Life in Year One: What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine [Hardcover]

Scott Korb (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 18, 2010

For anyone who's ever pondered what everyday life was like during the time of Jesus comes a lively and illuminating portrait of the nearly unknown world of daily life in first-century Palestine.

What was it like to live during the time of Jesus?

Where did people live?

Who did they marry?

And what was family life like?

How did people survive?

These are just some of the questions that Scott Korb answers in this engaging new book, which explores what everyday life entailed two thousand years ago in first-century Palestine, that tumultuous era when the Roman Empire was at its zenith and a new religion-Christianity-was born.

Culling information from primary sources, scholarly research, and his own travels and observations, Korb explores the nitty-gritty of real life back then-from how people fed, housed, and groomed themselves to how they kept themselves healthy. He guides the contemporary reader through the maze of customs and traditions that dictated life under the numerous groups, tribes, and peoples in the eastern Mediterranean that Rome governed two thousand years ago, and he illuminates the intriguing details of marriage, family life, health, and a host of other aspects of first-century life. The result is a book for everyone, from the armchair traveler to the amateur historian. With surprising revelations about politics and medicine, crime and personal hygiene, this book is smart and accessible popular history at its very best.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A society both familiar and strange emerges from this absorbing historical study. ... Korb's vivid, breezy prose makes accessible a mountain of scholarship that illuminates the past. --Publishers Weekly

Food, homes, politics, medicine, crime, punishment, customs, and staying clean: it's all here in this account of the biblical world from the coauthor of The Faith Between Us. Scholarly research but nonscholarly tone; many readers will like. --Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Expertly researched, beautifully distilled, and filled with wit, [LiYO] is an animated reminder that sometimes the things we think we know best -- our myths, our faiths, our ancestors, even ourselves -- contain the most remarkable surprises. --Jeff Sharlet, New York Times bestselling author of The Family

Life in Year One entertains as it educates, pulling back the veil on a world all the more alluring because it is impossible to know completely. ... Scott Korb reminds us that a history of there and then is always also a story about here and now. --Peter Manseau, author of Vows, Rag and Bone, and Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter

About the Author

Scott Korb is the co-author of The Faith Between Us: A Jew and a Catholic Search for the Meaning of God. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin and graduate degrees from Union Seminary and Columbia University. He has written for Harper's, Gastronomica, the Revealer, and Commonweal. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover (March 18, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594488991
• ISBN-13: 978-1594488993
• Product Dimensions: 5.7 x 0.9 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #620,354 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Scott Korb is the author of the forthcoming "Light Without Fire: The Making of America's First Muslim College" (Beacon Press, 2013). He is a coauthor, with Peter Bebergal, of THE FAITH BETWEEN US and associate editor of the HARRIET JACOBS FAMILY PAPERS, the first and perhaps only papers collection that will ever exist of a woman held in slavery. His latest book is LIFE IN YEAR ONE: WHAT THE WORLD WAS LIKE IN FIRST-CENTURY PALESTINE (Riverhead, March 2010). Scott currently teaches at the New School and New York University. Read his tumblr: LIFEINYEARONE.TUMBLR.COM.

Photographer Photo Credit Name: M. Ryan Purdy, 302

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 56 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A nice place to visit, but I wouldn't like to live there! February 10, 2010

By tachi1 TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

LIFE IN YEAR ONE doesn't purport to be a scholarly book. It's not deep. It doesn't break any new ground. It's written in lay, conversational language and assumes no previous knowledge on the part of the reader. It doesn't pretend to be anything more than an introduction to a fascinating subject and it qualifies often that a lot of what is said (as is usual in archeology) is personal opinion based on limited available evidence with a touch of imagination and a lot of curiosity thrown in.

All this might seem like a turn off but, actually, I found the book fascinating and pleasurable reading. This is the kind of book you want to take on a plane trip, to the doctor's office, anywhere where you want to take your mind off what you're doing and just let time fly.

First, it is not a religious book. Jesus is often mentioned because, since this was his time and place, much of what everyone assumes about this time and place is directly linked to Jesus, so he must be mentioned. But he is mentioned as a someone known to have been there then, and it would be strange if he wasn't sometimes used as a point of reference or contrast. The book begins just before he was born, and lingers for several decades after his death.

My own assumptions about daily life during the lifetime of Christ were based on the biblical narrative. I realized that a much of what I had assumed was, more or less, probable. But there were many aspects of everyday life that I had mentally glamorized (or modernized) beyond what is likely, and had also made assumptions I was not even aware of until they were contrasted with a more likely reality. On the whole, life was less bucolic, less peaceful, more stressful, and more complicated than I would have thought....

Some bits of trivia were a total surprise. I had no idea that the poor lepers that were so shunned in the gospels, the ones who had to leave society and call out that they were unclean, did not have the disease we now know as leprosy. (That disease had not yet made it to Palestine in the first century.) These unfortunates simply had psoriasis, eczema, or a skin fungus. I hadn't fully appreciated the delicate balances that had to be implemented in a deeply religious society with many cultural and ritual traditions that were in sharp contrast with the reality of being ruled by a foreign power that shared none of these. I hadn't realized that reading and writing would be such rare accomplishments, especially outside Jerusalem, where the sons were needed to work the fields and both reading and writing materials were scarce or non-existent.

Slowly, as the era comes into focus, it becomes clear how difficult it would be for a modern person to contemplate living in a town with no roads (just dusty worn paths of varying widths); in homes with thatched roofs and stone walls held together by dung and with windows just below roof level. A place in which bathing was difficult (but getting dusty, dirty, and sweaty was not); in which the everyday smells (and by-products) of animals and other humans could not have been pleasant. The logistics of sanitation and hygiene were challenging.

The author brings the era to life in a casual but observant narrative, combining little and large details (both known and the assumed) together in a primarily entertaining (and secondarily educational) manner. The book reads like a particularly interesting lecture in which the speaker interacts with his audience and goes off-topic. His many footnotes feel like off-the-cuff anecdotes that are not part of the prepared text but are just as fascinating. (Actually, I don't see why they couldn't just be part of the main text). It is a blend of social and political commentary, archeology, and history with a touch of psychology thrown in.

Topics covered include war, money, health, politics, religious practice and differences, cultural and religious tensions, family structure, religion, death, taxes, and many more topics mentioned in detail or in passing. This said, the book is still briefer than I would like. I really wish it had been longer---not necessarily deeper because it would lose its charm---just longer. I would have liked more detail about topics like clothing, education, available technologies (like for cooking, weaving, heating, wine-making, scientific observation, writing, etc.). I would have liked some details on the life of the wealthy and elite (the life of the poor and underprivileged was well-covered).

I thoroughly enjoyed this insight to life and living in the first century but, with all our challenges, I'm very grateful to live in the twenty-first--especially if I should get eczema. Read more ›

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars One of my favorite books on first-century culture March 24, 2010

By Timothy Gossett

Format:Hardcover

Life in Year One is, the author goes to pains to point out, not a book about Jesus. Instead, it seeks to place 21st-century persons in Palestine up until about the year 70 CE. Many books have done this before, of course. Some seek to do it visually, like the superb The HarperCollins Visual Guide to the New Testament: What Archaeology Reveals about the First Christians. Others, like Crossan and Reed's Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts, are far more in-depth, too much so in fact for most average readers. In between these two is Scott Korb's new book, which paints word pictures in spritely, rich, and even humorous language, encouraging us to make he connections (and more often, see the disconnect) between that world and ours.

Life in Year One explores the life of persons in the first century through ten broad topics: an overview of the world, money, home, food, baths, health, respect, religion, war, and death. Each chapter provides enough detail to enable the reader to grasp the tremendous distance between our time and theirs, yet it largely avoids scholarly arguments and archaeological jargon that could cause the reader to lose interest. Korb does expand upon the text in fairly extensive footnotes, which are often more enjoyable than the rest of the text. (Take for example, this nugget in the chapter on food, where Korb explores the shift to a more centralized, agribusiness-like food economy: "What today we call Cargill and Monsanto and Perdue was, in the first century, known by the brand name Antipas. Or a bigger brand name still--Caesar....") Korb relies on a wide range of scholarly opinion, but largely seems most convinced by the more progressive interpretations of that ancient culture.

I have rarely felt so engaged when reading about this period. The chapter on money, for example, (a topic I've read a LOT about since my hobby is collecting first century coinage) was the single-best treatment of this subject I've come across, but every chapter expanded my sense of perspective and ability to put the biblical texts in a wider context. You'll end each chapter very thankful you don't live in that time and place (especially after reading his chapter on health. Yikes!) I think it would be a lot of fun to read this book with a group, especially if the leader could pull in relevant biblical texts to illuminate and illustrate the book's text. Read more ›

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A lively read February 18, 2010

By CGScammell TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

This was a good read: highly informative and at times quite amusing.

Although Scott Korb reveals nothing new of the biblical era, his writing style is quick to absorb and quite humorous at times. I finished this short book in one morning.

The chapters are short and focus on one topic at a time: From Roman Palestine to money, homes and houses, food, baths, health, respect, religion, warfare and death, each chapter is filled with footnoted additives, comedic relief and contradictory evidence. We learn that the people in Year One were ruled by Rome, influenced by the Greeks, and very, very patriarchial. They lived in cow-dung covered homes, ate mostly bread, avoided the pig, used bathing water frugally, avoided soap and kept clean mostly as a ritual rather than for hygiene's sake. And despite the many differences between Jews and Roman, what kept the Jews strong was their local pride in their uniqueness. And all this before Jesus' time! The imagery alone is quite entertaining.

What makes this book interesting is that there is no proselyzing here. Korb writes from a historian or researcher's point of view and does offer some contradictions to biblical history of the region. He warns readers at the start that "this is no book about Jesus!" People who are looking for scripture and holy sacrament had better read elsewhere.

Perhaps there are books out there that cover each of the above-mentioned topics in a more scholarly (and boring) manner, but for someone who wants a good image of what life was like for the commonman of the time, this is a good read.