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Weaving & Textiles

Most families in the Bronze and Iron Age wove their own cloth and made their own clothing. Like breadmaking, this was an activity that figured prominently in the daily lives of women. In antiquity, the southern Levant was famous for the weaving of luxurious patterned and colored textiles. [Manners and Customs] [University of Pennsylvania Museum]...

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Map of Ancient Canaan

The land known as Canaan was situated in the territory of the southern Levant, which today encompasses Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, Jordan, and the southern portions of Syria and Lebanon. [University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology]...

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Sarcophagi and Tombs

These sarcophagi promote a degree of individuality in death, however, that contrasts with the typical communal type of burial. [Manners and Customs] [University of Pennsylvania Museum]...

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Animals in Daily Life

People in the Bronze and Iron Age lived in close contact with domestic animals. Animals provided food, and their care and feeding was an investment and a hedge against hard times. Sheep and goats were the principal herd animals: they are mobile, resilient in drought and provide meat, milk, wool, manure, and leather. Although cattle provide most of ...

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Timeline of Ancient Canaan

The dividing of ancient history into chronological periods is the product of modern scholarship. The division between the Bronze and Iron Age marks a significant technological innovation, namely the adoption of ironworking, which over time replaced bronze as the most popular metal for tools, weapons and armor. [University of Pennsylvania Museum of ...

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Bronze Age Temples

The earliest Canaanite temples of the Bronze Age consisted of a broad room, open porch and court. Facing the entrance in the broad room was a stone altar for sacrifices. Over time, temples developed into tripartite buildings, consisting of an entrance porch and a main room with a cult niche, sometimes called the "Holy of Holies." [Manners and Custo...

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Storage and Pots in Daily Life

In Canaan and Ancient Israel, people depended on storing sufficient food, fodder and seed to sustain them from one harvest to the next, and a little beyond. In the Bronze and Iron Age, people in the southern Levant never developed the kind of centralized storage and redistribution systems common in Egypt and Mesopotamia. [Manners and Customs] [Uni...

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The Pharisees

"Pharisee" is from a Greek word (pharisaios) taken from the Heb/Aramaic "Perisha" meaning "Separated one." In the first century A.D. the Pharisees were one of the three chief Jewish sects, the others were the Sadducees and the Essenes. Of the three, the Pharisees were the most separated from the ways of the foreign influences that were invading Jud...

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The Scribes of the First Century A.D.

The Scribes were also called "lawyers" and the "doctors of the law". They were all highly educated from a young age, and at an appropriate time (some say by the age of 30) they were elected to office. They were not only copyists of the law, but they were also the preservers of the oral tradition, which included the commentaries and additions to the...

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The Samaritans

In later Hebrew writings the word Samaritan speaks of the people of the district of Samaria in central Israel. They came from intermarriages of certain Israelites with the colonists from Babylon and other parts of Mesopotamia and Syria. These colonists had been placed there by the Assyrian kings Sargon II and Esarhaddon, after the Northern Kingdom ...

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