Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

TRADE AND COMMERCE

Trade represents the institutionalized exchange of material goods. Commerce is the sale and purchase of material goods (commodities) in a monetary economy. All commerce involves trade, but not all trade is commercial.

Antiquity and Varieties of Trade

Thousands of years before the Iron Age emergence of the biblical peoples, trade relations brought obsidian (volcanic glass used for blades) to the Levant from sources in the Anatolian highlands. Seashells from distant shores found their way into the remains of pre-Neolithic villages. Even for prehistoric times, archaeologists and Near Eastern historians can paint fairly detailed portraits of trade since trade goods stand out in the archaeological record and often possess chemical or other “fingerprints” that permit their sources to be ascertained. The historic periods offer up documentary evidence of trade. The most extensive documentation derives from Kültepe in northern Iraq (ancient Kārum Kanesh) where an archive containing thousands of tablets details the transactions of an Old Assyrian (20th-18th centuries b.c.e.) merchant colony. The merchants moved tin and textiles from the south and traded these for gold and silver mined in Anatolia. The 14th-century Amarna Letters from Egypt’s New Kingdom depict exchanges between various “heads of state” such as Pharaoh and the king of Cyprus (Alashiya). The OT also makes reference to such diplomatic trade relations — e.g., the relations between Hiram of Tyre and Solomon — as well as displaying the vigorous nature of trade carried on by the cities of Phoenicia, especially Tyre, labeled the “merchant to the peoples” (Heb. rōḵeleṯ hāʾammîm, Ezek. 27:3).

Participants in Western, market-oriented capitalism tend to view trade in purely utilitarian terms, the product of national economic choices made by the exchange participants based upon their own cost-benefit calculus. Trade decisions in the ancient economy, however, included a range of noneconomic parameters. While modern trading relationships are by no means devoid of noneconomic motivations, such parameters had a greater weight in the preindustrial world. Because of this “substantive” understanding of the economy, some ancient historians deny the existence of a price-setting market shaped by supply and demand of trade carried on by private entrepreneurs independent of the dictates of their royal palace. Yet most researchers have concluded that a variety of economic mechanisms promoted ancient trade. For example, literary traditions of Solomon’s trading activities — especially with Sheba — may be taken to represent the gift-giving and sanctions of reciprocal exchange; i.e., trade that is not commercial in nature. Such trade would be typical of palace-oriented exchange in which “gifts” pass between the trading parties at the highest political level. The queen gave (ntn) the king gold, spices, and precious stones. The king reciprocated: he gave (htn) her whatever she desired (ḥpṣ). Here as elsewhere, the verb ḥpṣ appears to be a component of the technical vocabulary of royal trade negotiations (e.g., 1 Kgs. 5:8-10[MT 22-24]). Solomonic importation of horses and chariots may represent the “economizing” exchange of goods in a price-producing market arena, i.e., commercial trade. Unfortunately, the textual tradition locates this hint of enterpreneurial trade within royal initiative — it is the work of “the king’s traders” (1 Kgs. 10:28), and there is no reference to any independent merchants who may have initiated and carried out the horse trade. Here, as elsewhere, the Bible records nothing about the operation of private ventures. This may well be due to its focus on the monarchy rather than the dearth of nonroyal trading operations. All efforts to understand trade in the ancient world encounter the potential bias of documentation.

In an age in which issues of international trade dominate economic forums and the news pulses with reports on tariff negotiations, favored-nation status decisions, and the ebb and flow of the balance of trade, it is well to remember that trade still accounts for but a small percentage of the gross production of an industrial or postindustrial democracy. The fraction of the total economy that produced and consumed trade goods was all the smaller in the ancient agrarian economies of Israel, Judah, and their neighbors. Moreover, ancient trade networks did not encompass huge volumes of everyday goods. Most people remained subsistence farmers and pastoralists: they produced mostly what they consumed and consumed mostly what they produced.

Trade goods consisted predominantly of special goods, “preciosities” consumed by the elite segment of the society, and strategic goods valued by the military and manufacturing interests. In contrast to most everyday commodities, these special goods possessed high value to weight and volume ratios — like computer chips and pharmaceuticals, unlike cement and plastic goods. With its reliance on animal power — donkeys, camels, and ox carts — ancient transportation technology forced severe limits on the range of heavy and/or bulky goods such as ordinary pottery, grain, and building materials. These could only be moved great distance by sea; overland trade in such items was infrequent and costly.

The regular wares of international trade constitute a concise list of goods evidenced by inscriptional, archaeological, and literary data. The reports of Solomon’s international income cite gold, silver, ivory, curious animals (1 Kgs. 10:22), garments, weapons, spices, horses, mules (19:25), almug wood (red sandalwood?; 10:11), chariots (v. 28), and cedar and cypress timber (5:10[24]) as imports to the royal household and building projects. Analogous inventories of precious and strategic goods show up as Assyrian tribute demands such as that imposed upon Hezekiah: gold, silver, gems, ivory-inlaid couches, elephant hides, African blackwood, boxwood, and human beings. From the end of the Iron Age, Neo-Babylonian tablets document commodities imported from the west: copper, iron, tin, dye, blue-purple wool and other fibers, lapis lazuli, alum, assorted honey, white swine, spice, and juniper resin. The Late Bronze Age Amarna Letters discuss the exchange of gold, silver, copper, lapis lazuli, ivory, chariots and horses, linen garments, “sweet oil,” timber for ship construction, and various categories of human beings. Within a few decades of this correspondence, the Mediterranean Sea claimed a transport vessel off the coast of Turkey. The Ulu Burunm shipwreck has offered archaeologists just this kind of cargo: copper and tin ingots, African blackwood, cobalt-blue glass ingots, unworked ivory, amphoras filled with terebinth resin, and storejars stacked with Cypriot pottery.

The role of long-distance trade in the small kingdoms of Israel and Judah began and ended with an urban elite sector, outside of which few items secured by long-distance trade circulated. As the citations above show, trade provided this sector with some necessities, e.g., timber for monumental construction, metals for military hardware. It procured status markers for the elite segment of society, e.g., ivory inlays for furniture (Amos 6:4), jewelry and choice apparel (Isa. 3:18-23), and fine tableware. Perhaps more significantly, trade represented the means by which the small kingdoms on the periphery of Assyrian imperial power could acquire the tribute goods demanded by their suzerain. Long-distance trade also spawned a coterie of trading specialists, e.g., people whom texts of the OT designated as “traders” (ʾanšê hattārîm), “merchants” (rōḵĕlîm), and “the king’s traders” (sōhărê hammeleḵ). A variety of texts also employed the term “Canaanite” as a designation for these specialists in international exchange (e.g., Isa. 23:84; Ezek. 17:4; Hos. 12:7[8]; Prov. 31:24; Zeph. 1:11), though apparently without any connotation of trading as a foreign specialty.

Though trade goods played a limited role outside of the elite social sector, the effects of trading ventures did extend beyond the palace compound. The cost of entering the trading network to garner specialized goods was borne by the primary producers of the ancient economy. Trading possibilities engendered both economic pressures and direct royal initiatives to increase the production of commodities which could most easily be traded. In a land of few natural resources (e.g., no significant deposits of ore), the agricultural sector bore the weight of this demand. Trade “policy” stimulated the production of the most tradable goods, namely olive oil and wine, the products of the field with the greatest value to weight ratios. Perfume (balsam) was another commodity developed, as excavations of the Dead Sea oasis of En-gedi (Tel Goren) have suggested, but its production was limited. During the Late Iron Age, widespread agricultural intensification and specialization converted arable land to orchards and hillsides to terraced slopes. Farming families increasingly produced for market rather than for subsistence, creating an increased state of interdependence. Rising land values and ownership defenses constricted the pastoral segment of the village economy — a family’s “food bank on the hoof” — further escalating the vulnerability of a farming family to economic disaster. Loss of ancestral property and its agglomeration in smaller numbers of hands resulted (Isa. 5:8; Mic. 2:2, 9).

Trends toward increased royal interference with the structure of rural life may have been dampened by income from tolls imposed on the movement of trade across Israel and Judah’s strategically positioned territories. Tolls imposed on caravans bringing the incense, spices, and gold of south Arabia across the desert toward the Mediterranean may have subsidized royal building projects and elite life-styles to a degree. This source of income from trade would have been especially significant during periods when Egypt’s reach into southern Palestine was reduced. The ebb and flow of settlement in the southern Negeb provides a barometer of Judean resources committed to controlling, protecting, and provisioning this trade for a portion of its profits. Transit tolls may have reached 25 percent of the value of this commercial traffic.

Commercialization

Long-distance trade promoted the commercialization of the Israelite and Judean economies, economies in which the products as well as the forces of production — land and labor — themselves were increasingly available for sale and purchase. Instead of producing a diverse repertoire of foodstuffs for their own subsistence and for bartering for needed craft specialties, farming families experienced pressures and incentives to produce commodities for market and for cash sale. Biblical literature and archaeological finds have both manifested the existence of commercial exchange and its growth to prominence in the Late Iron II period. Urban marketplace scenes animated the prophetic collection of Amos (e.g., 8:4-6). Jeremiah refers to the specialized production required in a commercial economy: the prophet acted out destruction at the Potters’ Gate with a purchased jar (Jer. 19:2) and ate bread bought at the bakers’ court (37:21).

Silver was the means of payment for transactions. Omri paid in silver for the property of Shemer (1 Kgs. 16:24), and shekels of silver measured the wild variation of the prices of foodstuffs during times of famine and feast (2 Kgs. 6:25; 7:1). Silver functioned more as a standard of value than a form of payment. Yet the precious metal did change hands during commercial exchanges. Since coins played no part in the economy until the Persian period (late 6th century), silver bits were weighed out on scales. Jer. 32:10 offers a succinct description of a real estate transaction: “I wrote a deed, sealed it, and had it witnessed; and I weighed out the silver on a balance.” Crooked scales and false weight are castigated occasionally in legal (e.g., Lev. 19:36), proverbial (e.g., Prov. 20:23), and prophetic literature (e.g., Hos. 12:7).

Archaeological discoveries have also portrayed a developed commercial economy. Excavators have unearthed standardized weights at numerous Judean sites beginning in the Late Iron II (ca. 700). These dome-shaped limestone weights (merely called “stones” in the Bible) have also been found at Philistine sites, suggesting their regional adoption as weight standards. Many of these weights are inscribed with their values: up to 40 shekels (by weight, with each shekel possessing a mass of 11.33 gm.), with the shekel divided into 24 gerahs. Such weights were used with balances, and bronze scale pans have been discovered at En-gedi and Megiddo. Balances of this type, with pans suspended from a beam supported freely at its center, are widely depicted: from an 18th-Dynasty Egyptian tomb painting — in which merchants in booths hung with a set of scales received wares from the cargoes of ships — to the 9th-century obelisk of Assurnasirpal II — where the scales serve in the reception of tribute. Silver bits — scrap, pieces of jewelry, and free-form ingots — emerge from several hoards such as those found at LB (20th Dynasty) Beth-shean, Iron Age Eshtemoa, and Late Iron En-gedi.

Late Iron Judah offers an abundance of stamp seals. Judeans pressed their seals into soft clay for a variety of administrative and undoubtedly commercial purposes, as Jeremiah’s real estate transaction shows. Dozens of recovered seals clearly disclose their use by royal officials in the administrative bureaucracy: along with personal names, they bear titles such as “minister of the king.” Private seals — seals containing personal or place names and without mention of a particular title — are even more abundant.

Stamp seals served most frequently to seal and certify rolled-up papyrus documents. Archaeologists recover the bullae, lumps of clay with seal impressions on one side and often the impression of the papyrus on the other, signals of the vanished deed or contract itself. Lachish and Jerusalem have produced hoards of bullae which hint at locations serving as repositories for now-vanished records. In the absence of the documents themselves, it is impossible to know what commercial transactions were included in their number. Yet the abundance of personal seals can probably be taken as indicative of the prevalence of commerce or at least the hands-on administration of some sort of commodity-producing economy.

Stamped into the handles of still-wet pottery, seals could also indicate the ownership of a vessel and/or the provenance of its contents. The most prevalent stamp of this type is the lmlk (“belonging to the king” or “royal”) stamp used on the handles of a ca. 45 l. (12 gal.) wine transport jar most likely associated with the royal production and distribution of wine during Hezekiah’s administration of a wartime economy. The jar represents royal involvement in wine production, but monarchical vineyards were not alone in producing wine at this time. Excavators of Gibeon uncovered a massive winery. Inscribed handles were among the artifacts — ca. two dozen inscriptions included the name Gibeon as well as one of several personal names, perhaps vineyard proprietors or managers. These small capacity jugs (ca. 10-15 l. [2.6-4 gal.]) made Gibeon’s wine available for commercial exchange. Operating simultaneously, the vineyards of Gibeon and those of the royal house indicate the complex interaction between entrepreneurial and royal enterprise in Late Iron Judah.

Against these indicators, it is worth noting that archaeological data for commerce are not particularly extensive. The artifacts of commerce are thinly distributed. It is telling that Iron Age city layouts generally did not include an open “square,” like the Greek agora, for the gathering of a regular market (though some scholars have sought to understand the common tripartite building as a marketplace). While a small constellation of biblical texts signals the presence of a multifarious commerce, their number also betrays its relative unimportance, especially, e.g., when biblical legislation is compared to other ancient Near Eastern legal collections. These deficiencies help to gauge the relatively low degree of Israelite and Judean societies’ commercial orientation. Only a very small portion of the total agricultural product moved by means of commercial exchange. Most produce stayed at home or was taken as taxes. The rural zone itself required few products, and thus there was no massive demand emanating from the hinterlands to drive the commercialization of the economy. However far and by whatever agency, royal or private, the commercialization of the ancient Israelite and Judean economies advanced, the ultimate use of commodities stayed within the framework of elite control and consumption.

Bibliography. M. Elat, “The Monarchy and the Development of Trade in Ancient Israel,” in State and Temple Economy in the Ancient Near East, ed. E. Lipinsky (Leuven, 1979), 527-46; J. Holliday, “The Kingdoms of Israel and Judah: Political and Economic Centralization in the Iron IIA-B (ca. 1000-750 b.c.e.),” in The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, ed. T. E. Levy (New York, 1995), 369-98; M. Liverani, “The Collapse of the Near Eastern Regional System at the End of the Bronze Age: The Case of Syria,” in Centre and Periphery in the Ancient World, ed. M. Rowlands, M. Larsen, and K. Kristiansen (Cambridge, 1987), 66-73; D. C. Snell, Life in the Ancient Near East, 3100-332 b.c.e. (New Haven, 1996); N. Yoffee, “The Economy of Ancient Western Asia,” CANE 3:1387-99.

David C. Hopkins

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

TRADE AND COMMERCE

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)