49 of 51 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
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (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.
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26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of my favorite books on first-century culture, March 24, 2010
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.
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19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A lively read, February 18, 2010
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (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.
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