant gifts and provisions to the temple, emphasized their monumental building projects, most especially those devoted to their gods. Sumerian and Babylonian kings often portrayed themselves as “basket carriers” – that is, manual laborers engaged in monumental works of irrigation and architecture, and were depicted pictorially with basket, rod, and measuring rope, tools of the builders’ trade (Selz, Reference Selz and Leick2007: 277–8; Figure 4).

Figure 4 Two stone steles showing Mesopotamian kings with work baskets (šupšikku) on their heads. On the left is Šamaš-šum-ukīn, a seventh-century king of Babylon. On the right is Assurbanipal, seventh-century king of Assyria. The symbolic nature of the basket is especially apparent in the image on the right, as the traditional royal headwear intersects with the basket in a physically impossible arrangement.

Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

In practice, of course, the rod, rope, and basket were borne not by kings but by the various classes of laborers subordinated to the crown. In Mesopotamia, class had less to do with levels of private wealth or ownership of the means of production than with rights and obligations in relation to other persons or the state. Often, class labels do not denote membership in a discrete category so much as relative hierarchical position and relationships of authority and subordination. On a basic level, Mesopotamian social positions spanned the spectrum from “freedom, with attendant rights and duties, to full enslavement, with no duties to the state and limited rights” (Dassow, Reference Dassow, Radner and Robson2011: 207). Counterintuitively, perhaps, it was free citizens – the highest general social class – who bore obligations of labor and military service to the royal authority. Enslaved and servile laborers, being fully subordinated to an individual or institution, were insulated against such claims (Dassow, Reference Dassow, Radner and Robson2011: 207). This is the backdrop to an oft-quoted Sumerian proverb: “The palace cannot avoid the waste land. A barge cannot avoid straw. A freeborn man cannot avoid corvée work” (ETCSL 6.1.02.157).

In every period, free persons made up most of Mesopotamian society. They were referred to as awīlu(m), the default term for “man,” implying man in his capacity as citizen and free agent.Footnote ⁹ The label was not absolute, however. Only the king was an awīlu in relation to all others, and kings were commonly called the awīlu of their city (Dassow, Reference Dassow, Radner and Robson2011: 215). Most men who could be legitimately identified as an awīlu in one context could also be called “subject” (muškenu) in relation to the state and “slave” (wardu) in relation to the king personally (Dassow, Reference Dassow, Radner and Robson2011: 213, Reference Dassow and Marti2014: 291–2). For this reason, free men had an obligation to provide labor to the palace in the form of corvee (Steinkeller, Reference Steinkeller, Garfinkel and Molina2013: 348; Dassow, Reference Dassow and Marti2014: 299–300). This was unremunerated labor performed for a specified amount of time per month or year, the benefits of which accrued to the state rather than the individual. As such, it took several forms. In an arrangement referred to as ilku in Akkadian, citizens gave a portion of their harvest to the palace in return for being granted the plot of irrigated arable land on which they worked. At other times, a certain number of labor hours were required from each citizen household to contribute to monumental building projects, including palaces, temples, walls, and major irrigation works (Steinkeller, Reference Steinkeller, Garfinkel and Molina2013: 348–9).

The severity of corvee obligations could be a cause of strife between monarchs and their subjects. Though ruling kings seldom intimated this in their own royal inscriptions, they were happy to criticize the oppressive demands of their predecessors and boast of their own lenience. Thus, the crown was able to impose obligations of taxation and labor, but not with complete impunity. At some point, the king’s rule depended on the people’s consent to be governed, and the balance of rights, duties, and privileges was a locus of constant negotiation.

2.1.5 Conclusions

Mesopotamian temples – at least in their own self-representation – created a focal point around which the economic activities of city and hinterland were organized. They were the primary vector through which material sustenance, comfort, and service were administered to the gods, and so justified their gravitational pull of resources inward. They provided ideological cover for royal governance and authority, and in return the crown laundered its coerced and violent acquisitions into voluntary donations for the temple.

On a material level, the temple and palace employed a variety of voluntary, persuasive, and coercive strategies to ensure that surplus production was siphoned inward to the institutions and their beneficiaries. On a symbolic level, this extraction also served to funnel resources upward to their rightful divine recipients. In this idealized model, the palace was merely instrumental – an institution mandated by heaven to facilitate and ensure the proper and consistent maintenance of the gods in the comfort to which they were accustomed. To reinforce this claim, the institutions of palace and temple had to produce appropriate etiologies for themselves, anchored in inescapable theological foundations, and it is to those that we now turn.

2.2.1 Atraḫasis

The myth that develops the labor creation motif in the most depth and detail is known to modern scholars as Atraḫasis, after the human protagonist of its second and third acts.Footnote ¹⁰ The earliest and most complete manuscripts date from the late Old Babylonian period, with further fragmentary recensions attested through the mid-first millennium.Footnote ¹¹ The best exemplars of the Old Babylonian version comprised 1,245 lines over three tablets. I cite primarily from the three most complete tablets, A, B, and C, unless otherwise noted.

Atraḫasis has attracted the most academic attention as a version of a cosmic flood story, an antecedent and close corollary to the biblical stories of Noah (Genesis 6–9), but the flood only occupies the myth’s third act. The first act – covering much of the first tablet – concerns events prior to and including the creation of human beings and their social institutions. I will focus primarily on this act, with briefer consideration of the second and third.

2.2.2 Enki and Ninmaḫ

The other primary example of a labor creation comes in a Sumerian myth known as Enki and Ninmaḫ. Its oldest extant tablets are roughly contemporary with Atraḫasis, and it was likewise copied in later periods.Footnote ²⁶ Like Atraḫasis, it begins with a world of gods:

The initial situation is similar to Atraḫasis, although the story proceeds with less detail and drama. The gods must produce their own food, and the greater gods oversee the lower ones who do all the work. The lower gods protest the arrangement, but they are less militant here than in Atraḫasis. They weep and lament but make no plan to dethrone or kill any of the greater gods.Footnote ²⁷

The goddess Namma takes their complaint to Enki, who is sleeping in his personal chamber (lines 12–23). His repose reinforces both his elevated social position and the freedom from labor that the subordination of the lower gods affords him.

In this tale, it is Namma who comes up with the idea of a replacement worker to automate the gods’ labors. Enki must only devise the manner of its creation and implementation. Once he designs the new creature and brings it into being with the help of various other deities, it is provided with its own means of reproduction through procreation and tasked with all the labors necessary to support the gods.

Even the more famous second half of this myth deals with labor issues, albeit in an idiosyncratic fashion.Footnote ²⁸ After the creation of humanity, the gods celebrate with a feast. They drink to excess, and inebriated boasting turns into a competition between Enki and one of the gestational goddesses, Ninmaḫ. They dispute whose authority and abilities determine the fate (i.e., life circumstances) of individual humans. To test the matter, Ninmaḫ attempts to create people with various physical disabilities and differences, to create people for whom Enki can find no productive position in society – no means by which they might earn their own daily bread.

Each time, Enki successfully counters her attempt.Footnote ²⁹ For the one who “could not bend his outstretched weak hands,” Enki found a position as a servant of the king. The blind man he gifted music and installed as the king’s chief musician. To the one with paralyzed feet, he gave the art of smithing, and made one with a cognitive disability a servant of the king. The infertile woman he placed as a weaver in the queen’s household. Finally, she created a person with no genitalia, whom Enki gave a position serving before the king. The only creation that Enki cures of his disability is a man with incontinence, and ironically only this man’s role in life is not specified. Presumably, he has now been returned to physical normalcy and can labor as any other person.

This part of the myth acknowledges the reality of labor differentiation – that not all humans are engaged day-to-day in the sowing, irrigation, and harvest of fields and orchards. Just as the gods have their rulers with retinues of palace personnel, so human societies have kings and queens surrounded by specialized artisans and attendants. Similarly, human bodies are not created uniformly, yet this does not release them from their obligation to labor in service of their rulers and their gods.

2.2.3 Enūma Eliš

Reflexes of the labor creation motif also appear in myths where it is far less central. A prime example is Enūma eliš, famous as a Babylonian creation myth but better understood as an etiology of Babylon as the greatest city in the world or a hymn to Marduk as the highest god in its pantheon.Footnote ³⁰ It opens with an account of the gods’ emergence from primeval powers and narrates an intergenerational conflict among the gods, the creation of the habitable world, and the founding of Babylon and construction of its great buildings. It concludes with a recitation of the fifty names of Marduk, each of which elevates and praises him in particular aspects.

The creation of humans is mentioned only briefly, but their purpose is consistent with the myths Atraḫasis and Enki and Ninmaḫ. When the gods conscript Marduk to battle the primeval goddess Tiamat, he agrees on the condition that they make him their king after he defeats her. The gods accept this condition, but only if he can arrange for the provisioning of their shrines (iv:2). After he slays Tiamat and defeats her army, the gods reaffirm this role (v:115) and Marduk devises an idea to provide for the gods:

The god Ea (Enki by his Akkadian name) assists in the planning and creation of the new being, suggesting the use of blood and bone from the body of a slain god (vi:11–14). They execute Tiamat’s general and consort Qingu, and form humanity from his blood:

This important achievement is reiterated in the praises that accompany the recitation of Marduk’s fifty names (vi:129–34).

Enūma eliš thus presents the purpose of humanity in similar terms to the previous stories, but with notable differences. Though the humans are said to release the gods from their toil, that labor is never mentioned prior to this point. In consequence, no class conflict among the gods precipitates the creation of humankind. Furthermore, the class politics of divine society are much less fraught here than in the previous two narratives. Before Marduk’s victory, the primary division among the gods is generational, and no mention is made of a division of labor among them.

After humans have freed the gods from agricultural labor, the gods ask Marduk how they can repay him (vi:44–54). His response: to build Babylon as his home and the location of his sanctuary (vi:55–8). The gods take up pick and shovel to build the city of Babylon with all its monuments and shrines (vi:59–69), doing the initial labor of construction before turning the maintenance of the institutions over to humankind. The mandate given to humans encapsulates a holistic summary of divine service, including reverence, invocation, obedience, and material provision. Thus, Enūma eliš makes the connection between the creation of humans as labor and the ongoing service of physical meals in temples and shrines crystal clear:

In its adaptation of the labor creation motif, Enūma eliš suppresses the class conflict among the gods, yet maintains the same purpose for humanity and ends up with the same labor relationship governing the ongoing support and maintenance of the gods’ households.Footnote ³²

3.1.1 Yahweh’s Houses: Temples, Sanctuaries, and Shrines in Ancient Israel

Yahweh’s sanctuaries – and the Jerusalem temple in particular – feature prominently in the textual record of ancient Israel. However, hints from biblical texts themselves and findings from the intensive archaeological investigation of the southern Levant show that neither this temple nor the temple system in general were uncontested in the region.

Beginning with the biblical texts, we find many that clearly articulate Yahweh’s perceived desire for a house (or houses) on earth. As in Mesopotamia, the vocabulary for such structures overlaps extensively with words for human habitations: ʾōhēl (mōʿēd) “tent (of meeting)” and miškān “dwelling” for Yahweh’s portable home in the wilderness and bayit/bêt YHWH “house (of Yahweh)” and hêḵāl “palace/temple” for permanent buildings and complexes.Footnote ³⁴

Many of the Bible’s most prominent voices advocate strongly for the centralization of Yahweh’s service in a single, glorious abode. In the Priestly (P) texts of the Pentateuch, offerings may be served to Yahweh only in a dwelling constructed to his meticulous specifications. Within P’s historical narrative, Yahweh does not give instructions for offerings and sacrifices until the dedication of the miškan (the mobile tent shrine where he dwelt with the Israelites after the lawgiving at Sinai) and no offerings occur prior to that point (Wright, Reference Wright and Roy2015: 145–6; Feldman, Reference Feldman2023: 15–20). Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic history of Joshua through two kings (so called because it adopts a thoroughly Deuteronomic outlook) are more tolerant of offerings in multiple locations before there is a temple to Yahweh in Jerusalem, but thereafter condemn worship outside of it in the strongest terms.Footnote ³⁵ This position is summarized in Deuteronomy 12:1–14, which culminates with the following command: “Take care that you do not send up your offerings at any place you see, but only at the place where Yahweh shall choose in one of your tribes – there you shall send up your offerings and there you shall do everything I am commanding you” (Deuteronomy 12:13–14). The books of Chronicles likewise identify the Jerusalem temple as the only location for acceptable service of Yahweh, relishing every bit of opulence and embellishment in Solomon’s temple from the perspective of a consummate institutionalist.

These sources hold fast to the ideal of centralized service, but never present it as an actualized reality. Over and over, they mention and condemn sacred sites that fall outside their bounds of acceptable practice. These include the cult complexes set up by the kings of the Northern kingdom of Israel at Bethel and Dan (1 Kings 12:29–31; Figure 6), as well as a nebulous host of sites referred to collectively as the “high places.”Footnote ³⁶ In these places, the Israelites are charged with worshipping other deities in addition to and alongside Yahweh, including various gods referred to as the Baals and Asherahs.

Figure 6 Aerial drone photograph of the cult precinct at Tel Dan.

Courtesy The Hebrew Union College, Jerusalem.

Not all forms of Yahwism were preoccupied with centralizing Yahweh’s service, however. The Yahwistic (J) and Elohistic (E) sources of the Pentateuch both include stories of offerings in many places, beginning with the first generations of humankind and continuing with narratives of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob/Israel, who built altars after significant life experiences and presented offerings to Yahweh on them. In J’s lead-up to the exodus from Egypt, Moses repeatedly asks Pharaoh for permission to lead the Israelites into the wilderness to “serve Yahweh.” He insists that they must take their flocks and herds with them, because service requires offerings. In an explicit contrast with the commandment in Deuteronomy 12:13–14, the Elohistic law collection known as the Covenant Code (Exodus 20–3) even contains rules for building altars in multiple locations: “you may build for me an altar of earth and you may slaughter upon it your burnt offerings and your wellbeing offerings, your flocks and your herds, in all the places I will cause my name to be invoked. I will come to you and bless you” (Exodus 20:21–2). For J and E, then, the service of Yahweh may take place just as well outside of a temple as within, and in any number of locations. Whether they support such distributed ritual in opposition or addition to service in temples is less clear, as neither source mentions nor implies knowledge of any such structure.

Archaeology of the Iron Age southern Levant has uncovered many kinds of cult sites in and outside of city walls, aligning to some degree with biblical descriptions of cultic diversity. Detailed descriptions and typologies of these sites have been provided by Zevit (Reference Zevit2001: 652–8) and Schmidt (Reference Schmitt, Albertz, Nakhai, Olyan and Schmitt2014: 266–7), among others. The concentration of grand, official temple buildings here is far lower than in neighboring regions, and even than in the same region prior to the Iron Age (Faust, Reference Faust2010: 25–9, Reference Faust2019: 5–11). Such structures have only been discovered at Arad (Figure 7) and Tel Moza (Faust, Reference Faust2010: 28, Reference Faust2019: 7–8; Koch, Reference Koch, Laneri and Steadman2023: 191–5). On the other hand, large open-air cult sites and smaller shrines of various sizes – within and outside of city walls – have also been excavated. These include the large Iron Age 1 site at Mt. Ebal (Figure 8), the official state complex at Tel Dan, and an assortment of smaller cult rooms and niches in industrial and domestic settings (Schmitt, Reference Schmitt, Albertz, Nakhai, Olyan and Schmitt2014; Koch, Reference Koch, Laneri and Steadman2023). In short, evidence abounds for rituals of veneration and offering in the Iron Age southern Levant, but with comparatively little taking place in temples specifically (Faust, Reference Faust2010: 31; Koch, Reference Koch2020, Reference Koch, Laneri and Steadman2023: 192–3).

Figure 7 Remains of the temple complex at Arad.

Photo by Oren Rozen (CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons).

Figure 8 Altar discovered at the Iron I cult site atop Mt. Ebal.

Photo by Hoshvilim (license CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons).

Smaller cult areas either did not have altars or had altars too small for animal slaughter, limiting the offerings there to grain and drink (Schmitt, Reference Schmitt, Albertz, Nakhai, Olyan and Schmitt2014: 274).Footnote ³⁷ However, many do include cooking facilities, which could have been used for family and communal feasts (Schmitt, Reference Schmitt, Albertz, Nakhai, Olyan and Schmitt2014: 267–9). At larger sites, deposits of faunal remains (primarily bones) imply ritual slaughter, offering, and consumption (Greer, Reference Greer2013, Reference Greer2019a, Reference Greer2019b; Scott, Reference Scott2021).

The impression that arises from a synthesis of biblical and archaeological evidence is one of diversity, ambivalence, and competition. The assortment of different kinds of cult sites and structures points toward diversity of use and practice. Biblical texts, while agreeing on the supremacy of Yahweh, espouse multiple and contradictory impulses toward centralization of his service on the one hand and dispersion on the other. In one memorable biblical scene, an Assyrian envoy attempts to exploit these divisions by pitting Yahwists who valued distributed worship against their centralizing king: “if you say to me, ‘we trust YAHWEH our god’ – is it not he whose high places Hezekiah destroyed?” (2 Kings 18:22).

Therefore, it may be that the perspective of the Yahwist and the Elohist would have fit well within groups that valued high places and the opportunities for communal service they represented. The Priestly and Deuteronomistic perspectives, of course, would have abhorred this outlook, but how would distributed worshippers have felt about the grand city temple, aligned and enmeshed as it was with the palace and royal power? Was it, to them, just another way of serving Yahweh, or a pernicious totalizing force bent on overtaking traditional and less authoritarian ways of serving their god?

Clearly, the centralizing tendency with its emphasis on grand and imposing households for Yahweh is most similar to the Mesopotamian temple system described in Section 2.1, but this does not preclude the possibility that the distributed offering system was also conceived and undertaken as a means of providing materially for Yahweh’s nourishment and pleasure – what Baruch Halpern called Yahweh’s “Backyard barbecue cult” as opposed to the elegant banquets of formalized temple culture (Halpern, Reference Halpern, Cooper and Schwartz1996: 303). In the next section, we shall briefly survey biblical texts concerning offerings and provisions inside and outside of temples to see how each engages with the model of divine households and service.

3.1.2 Food Service in Ancient Israel

Archaeologically, the southern Levant has produced plentiful evidence of animal slaughter and consumption in specifically cultic contexts (Greer, Reference Greer2019a, Reference Greer2019b; Scott, Reference Scott2021). However, archaeological findings alone convey little about the conceptualization of these rituals or the deity to whom they were directed (Greer, Reference Greer2019a: 6–7). For the meaning of such rituals, we must turn to the biblical texts.

Portrayals of offerings as Yahweh’s food abound within the Bible’s pages. These come across most clearly (though not exclusively) in temple-centric sources. A common feature in Yahweh’s dwellings, for example, is an element called the “bread of the presence.” These special loaves were placed regularly on a table constructed to hold them and the dishes, jugs, and utensils used in the regular offerings. As described in the Priestly texts of the Pentateuch, the table of the desert miškan was made of acacia wood overlaid with gold and placed on the north side of the sanctuary (Exodus 25:23–30, 26:35, 37:10–16; Leviticus 24:5–9). The bread of the presence comprised twelve large, unleavened loaves baked from two-tenths of an ephah of flour each, arranged in two rows of six on the table and accompanied by containers of frankincense. New loaves were placed on the table each Shabbat, at which point the priests were permitted to eat the ones they had just removed. Other biblical texts present variations on the practice. The book of Chronicles includes ten tables in its temple plan (2 Chronicles 4:8), and a priest at a place called Nob allows non-priests to eat of it provided they have abstained from recent sex with women (1 Samuel 21:4–6 [5–7 Heb]).

The bread of the presence is the closest biblical analog to the meals placed on stands before Mesopotamian deities,Footnote ³⁸ but it is far from the only offering to Yahweh treated as food. Take the prescriptions of Numbers 28–9, a schedule of the provisions offered to Yahweh on regular days and special occasions. Academic attention tends to focus on the passage’s calendrical contributions – that is, the dates of festivals, the reckoning of the year, and the way in which it organizes time. It is only one of several ritual calendars included in the Hebrew Bible, but it is the only one that specifies exact offering amounts for each day and each special occasion (cf. Exodus 23:14–7; Exodus 34:18–26; Leviticus 23; Deuteronomy 16:1–13; Ezekiel 45:18–25). The daily offering is also specified on its own in Exodus 29:38–42.

Numbers 28–9 better resemble the food schedules from Mesopotamia such as the Eanna text TU 38 discussed in Section 2.1.2, in both form and structure. These two chapters lay out the required quantities of meat, grain, oil, and drink that must be provided to Yahweh daily, on Shabbat, at the new moon, and for various annual festivals. The culinary nature of the offerings comes across clearly from the introduction, given in Yahweh’s own voice:

The first term in this list of descriptors derives from a root meaning “to be/bring near” (qrb), and can refer broadly to anything brought before Yahweh, procured by any means and intended for any offertory purpose. “My food” (leḥem) is more explicit, as it is the most common Hebrew word for bread and, by extension, for food in general. The next term (ʾiššēh), translated here as “gifts,” is common in ritual prescriptions but is still not well understood (Wenham, Reference Wenham1987: Ch. 1, n8; Milgrom, Reference Milgrom1990: 124, Reference Milgrom1991: 161–2). It has traditionally been translated as “offerings by fire” due to a perceived connection with the Hebrew word for fire (ʾēš), but it is used to refer to several offerings that are not burned, such as the bread of the presence (Leviticus 24:7) and the wine offering (Numbers 15:10).Footnote ³⁹ It is, however, associated with food throughout the Priestly source, as in Leviticus 21:6b “they offer the gifts (ʾiššēh) of Yahweh, the food (leḥem) of their god” (cf. Leviticus 3:11, 16; 21:6, 21; Numbers 28:2, 24), and with the consumption of those offerings by human religious professionals (Deuteronomy 18:1; Joshua 13:14; 1 Samuel 2:28). It is most likely, therefore, that despite the uncertainty, the term relates to food or consumption, and “(food-)gifts” serves as an approximate translation.

Finally, the mention of a “pleasing aroma” (rêaḥ hanniḥōaḥ) hints at a fundamental difference with Mesopotamian food service – namely, that biblical texts dictate that most of Yahweh’s food should be burned on the altar and sent heavenward in the form of smoke rather than served at a table. Sometimes an entire animal is burned and “turned into smoke” in this way (as in the ʿôlāh-offering as prescribed in Leviticus 1), while at other times only a portion is burned as a pleasing aroma.

All of the regular food offerings that follow in Num 28–29 are described as ʿôlāh-offerings.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Hebrew word ʿôlāh derives from a root meaning “to ascend, go up,” and the procedure for this kind of offering, as outlined in Leviticus 1, involves burning the entire carcass of the offered animal on the alter to send the smoke heavenward. Each regular ʿôlāh was accompanied by appropriate portions of three other foodstuffs: fine flour, top-quality oil, and alcoholic drink.Footnote ⁴¹ Daily provisions were offered at morning and dusk, each consisting of one lamb between eight days and one year old, accompanied by one-tenth ephah of fine flour, one-quarter hin of top-quality oil, and one-quarter hin of a fermented beverage. On the Sabbath, portions were doubled. On new moons and festivals, the quantities increased further and were bolstered by rams, bulls, and larger complements of grain, oil, and drink. Annual totals would have varied, as the lunisolar calendar of ancient Israel led to years with different numbers of Sabbaths and New Moons.Footnote ⁴² In a given year, then, the total offerings would fall in the following ranges:Footnote ⁴³

• - 113–115 bulls

• - 36–37 rams

• - 1065–1142 lambs

• - 30–31 male goats

• - 147 3/5–156 1/10 ephahs of flour

• - 334 3/4–355 1/3 hins of oil

• - 334 3/4–355 1/3 hins of alcoholic drink.

Other texts also attest to a daily meal service and schedule of provisions, though they differ on particulars (Milgrom, Reference Milgrom1990: 487). The book of Kings describes a twice daily offering but implies that meat is only given in the morning and the grain, oil, and wine in the evening (2 Kings 16:15; and cf. 1 Kings 18:29, 36). The program in Ezekiel 40–8 (admittedly a visionary ideal that was never implemented as written) prescribes both meat and grain offerings, but only in the morning (Ezekiel 46:13–15). As in all such things, daily service likely varied from place to place and from administration to administration.

The menu in Numbers 28–9 is much more modest than that of Eanna, but it presents only the bare minimum for Yahweh’s service. At the end of the schedule, it adds: “these you shall do for Yahweh at your appointed times, separate from your fulfillment of vows and freewill gifts, given as ʿôlāh -offerings, grain-offerings, drink-offerings, or wellbeing-offerings” (Numbers 29:39).

Priests treated other kinds of offerings differently from ʿôlāh-offerings. Where ʿôlāh-offerings were burned whole, well-being, grain, and drink offerings were divided among multiple recipients, with Yahweh always receiving no less than the fat and blood. Yahweh’s portion was always turned into smoke on the altar to send the “pleasant aroma” upward.

In other words, fire was the primary means by which Yahweh consumed food offerings, a theme that appears in narrative as well as ritual texts. A single Hebrew verb (ʾāḵal) serves as the default term for eating when done by humans or animals, and consuming when done by fire. It is used in contexts where Yahweh sends (or takes the form of) fire to consume offerings directly.Footnote ⁴⁴ After Moses and Aaron consecrate the miškān and meet Yahweh inside it for the first time, fire comes out from it and consumes offerings laid out on an altar (Leviticus 9:23–4). At the dedication of Solomon’s temple, fire comes down from the sky to do the same (2 Chronicles 7:1). In a particularly evocative episode, the prophet Elijah builds an altar and wets it thoroughly to prove Yahweh’s supremacy to the priests of Baal (1 Kings 18:30–8). This time, the “fire of Yahweh” comes down and eats up the animal offering, the wood, and the stones and earth of the altar itself, and even “licks up” the water filling the trench around it (1 Kings 18:38). Fire is Yahweh’s most common means of consumption, but one biblical story (Genesis 18) does describe the deity eating and drinking at a table with human beings. In this story, Yahweh and two companions visit Abraham and Sarah, appearing so much like humans that their hosts do not initially recognize them as divine and prepare them a meal fit for honored guests. Though his daily meals were not served like those of Mesopotamian gods, therefore, it was not foreign to the character of Yahweh to consume offerings, in human form, by divine fire, or by normal fire on an altar.

3.1.3 Food for the God, Food for the Priest

In the southern Levant as in Mesopotamia, the ritual professionals who performed divine service in temples and shrines were supported by the same offerings that satiated the god(s). As Yahweh’s portions ascended to heaven as smoke and the remains burned to ash on the altar, however, no leftovers were available for redistribution to human recipients. Thus, the specific mechanisms by which priests and other sacred personnel received their meals differed in several key ways.

Biblical texts portray the local class of ritual professionals as less complex and variegated than the Mesopotamian list of standard professions. Yahweh’s houses supported only two broad groups of people: the priests and the Levites. Technically, this was one group and a subgroup, since all priests were also Levites but not all Levites could be priests. The Levites were portrayed as one of the twelve tribes of Israel that had been denied a tribal territory and given instead to the sacred work of Yahweh’s service. Like all such portrayals of Israelite tribes descending from single legendary ancestors, this etiology for the Levites is not consistently represented across biblical texts or supported by archaeology (Leuchter, Reference Leuchter2017). Because they were cast as a tribe, however, groups of Levites with special duties and responsibilities were often described as smaller family units within the larger kinship group. The priesthood – that is, the office of presenting offerings to Yahweh – belonged to the descendants of Aaron (Numbers 3:10), while the descendants of Kohath were given oversight of the holy utensils and furnishings (Numbers 4:4,15–20). Levites of no special clan were responsible for the general maintenance and protection of sacred sites (Numbers 1:53, 3:5–9; Nehemiah 13:22). The internal hierarchy is communicated clearly by the Priestly source, which calls the Levites a gift to the sons of Aaron, to serve them and perform the lesser functions of the sanctuary (Numbers 18:1–7).

The Levites unique economic position was delimited by two complementary aspects of their tribal inheritance: “[T]he whole tribe of Levi shall have no territorial portion with Israel. They shall eat Yahweh’s food-gifts (ʾiššēh) and his portion. He (Levi) shall have no portion among his brothers. Yahweh is his portion” (Deuteronomy 18:1; cf. Numbers 18:20–1; Deuteronomy 10:8–9; Joshua 18:7). Again, the etiology here is historically dubious, but it does seem to reflect the distribution of Levites throughout the region and their traditional attachment to cult sites. Their lack of a hereditary tribal territory) excluded them from large-scale agriculture or pastoralism, but inclusion in Yahweh’s portion links them to the system of ritual provision.

Multiple texts state that Levites shared in food-gifts (ʾiššēh) offered to Yahweh (Deuteronomy 18:1; Joshua 13:14; 1 Samuel 2:28), but they did not receive their share in the form of leftovers as Mesopotamian priests did. In most cases, the victuals were apportioned prior to offering, with Yahweh’s portion immolated on the altar and the priests’ roasted or stewed separately. Whole burnt offerings were food for Yahweh alone, while the well-being offerings, grain offerings, and drink offerings were divided between Yahweh and his human servants. From these divided offerings, the fat and blood at least went to Yahweh, accompanied sometimes by additional cuts of meat, while the rest was divided between human parties.

Portions of offerings could be designated for the priests alone, for priests and Levites, or for these and the parties that had brought the offering to the sanctuary. Rules even governed how family members might share in the provisions (Leviticus 22:10–16; Numbers 18:8–19). Sources preserve different traditions regarding the specific portions allotted to the priests, Levites, and other parties (Greer, Reference Greer2019b: 263–8), and it is likely that such practices varied between cult sites and changed over time.Footnote ⁴⁵ A narrative set at the Shiloh temple implies that the custom there required priests to take a random portion pulled out of a stewing pot with a ritual fork (1 Samuel 2:13). In the Priestly prescriptions, on the other hand, the Hebrew text usually allotted the right hind limb and brisket to the priests (Leviticus 7:31–5). In Deuteronomy, it is the right hind limb plus the cheeks and diaphragm (Deuteronomy 18:3–4). Priestly regulations stipulate that priests and Levites must eat many portions in a state of ritual cleanness (Leviticus 22:4–7), practices that are supported by archaeological remains from religious sites with disproportionate representation of right limbs in locations where the ritual professionals would have dined (Greer, Reference Greer2019b: 278–81; Figure 9).

Figure 9 Sheep humerus (upper foreleg) excavated from the cult compound at Tel Dan with cut marks from butchering after slaughter.

Photo courtesy Jonathan S. Greer.

Putting the pieces together, we have observed that the daily provisions offered to Yahweh according to Numbers 28–9 were all characterized as ʿôlāh-offerings, but also that ʿôlāh-offerings were not a source of food for priests and Levites. Thus, the amount of food prepared daily for the deity did not translate directly into the amount of food available to the deity’s human servants, as it did in Mesopotamia. This may help to explain, if only partially, the modest scope of the daily food service in Numbers 28–9 when compared with temples in Uruk or Babylon. From a purely material perspective, the immolation of whole animals represented an extravagant destruction of precious calories. On the social and theological levels, of course, their loss would be offset by the beneficence of a happy god, but there are real limits to the quantity of resources that can be wholly surrendered even to so high a purpose. This is especially true considering the relative poverty of the southern Levant. A society cannot perpetuate a ritual system that its economy will not accommodate. To paraphrase Michael Hudson: “Offerings that can’t be made, won’t be made.”Footnote ⁴⁶ With that in mind, I turn to the strategies and means that sacred institutions used to acquire the resources they needed to sustain their activities and their personnel.

3.1.4 Ritual and the Economy

Since the Levites held no tribal territory, several lists suggest they were granted towns distributed throughout the other tribes’ lands (Numbers 35:1–8; Joshua 21; 1 Chronicles 6). This may represent a utopian ideal more than any real state of affairs, as there were supposed to be forty-eight such towns (four in each tribal territory), each within a perfect 2,000-cubit square of land for their livestock (ca. 80 ha.). Nevertheless, the basic notion that they did not participate in the survival subsistence economy through staple production probably stands. Instead, the texts present a variety of economic means used to ensure an adequate supply of animal, grain, and beverage provisions for the food service, other rituals, and priests’ livelihoods (Koch, Reference Koch2020: 342–4). Naturally, these looked different for centralized and decentralized worship practices, as each interacted differently with local communal political formations and with the state. The following provides a brief survey of practices that could apply in either context.

Distinctions must be made between vectors that were voluntary, upheld through social pressure, and coerced or forced. In the first category, biblical texts delineate options for individual Israelites to give gifts out of their own free will and in thanksgiving for good fortune (Leviticus 7:12–15, 22:29; Amos 4:5; Psalms 50:14, 56:13, 107:22, 116:17; 2 Chronicles 29:31, 33:16). In addition, many texts reference the practice of making a vow to Yahweh, promising a donation of some kind pending the positive outcome of an uncertain situation, such as infertility or a military venture. These could range in value based on the person’s means, from grain and small birds to large cattle and houses. Vows could even be made with human beings, who would then be redeemed for money (Leviticus 27:1–8) or bound to temple service (1 Samuel 1–2).

Levantine cult sites may also have profited from transactions similar to the Old Babylonian temple loans. Leviticus 27:14–25 outlines the procedures and prices for buying back items that had been previously designated as sacred donations, but it does not discuss motivations for their initial donation. It may be, therefore, that they were given as votive, freewill, or thanksgiving gifts and repurchased or traded in exchange for money that could later be repaid.

Other donations were framed as obligatory. Yahweh claimed the first portion from every harvest, including raw produce (Leviticus 23:9–14; Deuteronomy 26:1–11) and the first loaf from each grain harvest (Numbers 15:17–25). Israelites were also commanded to surrender every firstborn male to Yahweh (Exodus 13:12–15; Numbers 18:15–18; Nehemiah 10:36).Footnote ⁴⁷ This requirement applied to clean animals, unclean animals, and humans alike. Clean animals were kept, offered to Yahweh, and eaten, while unclean animals and children were purchased back (or “redeemed”) for a specified sum of money. A tithe of all produce also went to the Levites specifically, which could be delivered in the form of staples or their monetary equivalent (Numbers 18:21–32; Deuteronomy 14:22–9, 26:12–15; Nehemiah 10:37–9). Thus, several practices could yield both in-kind and monetary contributions.

Opportunities to collect these donations at scale occurred at the three annual pilgrimage festivals, which coincided with harvest times for major crops: Passover/Unleavened Bread for the barley harvest, Weeks for wheat, and Ingathering/Booths for wine and olives (Exodus 23:14–18, 34:18–26; Deuteronomy 16:1–17; see Farber, Reference Farber2019). All Israelite men were to congregate at a sacred site for each festival, and the commandments stipulate that “no one shall come before me (Yahweh) empty-handed” (Exodus 23:14–15; Exodus 34:20; Deuteronomy 16:16). Acceptable pilgrimage locations varied, of course, as did the nature of the offerings. The Elohistic laws in Exodus 23, which permit distributed service, mention only contributions of produce and livestock. Deuteronomy, with its centralizing impulse, recognizes that transporting bulk goods to the one authorized sanctuary may represent a hardship to those who live far away, and allows them to sell their goods and bring the proceeds instead. These donations – whether goods or money – supplied the festival offerings for Yahweh, furnished grand communal feasts for the assembled worshippers, and filled the storehouses of the cult site until the next gathering.

Royal administrations also supported temples and cult sites directly. Narratives describe kings as patrons of Yahweh (and other gods of the southern Levant, depending on their disposition), who built, destroyed, and renovated cult sites (1 Kings 5–8; 2 Kings 22:4–7; 2 Chronicles 2–7) and provided grandiose offerings as signals of piety and power (1 Kings 8:62–5; 2 Chronicles 7:1–8). The most celebrated of these was the first temple to Yahweh in Jerusalem, credited to Solomon in the late tenth century and renovated by Josiah in the seventh. These gifts and projects were furnished by all of the tricks of royal power – corvee and conscription (1 Kings 9:13–23; 2 Chronicles 2:1–2, 17–18), taxation (Ezekiel 45:13–16), trade (1 Kings 9:25–28), and plunder (1 Samuel 17:53; 2 Kings 7:16).

The burden of royal extraction and expropriation weighed heavily on rural producers, and several biblical texts express disapproval with its excesses (Yee, Reference Yee2017: 828–31). When the Israelites first ask for a king to rule over them, the prophet Samuel warned them about the voracious appetite of royal expropriation: their fields, vineyards, and orchards, sons, daughters, slaves, work animals, and livestock would all be claimed and seized by the king for his own purposes and benefit (1 Samuel 8:10–18). Ironically, Samuel excoriated royal oppression without acknowledging the economic weight of divine service itself or the oppressive corruption of his sons that had motivated the people’s request for a king in the first place. In general, biblical texts take a more critical view of the extractive activities of the palace and nobles, while glossing over those of the temple regime. Of course, in many periods the two were deeply entangled with one another, but it is almost always the secular authorities that find themselves the targets of prophetic critique.

The first temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonian army in 587/586 BCE and the elite classes were exiled to Babylonia. The temple was not rebuilt until Babylon fell to the Achaemenid Persians in 539 BCE and exiles were permitted to return home. Sometime during the exile, a prophetic figure wrote down a visionary program for Israel’s restoration, which is now contained in Ezekiel 40–8. This program would have cemented state control over the Jerusalem temple while explicitly attempting to limit its oppressive potential. Providing the materials for regular scheduled offerings would rest on a royal figure referred to as “the prince,” whose stock would be furnished by a percentage tax on all the people of Israel. In this way, “all the people will join together to offer the offerings through the prince” (Ezekiel 45:16). The size of the tax is specified to avoid the oppressive overreach of past kings: 1/16 part of the wheat and barley harvest, 1/100 part of the olive oil, and one sheep or goat from every flock of 200 (Ezekiel 45:13–16).Footnote ⁴⁸

This vision was never realized, and in the actual context of Achaemenid imperial rule, temple accounts may have been kept more separate from the state. The book of Nehemiah recounts a pledge – a voluntary compact pertaining to the direct support of the rebuilt Second Temple – made by a group of people who describe themselves as adherents to the “law (Torah) of Yahweh” (Nehemiah 10:32–9). The pledge includes a list of voluntary donations for all aspects of “the service of the house of our god” (Nehemiah 10:33), including an annual monetary contribution of one-third shekel and supplies of wood for the altar on top of the firstfruits and firstborn offerings already discussed. The economic organization and political entanglements of the temple experienced further changes and developments through the Hellenistic (332–163 BCE), Hasmonean (163–63 BCE), and Roman periods until the destruction of the Second Temple by Rome in 70 CE. These cannot be covered here, but this brief discussion should serve to illustrate the many processes that mobilized resources for use in the sacred work of divine service in the southern Levant.

3.1.5 Conclusions

As in Mesopotamia, southern Levantine sources from the Hebrew Bible portray divine service as an imperative for humankind. Human beings were required to serve regular provisions to the deity in addition to all of the other sacred duties and rituals they were obligated or permitted to perform. In contrast to Mesopotamia’s broad adoption of the divine household model, though, the multiple voices of biblical texts betray a deep split regarding the appropriate location and manner of divine service. Did meals have to be served in a grand dwelling, a house for Yahweh, or could they be sent heavenward as smoke from altars across the land? Local altars and central temples alike had to support their personnel as well as supply their rituals, with a shared suite of economic strategies to engage. The burdens and benefits of divine service could change in relation to religious leadership and the demands of the state.

One could imagine, for example, that small communities used the three harvest festivals to gather at local shrines, feast together, and store their produce for use in divine service and common use. This kinship-based allocatory form would invite the intangible benefits of a happy deity while maintaining community control over material surpluses they produced. As the corruption and greed of Samuel’s sons (and the sons of Eli before them) shows, however, even local ritual professionals could abuse their sacred and economic power. This only intensified when divine service was consolidated in a central location and bound up with royal power. The monumental construction efforts of Solomon were only enabled by corvee labor and broad taxation, and the oppressive and exploitative demands of Israel’s monarchs gave prophets frequent cause for condemnation.

Across these divides, the ideology of divine service remained alive and well. It shows up in both decentralized and centralizing texts, with different economic implications. Both tendencies could plausibly be bolstered by the labor creation motif, but the only example of the motif appears in a decentralized source: the Yahwist’s story of the Garden of Eden. We now turn to a discussion of this story and its relation to the Levantine ideology of divine service.

3.2.1 A Labor Reading of the Garden of Eden

The Yahwist’s primeval history, like Atraḫasis and Enki and Ninmaḫ, is no creation story in an absolute or cosmic sense. It is, rather, a story of origins from when the world was young. It opens on a world already rough-hewn, shaped but devoid of life, and the narrative relates how it has come to be filled with its many living things and institutions.

The opening of the Garden Story directly parallels the Mesopotamian myths discussed in Section 2.2,Footnote ⁴⁹ beginning “when” before describing an early, primeval world:

The presentation is curious, since it explains the lack of vegetation through the absence of its preconditions. No wild plants populate the uncultivated land because Yahweh has not yet sent rain, and no crops fill the fields because there are no humans to work them. The implication is that crop cultivation is an existing problem waiting to be solved – that is, that Yahweh desires crops but must arrange means for their production. Thus, agriculture is not first for humanity’s benefit but for Yahweh’s. Within the common ancient Near Eastern framework that gods need food and drink, agriculture exists first and foremost to provide for the gods’ diet.

No mention is made of Yahweh laboring or tasking other deities with his labor. Instead, he makes a human to meet the need from the first (Genesis 2:6–7). The human (ʾādam) is intimately connected with the earth (ʾădāmāh) – sculpted from it, named after it, and destined to work it and to bring forth its bounty.

Next, Yahweh plants a garden in the place called Eden (Genesis 2:8). He sprouts therein every good and desirable tree, with the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad in its center (2:9).Footnote ⁵⁰ In a lengthy excursus, the narrative mentions a river that waters the garden before splitting into four and spreading throughout the rest of the earth. Thus, just like the minor gods in the Mesopotamian stories laid the groundwork for human agriculture by creating the landscape and digging enormous rivers to irrigate it, so here Yahweh makes and plants the garden and arranges for its irrigation.

Once the garden has been created, Yahweh settles the human within it and instructs him in his new role:

The twofold mandate to work (ʿābad) and keep (šāmar) the garden closes the loop opened in 2:5 – where crop cultivation was impeded by a lack of workers. Wells (Reference Wells2023) has shown how Yahweh’s garden resembles gardens owned and administered by Neo-Babylonian temples, and how the position of the human mirrors that of the temple dedicants (širku) who worked them. Yahweh’s statement here reads much like administrative orders from such gardens, wherein supervisors delineate the duties and privileges of the laborers and set punishments for infractions. In the same way, Yahweh tasks the human with tending his garden, and permits the usufruct of most of its produce in the course of dispatching this duty. Only the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad is prohibited, although no reason is yet given. Apparently, this tree produces fruit that is only suitable for divine beings, not children of earth.

After this, Yahweh observes that it is not good for the human to be alone (Genesis 2:18). Though Yahweh may be concerned for the human’s social life to some degree, it is just as likely that the problem is with overwork and a need to share the load (Greenstein, Reference Greenstein, Graf and Hoffman2002: 236). Yahweh does not set about making a friend, companion, or lover for the human, but a “helper as his partner” (ʿēzer kĕnegdô). This does not imply hierarchy or subordination, as Yahweh himself is often called an ʿēzer. Rather, it connotes an appropriate co-laborer – a being capable of participating with the first human in the shared work of the garden.Footnote ⁵¹ For this reason, Yahweh’s first attempts fail. He sculpts all manner of beasts and birds from the earth, but none has strength, intelligence, and opposable thumbs in appropriate portions to match the human. Yahweh finally creates a fitting counterpart in the form of a woman, created not from the earth but from the first human’s own body.Footnote ⁵² She is made of the same substance as the other human, who now may be called a man, and she has the same basic form. She is a proper coworker for the man in his horticultural work, better suited to it than the beasts and the birds (Greenstein, Reference Greenstein, Graf and Hoffman2002: 235–7). In this reading, that which has been considered primary – the woman’s opposite role to the man in sexual reproduction and the gendered division of labor and caregiving – takes a back seat to her ability to share their common purpose of agricultural labor.

As chapter two closes, the man and the woman represent a workforce of two. They live together in the garden, unclothed and without shame. We do not know how long they served in this role, however, as the next scene introduces a new problem. A clever talking snake convinces the woman to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad, and the man follows suit. In their exchange leading up to her eating, the snake tells her she will not die from eating the fruit, but that her eyes will be opened instead. When the woman inspects the tree herself, she observes that it is “good for eating, pleasant to the eyes, and desirable for instruction” (Genesis 3:6).

Indeed, once the humans eat from the fruit, “their eyes were opened and they knew that they were naked” (Genesis 3:7). Initially, it does not state that the eating caused them to know good and bad, but Yahweh says as much later (3:22). Rather, the immediate consequence is a recognition of their nakedness and the desire to hide it, indicating that this represents at least some significant element of their newfound knowledge.

When Yahweh comes to meet with them in the evening (the time for one of the daily food offerings [Wells, Reference Wells2023]), he discovers their transgression and new state of knowledge. He imposes penalties upon each of the parties involved (Genesis 3:14–19). He curses the snake to crawl on its belly, to eat dust, and to be in perpetual conflict with the woman and her offspring. He afflicts the woman with toil, many pregnancies, and sexual subordination.Footnote ⁵³ He curses the ground on which the man will work, forcing him to battle thorns and thistles to grow grain for his bread. It is only now that gender entails the division, rather than the sharing of labor. The labor for which both man and woman were created Yahweh makes more difficult, more painful, and less rewarding. No more will humans enjoy the easy gig that was tending to Yahweh’s garden. Now they shall toil to grow food from poor soil until they return to the dust from which they came.

Notably, nobody dies (yet). Yahweh had attached a death penalty to his original command but decides to enact a different punishment in an address to unidentified interlocutors.

According to this statement, gaining the knowledge of good and bad brought the human(s) one step closer to godhood, implying that eternal life would bring them closer still (Wells, Reference Wells2020: 655). Presumably, the acquisition of eternal life alone would not have disqualified them from their service in the garden, since the tree was not itself forbidden, but the increase in wisdom engendered by the Tree of Knowledge creates an anxiety in Yahweh and his companions. There is no sense in the narrative that their fear is feigned or unfounded – the possibility that the humans could become gods (or like gods) is real and it is something Yahweh would prefer to avoid.

In this sense, the expulsion can also be understood as labor discipline. If the humans become (like) gods, they would no longer classify as workers. Like the Igigi in Mesopotamia, they would leave the working class and enter the ranks of the divine aristocracy. If they were killed, as Yahweh had threatened, they would no longer be able to supply agricultural labor or products. Expulsion, on the other hand, maintains both humans’ subservient position and their ability to provide labor and food offerings to the deity, although it makes their task more onerous.

Following their expulsion, Adam and Eve bear two children who continue their obligation to provide food for Yahweh in the world outside the garden (Genesis 4:1–4). Cain tends crops like his parents while Abel raises animals. Abel’s occupation bears particular notice, since Yahweh originally gave humans permission only to eat plants (Genesis 2:16) and the permissibility of meat consumption is unclear. It may be, then, that Abel tended the flocks primarily for Yahweh’s food, only taking wool and dairy for his own and the other humans’ benefit.Footnote ⁵⁴ He knows which meat offerings to bring to Yahweh – the firstborns and the fat portions – and apparently knows how to slaughter, butcher, and prepare them appropriately. This suggests a continuity of practice with his parents, who had provided for Yahweh in the garden.

After several generations, Yahweh, like Enlil, gets angry with the humans he has created and vows to destroy them with a flood. In this case, it is not noise, overpopulation, or incipient revolution that infuriates the deity, but some unspecified evil that occupies humans’ every thought (Genesis 6:5–6). The forbidden fruit had granted knowledge of good and bad things, but it seems the humans were exploring one end of the spectrum to the exclusion of the other.

As in Atraḫasis, only one family survives the flood. Yahweh preserves the life of his favorite, Noah, by ordering him to ride out the flood in a giant boat. Unlike the Mesopotamian gods, who do not anticipate the disruption to their food supply that the flood will cause, Yahweh plans ahead for his ongoing provisions. He instructs Noah to bring one breeding pair each of all unclean animals, but seven breeding pairs of every clean kind (i.e., those that are suitable for divine offerings; Genesis 7:2–3). He does not say why Noah should bring these animals, but Noah takes the hint and offers meat to Yahweh immediately after the flood subsides:

Implicitly, the humans’ continued existence is predicated on Noah’s willingness to fulfill his obligation for service. Only after the offering does Yahweh promise clemency. His opinion of humans does not change, but he permits them to survive and multiply and participate in the eternal cycle of seasons and years (Genesis 8:22) because they supply his regular provisions.

By removing the curse he had placed on the ground (Genesis 3:18), Yahweh makes the people’s lives a little easier. This ties back also to Noah’s birth narrative, where his father names him Noah (similar to Hebrew for “rest”) because he will “give us rest from our works, from the toil of our hands, from the ground that Yahweh cursed” (Genesis 5:29). By prioritizing Yahweh’s food service, Noah has earned some respite from humanity’s curse. After the flood, he manufactures another source of relief, though this one bears mixed results. Noah becomes a “man of the earth” and plants the first vineyard (Genesis 9:20). Wine, of course, offers some respite from a life of physical labor, but it also brings the consequences of drunkenness, which manifest immediately in Noah’s case (Genesis 9:21–7). Neither does it remove the burden of agricultural labor, meaning that in Noah’s day also “work [was] the curse of the drinking classes.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Finally, the Tower of Babylon presents yet one more explicit effort by Yahweh to disempower humanity (Greenstein, Reference Greenstein, Graf and Hoffman2002: 238). This time, the labor that draws his ire is that of construction, not subsistence. As the humans build a tower to the heavens from fired bricks, Yahweh considers the consequences of such an endeavor:

This speech resembles – thematically and even grammatically – the anxious exclamation of Genesis 3:22.Footnote ⁵⁶ In each situation, Yahweh expresses sincere apprehension at the capacity of humankind to exceed their prescribed role and escape their obligations. To stymie their common purpose, he diversifies their speech into mutually unintelligible languages. Like expulsion from the garden and mortality, this change places an ongoing check on the capability of human beings to act collectively and rise above their station. Unlike in Atraḫasis, there is no additional imposition of morbidity here, as Yahweh had already decreed a limitation on human lifespans in Genesis 6:3, after which they can be observed to gradually decrease in the genealogical lists.

3.2.2 Discussion of Issues in the Labor Reading

This reading may provoke objections on several counts, most profoundly the portrayal of Yahweh as a deity who requires sustenance and the creation of humanity primarily to meet that need. The first point has been addressed in the discussion of food service (Section 3.1.2). I shall discuss the second here.

The point that humans in the Garden Story were created to meet a need rather than as ends in themselves becomes clear through comparison to the Priestly creation story in Gen. 1:1–2:4b. P identifies humankind as the culmination and capstone of creation, made in God’s image and likeness to solve no open problem. Their mandate includes no service requirement; rather, they are commanded to “[b]e fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:28). Later, the Priestly source will introduce the obligation of divine service necessary to maintain a harmonious relationship between Yahweh and humankind, but here the implication is that human beings oversee and enjoy the earth and all that is in it as they spread across the land.

The general posture of creation could scarcely be more different between the two chapters. In Genesis 1, incompleteness is expressed at no point in the sequence of creation. Each new stage in creation is built upon the foundation of those that came before, but never toward some pre-ordained state, and especially not to fill some acknowledged lack. There is no sense, at the end of each day of creation, that it needs something to follow to complete it. Even the blessing and mandate for humankind to subdue and rule the earth and all that is in it arises unexpectedly, as no prior indication had been given that the birds and animals needed anyone to rule them.

The Garden Story, on the other hand, constantly relates new creations to the problems they are meant to solve. Yahweh creates a garden and a human to address the absence of agriculture, but this creates the new problem of a solitary and overworked human. Yahweh attempts (unsuccessfully) to ameliorate the burden by creating animals and then (successfully) by creating a woman. A new problem arises when the humans eat from the forbidden tree, with the potential for more trouble if they eat from the Tree of Life. Yahweh addresses this by expelling them from the garden and making them miserable, but this leads to strife, murder, and the growth of a general tendency toward evil in the human heart. Yahweh responds with the flood, preserving only one human family with enough supplies to restart the schedule of provisions. Much like the efforts of the Mesopotamian gods to solve their labor problems, each solution both addresses an existing problem and creates a new one that must be solved in turn.

Thus, the humans were created to do the agricultural work that needed doing, and this was not primarily for themselves. Even the wording of Yahweh’s administrative order suggests their subordinate position. The mandate to work (ʿābad) and to keep (šāmar) the garden carries strongly hierarchical connotations. In the vast majority of attestations, ʿābad especially refers to work done at another’s behest and on another’s behalf. Indeed, it is most often translated “serve,” and its two most common usages denote bound labor and human service of deities. Bound labor takes various forms, enslaved and remunerated, but is almost universally subordinated. Examples include indentured servitude, household and debt slavery, Israelite slavery in Egypt, corvée, and vassalage (HALOT, 2:774). Only a few usages refer to labor done freely and for oneself, including in the Sabbath commandments (Exodus 20:9, 34:21; Deuteronomy. 5:13), and several other occurrences of the stock phrase “work the ground” (Deuteronomy 21:4, 28:39; Zechariah 13:5; Proverbs 12:11, 28:19).

The verb ʿābad also denotes the service of deities (Yahweh and other gods alike), though in such cases most translations render it “worship” (HALOT, 2:774). This translation implies a much more abstract and immaterial meaning, but there is evidence that service was differentiated from other types of worship and veneration. As described in Section 3.1, serving Yahweh involved the practical, physical work of preparing and maintaining shrines and administering the food service and other offerings and sacrifices. When Yahweh outlines the duties of the Aaronide priests in Numbers 18:7, he says: “You shall keep your priestly duties in everything regarding the altar and what is behind the curtain. Your service – the service of the gift – I give as your priesthood.” The distinction is crucial in Joshua 22 when one group of Israelites confronts another about an altar they have built east of the Jordan River. They insist that they do not mean to provide offerings on it. It is only a reminder “to perform the service of Yahweh in his presence, [i.e., at Shiloh] with our burnt offerings and sacrifices and offerings of wellbeing” (Joshua 22:27; cf. Ezekiel 20:40). The types of worship they claim to perform there may be meaningful, but they do not qualify as service because they do not involve food service or sacrifice.

The verb šāmar is not as strictly hierarchical as ʿābad, and it can refer to things done for oneself or someone else. It is noteworthy, however, that when it appears with ʿābad it almost universally refers to service of deities and diligent performance of rites of the temple and sanctuary (Wells, Reference Wells2023).Footnote ⁵⁷ Thus, the dual mandate of the human to work and to keep the garden creates a resonance with other descriptions of offerings to Yahweh throughout the Bible.

Perhaps the most significant piece of evidence that humans were meant to tend a garden for the consumption of Yahweh and other divine beings is the very presence of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad. If the garden were planted for the sustenance of humans alone, planting and then forbidding an enticing tree would reflect callous caprice at best and moral entrapment at worst. This problem is intensified by readings that find in the Garden Story a narrative of the fall and original sin. In such readings, the sole purpose of the tree is to provide a moral hazard – introducing the possibility of damnation behind an attractive facade.

This thorny problem, however, is easily resolved if the food of the garden is first and foremost for divine consumption and only secondarily for humans. The garden is planted with trees whose fruit is appropriate for the consumption of gods, and the humans are permitted to eat from the subset of varietals that produce appropriate fruit for their needs and status. They are the help, and they are expected to eat like the help. In this reading, perhaps it is more surprising that only one of Yahweh’s many trees is not meant for its human caretakers.

The prohibition and Yahweh’s equivocation on the consequences are especially apt in light of the fruit’s effects and Yahweh’s interest in preserving a hierarchical labor relationship. The threat of death attached to the prohibition serves as the strongest possible deterrent intended to keep the humans in their place. It is not, as the reader discovers, for their own good, but to prevent them from gaining the knowledge it holds and taking one step closer to godhood.Footnote ⁵⁸

When the humans do eat the fruit, however, Yahweh shows the threat to be overstated. Killing them does not suit Yahweh’s interests, as it would put him out of a workforce. As part of his comparisons with administrative orders in neo-Babylonian temples, Wells (Reference Wells2020: 646–51) shows that such orders often included such conditional verdicts – articulations of the strongest possible penalty for an infraction that could be mitigated or abrogated at the supervisor’s discretion.

The portrait that emerges, then, is one of Yahweh as master and supervisor – the owner of an estate who also takes part in its day-to-day affairs. It is not an especially sympathetic or flattering portrayal. Like Atraḫasis, the tale takes a critical, even satirical view of the god(s) while at the same time affirming the inevitability of a life spent in service to them. Unlike in Atraḫasis, whose deities have unique personalities and approaches to leadership, Yahweh makes all the decisions here, with a nameless, faceless divine community acting only as audience to his pronouncements. At times, it seems that Yahweh’s character displays a certain incoherence or inconstancy, as the motivations and actions of multiple Mesopotamian deities had to be collapsed into a single agent. However, Yahweh is navigating a path that ensures continued food provision while also maintaining the subordinated position of the human labor force. He may not anticipate or plan for every eventuality but responds to events with a mixture of discipline and clemency that best keeps the humans productive and in line.