The People Beneath the Patriarchs: Class, Wealth, and the Religion of Ordinary Israelites

If you read through the Hebrew Bible, you may notice something peculiar. Nearly every named character seems to own land, have servants, arrange marriages with significant dowries, or argue with neighbors about property. Slaves and attendants appear in the background, almost as if they are always present but rarely the focus. Many books focus on issues such as inheritance, royal succession, the building of the temple, and laws governing ritual purity, all overseen by a hereditary priesthood. It is understandable, then, that a modern reader might wonder if the religion of ancient Israel was mainly for the wealthy, almost like an exclusive club with prophets keeping watch.

This impression is not entirely wrong, but it is not completely accurate either. The difference between these two views is where much of the most fascinating scholarship of the last fifty years can be found.

Who Was Actually Writing?

The first thing to notice is who was holding the pen. The Hebrew Bible was not produced by the average Israelite; it was produced by a tiny professional caste. As Karel van der Toorn puts it in his influential study of biblical scribalism, the Hebrew Bible was produced by a largely nonliterate culture in which writing, editing, copying, interpretation, and public reading were the work of a professional elite, and the scribes of ancient Israel are the main figures behind it. He goes further, arguing that the Bible should be understood in very specific historical terms, as the output of the Second Temple scribal workshop active in the period 500–200 BC.

This was not a culture in which the average shepherd could pick up a stylus and contribute a chapter. Estimates vary, but literacy rates in the ancient Near East, including Israel, were extremely low, between 5 and 15 percent of the total population, with urban centers averaging a bit higher. Konrad Schmid, writing for the Institute for Advanced Study, similarly concludes that literacy was probably an elite phenomenon, and texts were circulated only among these circles, which were centered around the palace and the temple; producing literature was an enterprise mainly restricted to professional scribes, and reading literature was generally limited to the same circles that produced it.

There is some recent pushback against the strictest version of this picture. A 2020 Tel Aviv University study used handwriting analysis on inscriptions from a remote military outpost to argue that literacy was not the exclusive domain of a handful of royal scribes in Jerusalem, and that even the quartermaster from the Tel Arad outpost had the ability to read. Even granting wider literacy than once supposed, however, the people who composed, edited, and curated the canonical text remained a small, urban, temple- and palace-connected group. There is general agreement among scholars that the scribes in ancient Israel and Judah comprised a relatively exclusive group, and while this group was not large in numbers, it was this elite group of literati that was responsible for composing the biblical text and for producing the majority of extant inscriptions.

This has important implications. When the Bible focuses on land, family lines, political struggles, and temple rituals, it is in part because these were the main concerns of the people who wrote it.

The Society Behind the Text

The society in which those scribes were embedded was also stratified, and not in subtle ways. Norman Gottwald, the dean of socio-political readings of the Hebrew Bible, describes it bluntly: the Israelite monarchic experience recounted in the Hebrew Bible is a familiar instance of the many small to mid-size tributary monarchies in Syro-Palestine, and as a tributary monarchy, Israel’s political structures and strategies were remarkably similar to those of other such agrarian states ruled by small elites whose lifeblood was drawn from a peasant population vulnerable to famine, warfare, taxation, and debt. Israelites who imagined themselves as equals under the Mosaic covenant, he adds, were not “citizens” in a constitutional state but “subjects” of a tributary state.

Archaeological evidence supports this view. Avraham Faust’s studies of Iron Age sites show that Israel and Judah in the late Iron Age were highly stratified societies. There were clear upper and lower classes, as seen in the differences in the size and quality of their houses. Faust also points out that, although Israel kept an idea of equality, society during the Monarchy became very unequal, even as people continued to talk about equality as an ideal.

The social structure was fairly clear. At the top were the king and his court, which included wives, concubines, military leaders, and priests. Just below them were officials who depended on the king’s favor. There were also people involved in trade and industry, mostly living in the cities. Most people, however, were ordinary Israelite peasant farmers living in the countryside. The main social base of the kingdom consisted of landowners and peasants. Below them were small landowners and tenant farmers who worked on large estates or royal lands. Many of these tenant farmers may once have been independent peasants who lost their land due to poverty or forced eviction.

This focus on land in the Bible makes sense when we consider the society it describes. Property law wasn’t just a concern for the wealthy. For many, it was the difference between keeping the land passed down from their ancestors and being forced to work for someone else. Gottwald points out that the Israelite system was not very different from other nearby societies. The monarchy and wealthy landowners often took advantage of the peasants, whose hard work supported the entire system. If the peasants had not produced enough, the state would have failed. When prophets speak out against those who “add field to field,’’ they are talking about real problems faced by ordinary people.

It is important to note that not all scholars agree with the strongest version of this class-based view. Some argue that the idea of a conflict between rural and urban groups is overstated, and that while there were inequalities in both early and later Israel, society was not divided into clear classes with class consciousness. Instead, they suggest that relationships between superiors and inferiors were more complex and based on family and household ties. In this ‘patrimonial’ model, society was organized as a series of households, each level building on the one below, from the family to the royal court to the divine. No matter which model you use, though, the main characters in the Bible are much closer to the top of society than to the bottom.

Two Religions, Not One

Here is where things get surprising. Even if the Bible’s authors were elites and the society they wrote about was sharply hierarchical, the religion of ordinary Israelites is now thought to have been a much broader, messier, and more of a domestic phenomenon than the canonical text suggests. The crucial distinction, developed most forcefully by the archaeologist William G. Dever, is between “book religion” and “folk religion.”

Dever’s project, in his widely read Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel aims to reconstruct the practice of religion in ancient Israel from the bottom up, drawing on archaeological excavations that reveal numerous local and family shrines where sacrifices and other rituals were performed, and to write about ordinary people in ancient Israel and their everyday religious lives. His central argument is that, based on archaeological evidence largely dated between the 12th and the 8th centuries BC, this folk religion, with its local altars and cultic objects, amulets and votive offerings, was representative of the outlook of the majority of the population, and that the Jerusalem-centered “book religion” of the Deuteronomist circle set out in the Hebrew Bible was only ever the preserve of an elite, a “largely impractical” religious ideal.

Overall, Dever argues that there wasn’t only one Israelite religion during the Old Testament period. Instead, there were different forms: the “book religion” found in the Old Testament and the “folk religion” practiced by ordinary people. What people actually did in their daily lives often differed greatly from what the prophets and priests said they should do. In fact, much of what counted as real religion for most Israelites was exactly what the biblical writers criticized.

The Household as Sanctuary

For most Israelites, religion did not happen in Jerusalem. It happened at home. A detailed study of the archaeological evidence reveals that Israelite cultic buildings were extremely rare, both in absolute terms and when compared to other ancient Near Eastern societies. Most peasants would have lived their entire lives without entering anything that resembled the Temple in Jerusalem, and most communities had no dedicated cult building at all.

Instead, the main place for religious practice was the home. Archaeologists have found strong evidence that family-based rituals were more important in Israel than once thought. In fact, it is possible that every family took part in religious activities within their own household. These included home rituals, mourning for the dead, and care for ancestors. All of these practices helped strengthen family identity and took place outside of official temples or sanctuaries.

Within the home, women often held religious authority that the Bible rarely mentions. While women were limited in their roles in official temple worship, they played important parts in family rituals, especially those connected to fertility, childbirth, and preparing food. Recent archaeological studies of homes have shown that women acted as the main religious leaders in these household settings. We now know that many Israelite household shrines existed outside the official priestly system described in the Bible.

The gods honored in these homes were more numerous than the Bible suggests. People worshipped Yahweh in various ways, but they also honored other gods such as Baal and Asherah, as well as their ancestors. The many times prophets speak out against “high places,” household idols, and the worship of the Queen of Heaven make more sense when we understand that these practices were common parts of daily religious life rather than rare exceptions.

Even something as ordinary as naming a child was a theological act for the non-literate majority. Family religious beliefs are expressed in the almost 3,000 individual Hebrew personal names recorded in epigraphic sources, which encompass the vast majority of known Hebrew personal names and a substantial sample of the names from surrounding cultures. When a peasant family named a child something like “Yahweh has given” or “Yahweh hears,” they were inscribing their religion onto the next generation in the most enduring medium available to them.

What a Peasant’s Religion Actually Looked Like

When we put all of this together, we see that the religious life of an ordinary Israelite peasant in the eighth century BC was very different from what the book of Leviticus describes. Most religious activities took place at home and followed the rhythms of the farming year. Women commonly led these rituals. People prayed not only to Yahweh but also to other gods and ancestors, whose names we find on figurines and amulets discovered by archaeologists, rather than in the Bible itself.

A typical peasant would have made offerings at home for events such as harvests and childbirth, cared for family graves, and performed memorial rituals. Instead of traveling to Jerusalem, most people visited local holy places or “high places” in the countryside. They took part in seasonal festivals organized by their village and observed practices such as circumcision, the Sabbath, and dietary rules as family traditions long before these were codified in priestly law. Only rarely would someone visit a regional sanctuary or, after centralization, the Temple in Jerusalem. For most, religious life was centered in the home, shaped by farming, and passed down by word of mouth.

We should also remember that the term ‘Judaism’ does not really fit most of this period. Only with the rise of the rabbis does it make sense to talk about Judaism as a single religion. Before that, there were many different “Judah-isms,” or local forms of practice. What we call “early Judaism” was actually a mix of customs that varied by class, region, gender, and time. The Bible mostly preserves the version practiced by the elite in Jerusalem, especially the priests and prophets.

Conclusion

The Bible reflects the perspective of the upper classes, because the people who wrote and preserved it were themselves part of that group. Their society was highly unequal, and most of the main characters in the stories came from the top levels. Land disputes were very important to everyone, not just the wealthy. For a peasant, the difference between owning a small piece of land and losing it, ending up as a tenant or in debt slavery, could come down to just one bad harvest.

However, the religion practiced by most Israelites was much more down-to-earth and centered on the home. For example, a woman caring for a small clay figurine at her hearth, or naming her child after a god she would never see in a temple, was just as much a part of Israelite religion as the priest serving in Jerusalem. In fact, she may have been more typical. The Bible, in many ways, records a long debate between these two religious worlds, but it mostly tells the story from the perspective of the elite.