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

SOCIETY’S CONDITIONS AFFECTING WOMEN’S LIVES IN ANCIENT ISRAEL | 103
and probably also semi-free people, especially servants and specialized workers
whose legal status is unclear. 78 Scholars divide slaves into state-, temple- and
privately-owned; they can also be divided into those owned privately or by the
great institutions. Although the relationship of the temple and the particular city
and/or empire to which it was connected differed according to times and
circumstances, both owned and distributed land in exchange for revenues, drew
their income from taxes and offerings from the population, acted as loaners, had
jurisprudence on legal issues, received people as donation or as booty, and also
hired out people for particular projects. 79
By far the most important employer in the Ur III period was the state, whose
influence was felt in every area of activity, from agriculture and animal
husbandry through craft industries such as weaving, milling, and the working
of metals, wood, leather, and reeds to administration of the state, the provinces,
and the individual cities.
Second in order of importance were the temples. They too possessed large
estates devoted to agriculture and animal raising and employed large numbers
of craftsmen, officials, and administrative personnel.
78 Ration lists are not complete and do not give details (for instance, differentiating between slaves
and semi-free workers). For instance, there are temple archives and a few particular archives, but so
far no palace archives have been found for Babylon. In Israel, no ration lists or letters by kings
ascribing prisoners to certain officers (as in Hittite discoveries) have been unearthed. Thus, lists are
not exhaustive, so that what can be said here applies to certain periods and places and is reliable for
those periods and places, but not further. They serve us to speculate on what could have happened to
slaves in Israel.
79 Bibliography on this subject is quite extensive. See for instance, on temples as business
organizations, M. Silver, Economic Structures of the Ancient Near East (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and
Noble, 1986), 7–8. On Sumer, Adam Falkenstein, The Sumerian Temple City (Los Angeles: Undena,
1974); Igor M. Diakonoff, Structure of Society and State in Early Dynastic Sumer (Los Angeles:
Undena, 1974); and Muhammad Dandamayev, “State and Temple in Babylonia in the First
Millennium B.C.,” in State and Temple Economy, 2:589–96. On Ugarit, Michael Heltzer, “Royal
Economy in Ancient Ugarit,” in State and Temple Economy 2:482–94 (particular male professions).
He finds no clear differentiation between court and palace economies (p. 496), “It appears that, in
Ugarit, there was no exact definition of the royal economy. The temple personnel, the administrative
personnel, the military men, with their duties, obligations, and privileges, were also royal dependents
(bnš mlk). All these people were connected with the gt, receiving there deliveries and ‘ubdy-fields.
However, the bnš mlk, according to their professional groups, were distinguished from the peasants
of the village communities.” On Egypt, J. Janssen, “The Role of the Temple in the Egyptian
Economy during the New Kingdom,” in State and Temple Economy2:505–15. On the other hand,
Roland Boer, “Sacred Economy,” 36, asserts that “the temple-city complex is not the same as the
state. Rather, the state arises in a tension between the village commune and the temple-city
complex.”