Book Review: Daily Life in the Time of Jesus
Author: Henri Daniel-Rops
Year: 1962
PART I
This book caught my eye when I was randomly strolling through a used bookstore.I bought it originally as a writing reference guide for a writing project I had going on at the time. What was going to be a stream of resources for the writing project, ended up me reading this wonderful book about what was essentially a neglected part of Christian Catechism and Understanding of the Ancient world, and in particular the Roman Province of Judea, the Israelites and the Roman occupiers that helps give way to a fuller, broader context of the Scriptures we don’t fully see. Now, for clarity sake, and for my sake as well, I’ll be doing brief pointers, as going through the entire book to review it would be a long series, and I’d rather let you, the reader to buy the book and read the full version since Rops has a wonderful writing style that flows easily and yet is dense at the same time.
Having been to Israel, I had a glimpse understanding of how the Ancients Israelites lived via looking at archeology of Old City Jerusalem, Tyre, as well as Bethlehem, and just walking amongst those ancient cities. What I did not figure out until much later, was the fullness of how they lived. So, we’re going into this book.
in Part 1, Rops dives down into the Geography of the region (in the book and for the remainder of this essay, he uses “Palestine” no doubt taken from the British Mandate of 1920 ) the very name of Palestine is derived from the Philistines, thus meaning “Land of Philistines”, which as one could’ve guessed had problems, being that the Philistines were enemies of the Israelites. So what were the other names used by the inhabitants of that time? “Land of Canaan” was used, but that referred to Canaanites, another enemy tribe of the Israelites. The most common term, and one that is still used to day is “The Promised Land” after 40 years of exile wandering in the Sinai Desert (of which i also got to visit) and later, after Christ walked the very same land, The Holy Land. (which is another term I’ll be using as well)
Geography plays a big role in the region, as it was (and still is) a Mediterreanean Climate with some desert regions, namely the Negev in the south:
in the North is the temperate climate. Most of the Farms (Kibbutz, collective farms… heh) are in the central to southern part of The Holy Land In the Ancient times, this area would’ve been extremely rural and used for small scale farming and herding. in the areas around water: Sea of Galilee, Med and in the Red Seas were alll meant for fishing. When the romans came in the area, the first thing was to establish roads and a governing system making travel easier as well as making the area easier to be connected.
Moving on to the next 3 parts: The People, the Politics, and Jerusalem we find ourselves reading how the Israelites separated themselves from the pagans, and how they deemed themselves to be both a Religion as well as a Nation1. Rops goes into detail between the Israelite Diaspora who resided among the Greek Cities, and the native Israelite cities giving a stark contrast between those who lived in a cosmopolitian lifestyle than those who lived in a strict religious lifestyle. The Diaspora often times lost their strictness towards their Israelite faith in favor of either a “Cosmopolitian religion” or their faith loosened up. Interestingly enough, St. Luke the Evangelist was from the Diaspora.
the Political section is going to be even more complicated, because through out history, in ancient and modern, Palestine was under multiple empires: Greek, Roman, Babylonian, Assyrian, Akkadian, Phoencian, Egyptian, Ottoman, and the numerous islamic empires from 600AD onwards. It wasn’t until recently as in, the last 70 to 100 years when it got its own territory gained. For now, Christ lived under the Romans, which is what we’ll be studying going further.
Rome had a system of sending legions to newly conquered areas to keep it in peace, collect taxes and men to raise new legions in-case a war arose or the army needed more legions. Judea was the only exception to this rule because of the religion of the Israelites, and of course the Israelites being an unruly people, wanting revenge and freedom from their Roman Oppressors, just like the Maccabean revolt earlier, when Alexander the Great ruled the region.
Josephus mentions that the Israelites’ view of a Messiah was one to save them of the Roman Occupiers via violence, instead of saving their souls of which Christ came down for us.
PART II
moving on into Part 2, which is dealing with the culture and customs of the people, this on is by far the longest one, and rather go through each and every one of them, I’m going to go through some of the more simpler ones. I promise i’m not being lazy, I just want to be respectful of your time and my time.
The Biggest thing that makes up modern discussions about the Bible always ends up between: the Temple, the priests of the Temple, Scribes and Pharisees, and most of these discussions end up fruitless or in some cases downright mis-interpteting what their original function was.
To give a brief summary for all of them as I have a lot of other things to cover:
Temple was the main building for all things Jewish under the Israelites, not only was it just a building but it was also a series of social settings, a holy place for learned scholars of the Torah to study uninterrupted as well as commentaries from the presiding Rabbis past and present. Both the Scribes and Pharisees were under these schools. As the name suggests, the Scribes were the writers and the Pharisees were the doctors. Now, much is said about the Pharisees being hypocrites, when in reality they were strict dogmatists towards the Law and how to apply it. After all, in John 3:1-10 we see Nicodemus, who was a Pharisee that wanted to know to how to get into the Kingdom.2 Jesus was quick to reproach him saying, “Are you not a teacher of Israel?” The strictness and adherance to the Law came off as standoffish by the Pharisees, and it was the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin who ordered the Crucifixion of Christ.
Sanhedrin was the legisation council of the Israelites, making up of seventy elders. it’s also a direct translation from the Greek Sunderion, which basically means “Council”. When the Romans conquered the province, instead of getting rid of the Sanhedrin, they recognized it and gave it permenance as opposed to what the Israelites did; make it semi-permanent.
In the Roman province of Judea, taxes were levied instead of military service, however this lead to a lot of collectors taking up contracts to levy the taxes, and then profit from them. Zaccheus, who had many riches, but later sold everything fourfold to poor. 3 The other tax collector being St. Matthew. The difference between these 2 men is that Zaccheus was the Civil tax collector while St. Matthew was the religious tax collector, who was tasked with collecting taxes from every adult Israelite male— one over 13 years old had to pay a half shekel to the Temple, an early form of tithing 4
PART III
Labor in the Ancient time was usually dedicated to either Farming, herding, fishing or being a craftsman/tradesman and being a merchant.
Farmers are the same in the ancient time as it is today so I won’t go into detail on them, however Fishermen, Craftsmen, Merchantmen and Herders are going to be in fuller detail since they had specific jobs as well as being cited more in Scripture.
Fishermen had an honorable calling in life, however it wasn’t so noble, and one thing that stood out amongst the other trades of the time was that they were unusually pious, almost to the point of embarrassment. It was this reason that Christ chose them to lead them into His Earthly ministry. "lay down your nets and I will make you fishers-of-men".
Craftsmen were the next honorable yet not so noble jobs. The 2 differ in that Craftsmen built things with their own hands and tools. St. Joseph’s own trade, that of Carpentry was the one Christ took up. However the word “Carpentry” as it exists in English doesn’t exist in Hebrew or Greek, but instead we get the word “Tekton” in Greek meaning “builder” , in Hebrew we get the word “Naggar” which translates into carpenter, joiner, cabinet maker of all things wood in the rural industry with no specialization in one. In that famous Parable in the Gospel of Matthew, when Christ is talking about having the beam in ones eye5, we see how the tradesmen and carpenters often carried their tools and material through crowded city streets and sometimes village streets.,
Now Onto merchantmen and peddlers. Peddlers simply traveled from village to village heavily laden with wares, peddling their wares to the villagers, selling things almost in time for the major feasts, like Passover.
In the cities on the otherhand, we have merchantmen at bazaars selling wares alongside farmers selling their wares, garments, etc to the urbanites.
PART IV
Towards the end of the book, Rops gets into a strange group known only as the “Essenes”. Not much was known about them until recently (this book was published in 1961 in French, 62 in English, and the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947) , however with the discovery of the Scrolls at the Qumran Caves, a lot more was discovered about these secretive group of Israelites who, instead of following the normal customs of the Israelites of that time, chose to go off into the wilderness and be closer and commune closer to God. In a sense, like monastics. St. John the Baptist apparently came from these groups.
This begs the question, did the ancient Monastics draw their inspiration to go out of the world, and into the wilderness to be closer to God from the Essenes? I am pretty certain for sure they did.
Conclusion
I wrap up this review with a lot missing out, because honestly I don’t think I could get a good descripton of the Israelite social, civil, political and religious life in a short enough review, unlike Rops who wrote about them in detail while not being dense.
I reccommend this book for all Orthodox Christians, inquirers, Catechumens and Catechists, as well as Catholics and all Christians.
10/10
Rops does give into detail how modern day Jews, post Babylonian Talmud ~600AD still hold this claim, and frankly I don’t fully remember how he explained it and I’m not going to further explain it since it’s a tangent not related to this essay
Evangelicals will base their entire theology around this particular verse to be “Born-again”, however clearly in verse 5 we see these lines “verily, unless one is born of water and of the spirit, ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven” which indicates Baptism as a pretext to get into Heaven