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

FEMALE WORKERS RELATED TO THE ROYAL HOUSEHOLD | 243
year long at particular locations (such as the Dead Sea and Ein-Gedi areas). 18
We do not know, however, whether these would have been women like the ones
referred to in Samuel’s speech or only men, or both. One can well imagine that,
the larger the production needed, the more people working on it. Even though
small households needed oil every day and every night, it would have been
costly to produce it individually. As it still happens in different parts of the
world, production of different items tends to be concentrated in different villages
and then exchanged for other products. 19 These considerations notwithstanding,
Frick asserts that the range of oil presses unearthed run from private ones to
those belonging to political authorities, even within the same village:
Oil presses have been found in all kinds of settlements: in towns ranging
from three to six hectares, in smaller sites, and on agricultural farms. Eitam
maintains that the location of olive oil installations at a site illumines the
character of both the olive oil industry and the site itself (27). He observes, for
example, that at Khirbet Bint-Bar … olive oil installations were clustered in
two areas. Some were located at a central, high point of the settlement while
others were spread out on terraces between houses. This type of distribution
hints at two types of ownership of oil presses—some were probably privately
owned while others belonged to the town authorities. 20
Furthermore, there is a development factor to be considered (although that
is not our focus here), which explains differences in oil production even within
the (comparatively limited) time period covered by the Bible. 21 Scholars affirm
18 Wolfgang Zwickel, Frauenalltag im biblischen Israel (Verlag Katholisches Bibelwerk: Stuttgart,
1980), 45, 94; Karen Nemet-Nejat, Daily Life in Mesopotamia (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998),
157 asserts that “a woman was listed as the author of a series of recipes for making perfumes.”
19 So also King and Stager, Life in Biblical Israel, 192.
20 Frank S. Frick, “’Oil from Flinty Rock’ (Deuteronomy 32:13): Olive Cultivation and Olive Oil
Processing in the Hebrew Bible—A Socio-Materialist Perspective,” Semeia 86 (1999): 11. Scholars
(including Frick) rely on Rafael Frankel’s works on wine and oil production. Frankel’s works are
unavailable to me; see, however, Marilyn M. Schaub, review of Frankel, Rafael, Wine and Oil
Production in Antiquity in Israel and Other Mediterranean Countries, CBQ 62 (2000): 724–5; David
John Jordan, Review of Rafael Franklin[sic], Wine and Oil Production in Antiquity in Israel and
Other Mediterranean Countries, Review of Biblical Literature [http://www.bookreviews.org] (2000).
Hans M. Barstad, “After the ‘Myth of the Empty Land’: Major Challenges in the Study of Neo-
Babylonian Judah,” in Judah and the Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian Period (ed. Oded Lipschits &
Joseph Blenkinsopp; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2003) looks at the Neo-Babylonian need of
keeping Judah as oil and wine producer; see especially n.25 on p.10 on other bibliography on
agriculture, and more generally, 10–13.
21 Frick, “‘Oil,” 5–11 for a very helpful summary. See, for instance, Seymour Gitin and Trude
Dotan, “The Rise and Fall of Ekron of the Philistines: Recent Excavations at an Urban Border Site,”
BA (1987): 207–9 for a detailed description of unearthed oil press rooms and altars. In 2008, a
Byzantine olive press was accidentally discovered, according to this newspaper report: Hana Levi