Quick questions on Religion, society and economy in the Levant c. 869-586 BC: HSC Ancient History

At the start of the period, Israelite and Judahite religion was not monotheistic. Yahweh was the national god, but he was worshipped alongside the Canaanite storm-and-fertility god Baal and the goddess Asherah, at a Temple in Jerusalem, at royal shrines such as Bethel and Dan, and above all at countless local "high places" (bamot). The most important non-biblical evidence for what ordinary people actually did is epigraphic: at Kuntillet Ajrud, a way-station in the Sinai dated to around 800 BC, painted storage jars carry blessings "by Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah" and "by Yahweh of Teman and his Asherah," and a similar formula appears at Khirbet el-Qom near Hebron. Whether "Asherah" here names a goddess acting as Yahweh's consort or a wooden cult symbol, the pairing shows Yahwism was not narrowly exclusive.

Levantine society was a pyramid. At the top sat the king and the royal household; below them a class of court officials, military officers and, increasingly, large private landholders and merchants; and at the base the great mass of peasant farmers who worked the land, alongside artisans, the landless poor and debt-slaves. The key social DEVELOPMENT of the period is the widening gap between the top and the base, especially in the prosperous eighth century.

The Levantine economy rested on the "Mediterranean triad" of grain, wine and olive oil, and it is oil and wine that leave the clearest evidence. The Samaria ostraca, about one hundred inscribed potsherds from the royal quarter and generally dated to Jeroboam II's reign, record consignments of wine and fine oil from named estates to the capital, evidence of an estate economy feeding a court-centred system of collection. In Judah, the wine industry is visible archaeologically at Gibeon (el-Jib), where James Pritchard excavated dozens of rock-cut wine cellars and inscribed jar handles bearing the town's name (their exact date within the later Iron Age is debated). The scale an oil economy could reach under imperial demand is shown, just outside Israel and Judah, at Philistine Ekron, which in the seventh century became one of the ancient world's largest olive-oil production centres, over a hundred oil installations, under Assyrian hegemony.