FAMINE

Joyce Voysey

Even before I opened up to Ruth, I remembered that it starts up with a famine, and that famine plays a large part in Ruth’s story. This brought the idea of the Fertile Crescent to mind.  I had placed it somehow in the Lebanon/Israel area, but Wikipedia furnished me with information and a map.  It looks like Israel misses out on most of the fertility, although Israel is such a tiny place to actually show on a big map.

 

Fertile Crescent

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Fertile Crescent is a crescent-shaped region containing the comparatively moist and fertile land of otherwise arid and semi-arid Western Asia, and the Nile Valley and Nile Delta of northeast Africa.  The term was first used by University of Chicago archaeologist James Henry Breasted.  Having originated in the study of ancient history, the concept soon developed and today retains meanings in international geopolitics and diplomatic relations.

In current usage the Fertile Crescent has a minimum extent and a maximum extent.  All definitions include Mesopotamia, the land in and around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.  The major nation in this region is Iraq (formerly Mesopotamia), with small portions of Iran near the Persian Gulf, Kuwait to the south and Turkey in the north.  More typically the Fertile Crescent includes also the Levantine coast of the Mediterranean Sea, with Syria, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon and the West Bank.  Water sources include the Jordan River.

At maximum extent, the Fertile Crescent also may include Egypt and the Nile Valley and Delta within it.  The inner boundary is delimited by the dry climate of the Syrian Desert to the south.  Around the outer boundary are the arid and semi-arid lands of the Caucasus to the North, the Anatolian highlands to the west, and the Sahara Desert to the west.

The region is often called the cradle of civilization; it saw the development of many of the earliest human civilizations.  Some of its technological inventions (but not necessarily first or uniquely) are writing, glass, and the wheel.  The earliest known western civilizations manifestly arose and flourished using the water supplies and agricultural resources available in the Fertile Crescent.  They were not necessarily the first or the only source of civilization, as Breasted believed.  Moreover, plants and animals were not domesticated there but in the surrounding nuclear area, where the original plant species still grow wild. 

 

Then I consulted my Peloubet’s Bible Dictionary for a definition of famine.  Lack of rain is not the only cause of famine; caterpillars, locusts or other insects can destroy things grown in the earth.

 

One remembers reading of the “latter” rain, and that it sometimes failed.  The “early” rain fell in the autumn (late October, November, December) and the latter in the spring (March and maybe some in April).  Peloubet says that from May to October no rain falls, but there can be snow in Jerusalem in the coldest months of January and February.

 

It seems that in Bible times there was plenty of underground water which could be accessed by constructing wells.  Isaac (as we saw in last week’s Lesson) kept busy digging wells and having them destroyed by the Philistines (Gen. 26:15-22).  Wells enter lots of Bible stories: even Jesus sought water from a Samaritan woman at the well, and what inspiration came of that!  See John 4:1-42.

 

Wikipedia on “wells”:

The world's oldest wells, located in Cyprus, date to 7500 BCE.  Two wells from the Neolithic period, around 6500 BCE, have been discovered in Israel.  One is in Atlit, on the northern coast of Israel, and the other is the Jezreel Valley.^[1]

 

An aquifer is an underground layer of water-bearing permeable rock or unconsolidated materials (gravel, sand, or silt) from which groundwater can be extracted using a water well.

 

It occurs to me that I haven’t placed that weather/rainfall.   In general, it refers to Israel, but in the case of Ruth’s story, we are in Bethlehem-Judah (2 hours south of Jerusalem, Peloubet says – 2 hours how?  He doesn’t say.)  And then the introduction to Ruth’s story takes us over to Moab, which is “but a short distance”, but I note that it is across the Dead Sea.  It was a “fertile, highly cultivated country,” and “a land of streams.”

 

I see that Moses died in Moab.

 

“The Moabite Stone” is an interesting read in the Bible Dictionary.