Women at Work in the Deuteronomistic History - International Voices ...

86 | WOMEN AT WORK IN THE DTRH
how frail the situation was for farmers in antiquity. 22 The reason for bringing to
the picture these obligations, characteristic of agrarian societies, is that they are
usually only implied in the biblical texts, but they need to be brought into the
picture, as they form an important component in the lives of the women with
whom this study is concerned.
Characteristic of agrarian societies is also the occurrence of urban
settlements, estimated from five to ten percent of the total population, although
one should not think in terms of megalopolis and the very use of the term “city”
is misleading. Sjoberg estimates that in the pre-industrial world even cities of
more than 25,000 inhabitants would have been rare. 23 Wolf, on the other hand,
prefers to take as characteristic of the agrarian system not the city per se, but the
relation of several villages into a larger community with a center of power, a
system he calls “the state.”
Not the city, but the state, is the decisive criterion of civilization and it is the
appearance of the state which marks the threshold of transition between food
cultivators in general and peasants. Thus, it is only when a cultivator is
integrated into a society with a state—that is, when the cultivator becomes
subject to the demands and sanctions of power-holders outside his [sic] social
stratum—that we can appropriately speak of peasantry. 24
Note the idiom of power. One can appropriately speak of peasantry when
the cultivator’s integration into a society with a state equals the cultivator being
subject to demands and sanctions by the power-holders outside his or her social
stratum. In other words, the agrarian social system is based upon a mass of
farmers who become “peasantry,” who suffer what another sociologist calls “the
‘underdog’ position—the domination of peasantry by outsiders.” 25 Although
farms are breadbaskets of the whole system, distribution mechanisms work in
such a way that farmers are the ones who usually absorb any loss. In theory,
return mechanisms are provided—otherwise the urban elite would not be able to
exploit indefinitely the peasants. The system is supposed to provide roads and
22
Chirichigno, Debt-Slavery, 142. “[T]he rise of debt-slavery and the alienation of land in Israel, as
in Mesopotamia, can be attributed to insolvency among free citizens that was caused by various
interrelated socio-economic factors, including taxation, the monopoly of resources and services
among the state and private elite (i.e., rent capitalism), high interest loans and the economic and
political collapse of higher kinship groups. That the development of debt-slavery and the alienation
of land were similar in each of these societies can be attributed to the similarity in the kinship
structure of the various tribal societies that made up the population of these agrarian states and the
development of these tribal groups into state societies.”
23
This opinion is held by Sjoberg, among others. See Preindustrial City, 83, and Lenski, Power and
Privilege, 198–200. Other scholars think some of the largest preindustrial cities had up to a million
inhabitants.
24
Wolf, Peasants, 11.
25
Shanin, “Introduction,” 4.