Craftmanship: A Jewish Tradition Part II - The Biblical Period

Fact Paper 13-II

© Samuel Kurinsky, all rights reserved

GLASS HEAD-BEAD, Mid 5^th - 6^th c. BCE. This glass "head-bead," probably worn as a pendant, is typical of those produced in Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel, from the 9^th c. BCE forward. Such glass trade goods were distributed around the Mediterranean by sea-faring Canaanites, the so-called "Phoenicians." Israelite artisans were then apparently the only ones practicing the pyrotechnology required to produce glassware.

• The Persian Diaspora
• The Birth of the Iron Age
• The Biblical Background
• Notes

The Biblical Background

It is written that the Israelites wandered in the desert for forty years. They were not nomads. The Israelites did not choose living in the desert as a way of life. They were constrained by circumstance to suffer that bitter experience. They wearied of wandering, yearning for a sedentary life in a land of their own. They did not disperse into small family bands as nomadic desert life demands, but remained a multitude that survived to congeal into a nation.

It is written that the desert experience brought the wanderers close to their Creator, and that the great band of bedraggled stragglers survived the sands of the Sinai through the miracles He wrought It is written that a covenant was entered into between the people and their Creator, that upon the acceptance of His divine ordinances the wanderers were chosen to deliver His laws to a iniquitous, idolatrous world. It is written that the Israelites were to be rewarded for assuming that heavy burden with a land to dwell in from which they would wander no more.

The Israelites had been among the craftsmen who erected the tombs, temples and palaces of Egypt and outfitted them with exquisite ware. God was confident of the technological abilities of the people chosen to bear His burden. In addition to providing a constitutional framework for a humanitarian society, God set up projects requiring a comprehensive assortment of technological disciplines.

Metallurgists working gold, silver, copper and bronze were called upon to exercise their skills. Carpenters constructed an elaborate tabernacle, and cabinet-makers constructed furniture for it. The furnishings as well as the ark of the covenant were adorned with the works of accomplished sculptors. Weavers, embroiderers, and dyers were engaged in producing exquisite fabrics and tapestries in colors then unknown in most of the world. Tanners, lapidaries, stone-masons and potters applied their arts to the trappings of living in and moving about the Sinai for many thousands of people.

The work went on under the expert supervision of two men superbly equipped for the purpose. Bezaleel was a master smith of the tribe of Judah, "filled with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and all manner of workmanship." He devised cunning works in gold, silver, copper, and brass, and excelled in the cutting and setting of stone and in the carving of timber. (Ex. 31: 2-5).

Under the stewardship of Bezaleel much was made of gold, including candlesticks and lamps, snuffers and snuff-dishes, shovels and basins, dishes and spoons, fleshhooks and firepans and bowls. The four horns of the altar and all the vessels were made of brass. A great laver of brass was made, and mirrors of brass to satisfy human vanity.

Oholiab, of the tribe of Dan, served under Bezaleel. He was no less talented, a "cunning workman and embroiderer in blue, and in scarlet, and fine linen." Under Oholiab curtains were woven of "fine twined linen in blue, purple, and scarlet decorated with "cherubim of cunning work and adorned with decorations composed of precious stones. The ten curtains enclosing the tabernacle were specified to be a generous twenty-eight cubits long and eight cubits wide.

The Israelite artisans were so prolific that Moses called a halt to the artifactual cascade. "[Moses] proclaimed throughout the camp, saying: Let neither man nor woman make any more work for the offering... for the stuff they had was too much."

Aaron, brother of Moses, used his talents as a skilled smith and engraver to sculpt a golden calf, much to the discomfiture of his brother and of God. Aaron "fashioned it with an engraving tool."

The Israelites are reminded in the Sinai of the availability of iron in their promised land, a metal that had never been worked in Egypt. The Lord promises the Israelites not only a fecund agricultural land, but ample metallurgic resources: "... a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass."

The record of Israelite familiarity with working iron is regularly overlooked, whereas a biblical passage has been misinterpreted to infer ignorance of the art. In Samuel 13:19 it is stated that "There was no smith found throughout all the land of Israel; for the Philistines said, 'lest the Hebrews make them swords or spears."

Read properly, it is clear that the Hebrews, a stateless people, and not the Philistines are designated as arms-makers. The Philistines rounded up the itinerant Hebrew smiths from around the region and restricted them to their camp. Their motive is clearly laid out in the next sentence, stating that the Israelites (referred to separately from the Hebrews) were thus forced to sharpen their agri-cultural and industrial tools under Philistine control, thereby preventing them from making or sharpening weapons

The Hebrews and the Israelites became one people. YHWH is biblically referred to alternately as the God of the Hebrews and as the God of the Israelites. After the states of Israel and Judah came into existence the ethnicon "Hebrew" became another term for the Israelites.¹

The clue for this amalgamation of the two stateless peoples may be found in Isaiah 14:1: "For the Lord will have mercy upon Jacob, and will yet choose Israel, and set them in their own land, and the strangers shall be joined with them, and they shall cleave to the house of Jacob."

The Birth of the Iron Age

The Iron Age was launched in 12^th century with the esta-blishment of hundreds of Israelite villages on the hills of Canaan. "About 240 sites of the [Iron I] period are known [to have sprung into existence] between the Jezreel and Beer-Sheva valleys; 96 in Menassah, 122 in Ephraim...and 22 in Benjamin and Judah. In addition, 68 sites have been identified in the Galilee, 18 in the Jordan Valley and dozens of others on the Transjordanian plateau."²

The Bible acclaims the Iron Age in the account of the building of the temple: "David prepared iron in abundance for the nails for the doors for the gates, and for the joinings, and brass in abundance without weight."

Iron agricultural and industrial tools were found by archaeologists only at Israelite sites. The use of such tools is biblically attested after David took the city of Ammon: "He brought forth the people that were therein, and put them under the saws, and under the harrows of iron, and under the axes of iron."

David's military successes can be attributed to the steadfast support of two brothers, Joab and Abushei, who were at David's right hand from the time David was yet an outlaw contending with Saul. Joab headed an extended family of master craftsmen. "The father of the valley of Harashim; for they were craftsmen." It appears that these brothers outfitted David's army of 800,000 valiant men in Israel, and 500,000 more in Judah.

As David turned over the reins of government to his son, Solomon, he bequeathed materials for building a proper house of the Lord. The value of iron, 100,000 talents, exceeded that of all the other metals combined.

Solomon retained Andoniram, another Israelite master to oversee the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Three thousand three hundred foreman were placed over a workforce of 30,000, mostly hewers of timber and stones. In addition, Solomon flattered the king of Tyre, Hiram, to supply additional hewers of timber. Under Adoniram the construction of the temple compound was completed and adorned with an array of metal fittings and wood carvings elaborately detailed in the Bible.

The king of Tyre supplied another master craftsmen for the production of brass and other works for the Temple. Hiram "was a widow's son of the tribe of Napthali, and his father was a man of Tyre, a worker in brass; and he was filled with wisdom, and understanding, and cunning to work all works in brass."

Whether Hiram's father was an Israelite like his mother is not stated; we are told merely that he hailed from Tyre, was born into a family of metalworkers and married an Israelite woman.

Hiram furnished two massive brass pillars supporting the Temple's porch; their capitals were embellished with several hundred pomegranates, an Israelite motif established in Exodus. A great brass basin was produced. It was a metallurgic marvel, resting upon twelve oxen, and its borders and ledges were delicately carved with lions, oxen, cherubims and palms. When Hiram completed his commission, "Solomon brought in the things that David, his father, had dedicated; even the silver, and the gold, and the vessels, did he put among the treasures of the Lord.

The evidence of Israelite metalworking in the Upper Galilee dates from the outset of Israelite settlement. It was a sparsely inhabited area until the Israelites arrived. The occupational debris of the Israelite I period was found on one of the highest Galilean ridges. In one of the rooms the remains of a kiln, ovens, benches, and vessels survived, "which proved that it had served for a metalsmith in copper and bronze." The fact that this habitation and workshop was sitting on bedrock, and that "above this stratum was the debris of a settlement of Israelite II protected by a casement wall" leaves scarcely room for doubt that the smith was indeed an early Israelite.³

The thickly forested Galilee supplied the vast amounts of fuel consumed by the smelting and working of metals and the production of glass and glassware. The forests flourished in the provinces of the tribes of Naphthali, Asher, Dan, and of some of the Benjaminites. The Rechabites, attested biblically as metalworkers, were of the Benjaminite tribe.

The pyrotechnical arts practiced in the proliferating hilltop villages of Eretz Israel were at the highest level civilization had attained to anywhere on earth at that time. Objects of glass appeared in the region at the very time they disappeared from Egypt. The glassware was functionally distinct from the type that Egyptian hierarchy had placed in their tombs. They were simpler in decoration, more utilitarian or suitable for ritual purposes than lavishly executed and decorated. A jug recovered from Lachish is an example of this new type of glassware. It bears a palm leaf design, a pattern that recurs as a standard Israelite motif. Glass rods used as ritual scepters bearing the same ornamentation and topped with a cast glass pomegranate were found at Hazor and at Megiddo

The commercial association between the seafaring Canaanites (the so-called Phoenicians) led to a revitalized vitric industry and to the distribution of glass artifacts throughout the Mediterranean. The trade was that foreseen by Moses, when the area around Tyre and Sidon was assigned to the tribe of Zebulun, and the Galilean hinterlands to the tribes of Asher and Dan. Moses predicted that "They shall profit from the abundance of the sea and from the treasures hidden in the sand."

The glassmaking propensity of the Israelites lives on in legend. An Arabian folk-tale recalls a deception practiced by King Solomon upon the Queen of Sheba. The wily king had a pavement of glass installed in a section of palace that deceived the visiting Queen, who believed it to be a pool of water. The legend is clearly mythical, since an expanse of flat glass or mirrors was then beyond the capabilities of glassmakers, but myths often contain real elements of tribal memory. The Talmud does state that "white glass has ceased since the destruction of our temple,"⁴ from which we must deduce that such glass was used in the temple.

Familiarity with the process of glassmaking is reflected in a number of Talmudic and idrashic references. Wisdom is referred to in Job (28:1-17) as being more costly than sapphire or glass, the most costly of earthly materials. The Palestinian Talmud describes the fusion of glass by rolling, a process known as "marvering" in the glassmakers vocabulary. It also refers to the layering of glass and cutting through the layers, a process by which cameo glass is produced.⁵ In Genesis 2:7 it is written that, after God formed man out of the dust of the earth, he blew into his nostrils the breath of life. This ultimate act of creation is likened in the Midrash to the art of blowing glass, in which the breath of man becomes the soul of the vessel he creates just as the breath of God becomes the soul of Man.⁶

The technological aptitude of the Israelites is attested to by the Assyrian monarch Shamaneser III (858-824 BCE) in an inscription on a monolith in which he recorded an encounter between his forces and a coalition of enemies, among whom Ahab, king of Israel (c. 859-853 BCE) was the most formidable. According to Shalmaneser, the Israelite forces mustered more chariots than did all his other opponents combined. More than two thousand Israelite chariots were arrayed against his army at the battle of Qarqar.

EYE-BEADS, 6^th - 3^rd c. BCE. The provenance of these beads is presumed to be Judah or Persia. The deportation of Israelite artisans to Assyria coincided with the resurgence of the art of glassmaking in the Persian Diaspora. Glass artifacts were important ingredients of the trade around the Mediterranean and across Asia to China and India.Photograph courtesy of the Corning Museum of Glass.

The Persian Diaspora

A century and a half later Tiglis-Pileser prevailed over the Israelites. According to an Assyrian source, 13,150 Israelites were deported to Assyria in 733-732 BCE.⁷ In addition to the artisans, several hundred Israelite musicians were taken to the royal palace. The musicians were descendants of the musical community established under King David. So delighted was the Assyrian monarch that he had the scene recorded in bas-relief on walls of the palace.

His successor, Sargon II, boastfully recorded that in 722 BCE 27,290 more Israelites were deported to Assyria.⁸

The exultant blusters of the Assyrian ruler confirms the biblical account: "In the ninth year of Hosea the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away..."

The pyrotechnical arisappeared from Upper Israel. It is hardly remarkable, therefore, that there was a resurgence of the pyrotechnical arts in Mesopotamia, the very land in which those arts had been born. It appears that Sargon II soon took advantage of the skills of the glassmakers among the deportees. He had a glass vessel made with his name boldly inscribed upon it. The alabastron of Sargon II was excavated at Nimrud and is now the proud possession of the British Museum. It is the earliest surviving example of a vessel apparently carved and polished from a mold-produced form. The vessel is engraved with a symbolic lion and Sargon II's name.⁹

Archaeological finds indicate that some Israelite artisans survived through the next century and managed to maintain their ferric and vitric activities until the Chaldean/Babylonian monarch, Nebuchadnazzer, invaded Israel. That process is reflected biblically in the recounting how, upon witnessing the capture and deportation of fellow artisans, the descendants of the metal-working Rechabites sought refuge in Jerusalem: "But it came to pass, when Nebuchadnazzer king of Babylon came up into the land, that we said, Come let us go to Jerusalem."

The escape to Jerusalem, however, proved to be a temporary remedy. Nebuchadnazzer assailed the holy city, looted Judah, and took princely Judahite hostages back to Babylon, including Daniel. The biblical rendition of the story of that campaign is supported by a Chaldean chronicle detailing the battles against Egypt near Hamath and at Carcamish.¹⁰

Jerusalem was again assailed by the Babylonians in 598 BCE, and 4,600 (or 4,897) Judahites are recorded as being deported to Babylon in successive waves. Three months thereafter the Judahite king Jehoiachin was taken prisoner and transported to Babylon along with all the remaining Temple treasures and ten thousand more captives, including "all the craftsmen and the smiths."

Jerusalem held out for three more years, bereft of a large proportion of her skilled artisans. Finally, the city fell, its walls were dismantled, its buildings razed and the city was burned to the ground in a fire that lasted three days. Thousands of additional artisans were rounded up and deported. Only "the poor of the land" were left to carry on as "vinedressers and husbandmen."

In 550 BCE Cyrus of Anshan rebelled against his overlord and founded the Persian Empire. In 539 he conquered Babylonia, and thereafter issued an edict permitting the exiles in Babylonia to return to Judah and rebuild their Temple in Jerusalem. 42, 360 members of the congregation are said to have returned together with 7,337 servants and maids. Among them was a corps of artisans needed to rebuild Jerusalem, accompanied by several hundred musicians.

The tribes of the children of Israel spread out across the land, some settling in Ono, "the valley of the craftsmen." Ono was not the only such valley, for the valley of Harashim (from which the descendants of Joab, captain "of all the host of Israel" stemmed), was a wilderness that was equally renowned for its craftsmen. The Rechabites had previously practiced their metallurgic skills in that very wilderness.

We are also biblically informed about the house of Jokim, who were potters, and whose activity presages the establishment in that very area of such great pottery-producing industries as came into being later at Kfar Hananiah and Shikhim. The reference to those industries in the Mishnah, long held to be myths by the doubters of biblical chronicles, have now been justified by the excavations under David Adan-Beyewitz, an HHF board member. A series of huge kilns were uncovered in those Judaic communities, capable of producing vast quantities of pots. They have now proved to have been distributed widely across Israel from the Golan to the Negev.¹¹

We are likewise biblically introduced to families of scribes, and to the house of Ashbea, "who wove fine linen." Linen production grew to be a major industry in the area well into the Roman period. The linens of Beth Shean (Scythopolis) became officially recognized by the Roman emperor Diocletian in his "Edict of Maximum Prices" as the finest in the world.¹²

The Jewish communities formed Persia's commercial and industrial heart. The creative endeavors of the Jews in artisanship and commerce gained great impetus within the Persian matrix. The Jewish population of Persia expanded through the Babylonian, Persian, Achaemenid and Seleucid periods to a total of some one million persons, and may have doubled with the additional influx of Jews after the Roman destruction of the Second Temple and the defeat of the Bar Khochba revolt.

The remarkable aspect of the subsequent Judaic diffusion into disparate societies is that almost invariably their communities were located in commercial centers at the forefront of technological evolution. The dispersion of the Jews led to the spread of the technologies at which they were adept. The Jewish exile from their homeland proved both a bane and a boon. Although continually buffeted by storms of prejudice and intolerance, they were at a commercial advantage by their access to each other across borders through a common language, an advantage that no other people possessed. Being a literate people, they were able to communicate with their peers in foreign lands. Having a common interest, they were able to establish commercial liaisons of mutual benefit and to issue letters of credit that were certain to be honored.

A world-wide commercial network was seeded in Persia, in which international contact and travel became part and parcel of Judaic life. Persia was the pivotal point around which the trade of the Far Eastern and Western worlds revolved, and the Jews became the common denominator between those worlds. The network eventually became epitomized by the activity of world-girdling Persian Jews known as the Rhadanites. Their itinerary spanned Eurasia from Gaul and North Africa to China and India. Their erudition and literacy enabled them to become the couriers of the canons of Judaic philosophy from the Jewish universities along their route to the Judaic communities throughout that vast tri-continental region. They were at once the postal system by which the Judaic communities maintained contact, the carriers of culture into the Judaic Diaspora, and the pioneers of trade routes that serve the world into the present.

Olmstead, author of a comprehensive work, History of the Persian Empire, emphasized that "without any doubt, the most important economic phenomenon was the emergence of the private banker and the consequent expansion of credit."¹³ The records of two Persian/Judaic banking families of Egibi and Murashu are revelatory documents of the beginnings of this process.

Up to the seventh century BCE, credit had been made available mainly as temple loans to dependents, to be repaid to the temple in kind or equivalent, or as loans from landlords to their peasants in off season, to be repaid at harvest time. Soon after the settlement of the Israelites into Persia, the Jewish financiers instituted a reformed system of credit whereby interest-bearing capital was also offered privately for seminal secular or non-governmental purposes. By the mid-seventh century, the Babylonian houses of Egibi and the Persian house of Murashu were engaged in such enterprise, extending the previously agrarian application of credit to industry and commerce.

The name Egibi is an Akkadian transliteration of Joseph. It was a secondary name; the family name of the banker's father was Shirik, an Aramaic name, and his first name is given as Iddina, rendered in Hebrew as Nathan. The Egibi documents survive because their cuneiform inscriptions on clay tablets were baked in a conflagration. The records concern credits issued and loans granted, bills of exchange, the founding and financing of commercial enterprises, the purchase of goods, and the acquisition, management and sale of tracts of land.

A study of the Murashu documents brought to light a pattern: whereas many of the older members of this unquestionably Jewish family assumed pagan names, they reverted to the use of Yawist names for their children. The consistency of this reversion suggests that in the century following the fall of Jerusalem (586-486 BCE), extradited Jews were either forced to suspend allegiance to Yahweh, or found it politic to do so while secretly adhering to their faith. In a process presaging that of the Marranos of the Inquisition, they returned to the open practice of their faith as tolerance was instituted.

JUDAIC COMMUNITIES IN PERSIA, TALMUDIC PERIOD. Judaic centers continued to grow in Persia after the deportation of the Israelites to Assyria and Babylonia, reaching a population of up to a million at the turn of the Common Era. The number far exceeded that figure after the dispersion of the Jews in the first and second centuries. The Jews were concentrated in the key centers of the rich agricultural heartland of Persia (now Iraq), where canals criss-cross between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. The Judaic centers accounted for more than 90% of Persian industry, and in them flourished the great Judaic universities that drew Jewish students from throughout the Diaspora. He trade routes connecting the West to China radiated out from the Judaic/Persian hub.

The Murashu family was among those deported from Judah. After rooting in Nippur they became an institution central to Mesopotamian economy. 730 tablets of the banking house of Murashu and Sons were recovered, the last dated to 403 BCE. The Aramaic forms of names mentioned in the records and other indications of Judaic identity indicate that Jews were prominent among artisans and entrepreneurs. There are a number of references to Jewish engineers who earned their living as irrigation experts. All fourteen canal managers known to us through the documents were Jewish. Some Jews were part of the military establishment. Thus the son of a feudatory, Gadalyaw Gedaliah "volunteered to serve as a mounted and curassed archer in place of a son of Murashu."¹⁴ Most of the Jews referred to in the documents were of the "lower classes." Some were slaves, and come to our attention because slaves of those times were more like indentured servants. They retained both individual privileges and responsibilities, and could independently enter into legal agreements. Two such slaves, one clearly Jewish, were contracted by the house of Murashu to repair the dam of the irrigation canal passing through Murashu property or be assessed damages if they failed to fulfill their commitment. An impoverished Jewish woman who made a living at home by spinning and selling her product was assisted in her endeavors. A Jewish guide was hired for a journey and was promised, in addition to wages and expenses, a bonus upon completion of the trip. A certain Zebadiah was one of five fishermen who leased nets for a period of twenty days.¹⁵

The activity of the Egibi bankers in Susa, gateway to India, presages the expansion of trade along the land and sea routes to the Far East. Jews were concentrated in the heartland of Persia along and between the two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, at the hub of these burgeoning caravan routes. Judaic communities were solidly ensconced along the routes being newly established through the vast Asian continent.

During the Achaemenid period (550-330 BCE) glassmaking reached a new height of sophistication in Persia. The finest examples of the art have been recovered from Nippur, Nimrod, and Ctesiphon, precisely the areas of the heaviest concentration of Judaic communities. Examples of these unmistakable objects were found as far afield as Ephesus and Gordion in Anatolia, Jerusalem, Persopolis, and elsewhere. One such bowl, with an eighteen-leafed rosette molded into its bottom, appeared on the London market and is inscribed in Aramaic.

The Europeans were, at this time entirely ignorant of the process of glassmaking. The first mention of glassware in Greek literature relates to an experience of Greek ambassadors to the Persian court. Aristophanes reported in 425 BCE on the amazement of the Greek dignitaries on being served drinks in bowls made of a strange, brilliant, crystal-like material, for which no word yet existed in their language. Nor had Latin yet acquired a word for "glass." One can imagine the value set by the enraptured Greeks for such crystal bowls; perhaps equi-valent to that reached at a Sotheby auction; an Achaemenid bowl was sold for sixty-two thousand English pounds!

ACHAEMENID PHIALE, 450 - 400 BCE. Ribbed glass bowls, imitations of metal prototypes, traded from Achaemenid Persia to the West during the period in which the Judaic population of Persia was growing. The production of glassware appeared in Persia after the arrival of deportees from Israel.

Glass production was then peculiarly a Judaic art. Characteristic eye-beads, which had become staple trade goods around the Mediterranean, suddenly appear among Imperial Chinese grave goods at Lo-Yang in the fifth century BCE. Iron products likewise appear at the same time in China. China had its own unique products to offer in exchange: silk, paper, munitions and spices.

Silk was a wondrous filament with which the most elegant materials could be woven. The ancient arts of sericulture and the production of paper and munitions, were added to the roster of Judaic arts. Just as the Persian Jews introduced the technology of glass and iron production to China, so they introduced the esoteric art of sericulture in the West. Damascus was one of the important centers of East-West trade. The import of silk into Damascus and the production and export of silk products were largely in the hands of Jewish entrepreneurs, and glassware was a integral element of the process of exchange.

L. Boulnois, in a work on traffic to the East, concluded that the Jewish merchants "were celebrated for their work in glass, byssus (linen) and silk, as well as for their dyeing... As expert glass workers, the Jews had on hand one of the means of exchange used as payment for silk - especially the famous glass beads."¹⁶

Jewish artisans and entrepreneurs had much to offer the West. During the period in which the Jews had become central to Persian/Babylonian commerce, Greek merchants were also learning science, mathematics and astronomy from the savants of the region. Formerly an illiterate people, the Greeks first adopted the aleph-beth. The Greeks went on to adopt: the Judaic/Babylonian systems of measurement, units of weight, division of the day into 24 hours, division of circles into 360 degrees, astronomical tables, and land measurement systems.¹⁷

The process of the Greek absorption of Judaic/Babylonian science began with Thales (fl. 580 BCE), born in Anatolia. Pursuing a mercantile career in Babylonia, Thales was immersed in Babylonian mathematics and science; the astronomical tables he learned enabled him to predict an eclipse of the sun and made him famous.

The Greek historian Herodotus,also visited Babylonia in 450 BCE, informs us that Pythagoras (c. 582 BCE) was another of the Greek merchants who learned mathematics from the savants of Babylonia.

The same was true of Leucippus, Democrates, and others who followed Herodotus et al into the region in which the Jews established themselves as its commercial and industrial mainstay.¹⁸

As Alexander the Great and his successors became rulers in the Near East, they opened the western door to Judaic skills and knowledge.