by Bill Myers
Want a shower? Sure, stand in the courtyard and pour water on yourself. Yup, that will work.
Toilets? Oh right, toilets. Your bathroom was a stinking pit out in the courtyard. It buzzed so loud with flies it sounded like a beehive. You really had to keep the lid on that sucker.
FUN FACT:
Toilet paper didn’t exist in ancient Israel. It didn’t even exist in America until Joseph Gayetty invented it in 1857. Before then, people wiped with pages from mail order catalogs. Of course, they didn’t have catalogs in ancient Israel, so, um, what did they use? Whatever they could find: their bare left hand, rags, wool, stones, and sticks. You name it. Most people preferred leaves. Some of the farm trees must’ve been almost leafless.
Oodles of Kids
Houses were small, but the more kids your mom had, the more blessed she felt she was. If she had ten boys running around, she thought that was just great. A guy named Heman had fourteen sons and three daughters (1 Chronicles 25:5). Some he-man, huh? You’re wondering why so many kids, right? Just wait. We’ll talk about chores soon enough.
Leaky Roofs
Roofs on the mud houses were flat. Branches or thorn bushes were laid on wood rafters, and clay was packed on top of that. These roofs were strong enough to walk on, but if you jumped on them, you’d knock holes in them. Can’t you just hear Jewish moms telling their kids, “Joab! How many times must I tell you? Do not jump on the roof!”
Roofs weren’t hard to tear apart either. Once Jesus was inside a crowded house, and four guys wanted him to heal their sick friend. When couldn’t get to him, they ripped a big hole in the roof and lowered their buddy down to Jesus with ropes (Mark 2:1 – 4).
On hot summer nights the whole family slept up on the roof because the breeze made it cooler. People went up there to pray too. They even stored food there. Some rooftops were so cluttered with stuff that you could hide up there. Play hide-and-seek and you just know somebody’s on the roof.
One problem was that when it rained during winter, the clay on the roof would wash away, and people in the house below got a shower! Leaky roofs had to be fixed all the time. And after all that rain, grass even grew on the rooftops!
Tunics and Cloaks
Jewish men wore a light robe called a tunic. It was made out of wool or linen and reached down to the ankles. When you were working — which was usually — you tucked it up into your belt. Some guys said, “Aw! Forget this!” and just wore short tunics all the time.
Men wore a cloak over the tunic. The cloak was made of thick wool, and it was like a blanket, so on hot days you slung it over your shoulder. When you sat down in the dirt, you folded it and used it as a rug. When you went to sleep, the dirty rug became your blanket.
When the prophet Elijah was caught up to heaven in a whirlwind, his cloak blew off — not surprising with all that wind. When it hit the ground, his buddy, Elisha, picked it up and wore it. He needed it! After all, he’d just finished tearing his own clothes apart (2 Kings 2:11 – 13).
Designer Duds and Underpants
Some people think that Jesus wore expensive designer clothes because his tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom (John 19:23). Nuh-uh. Many tunics from Galilee were woven in one piece. It was standard issue. That was how they made tunics in Galilee.
Jesus was no fashion show. After all, he was the one who said, “Do not worry … about your body, what you will wear” (Matthew 6:25). The rich Pharisees? Yeah, now these guys were the ones wearing fancy clothes.
By the way, the Bible calls Jesus’ tunic his “undergarment.” This is not talking about his underwear. People back then wore loincloths for underpants. Undergarment just means the tunic under his cloak. You know, like a T-shirt under a sweater.
Buying Stuff
Most boys get bored out of their skulls when Mom drags them to the mall to buy them clothes. Be thankful you didn’t go out shopping in Bible times. Back then there were no price tags, so Mom might stand there arguing with a merchant over the price for an hour . They’d argue, haggle, and even yell at each other — and enjoy every minute of it! Ain’t it great to live in the day of price tags?
Clean Clothes, Anyone?
Farmers weren’t big on washing clothes because it was hard work to wash them by hand. Besides, it wore clothes out if you whacked them against the rocks too much. (Yep! That’s how Moms washed clothes. Smack! Whack! Splak!) Anyway, the day after Mom washed your clothes, they started getting dirty again. And it’s not like you had several sets of clothing. You wore the same tunic day after day and even slept in it.
Bedtime! What Fun!
There were no beds as we know them. You lay on a straw mat right on the dirt floor and covered yourself with your cloak. Most families slept on the floor together, so if you had to get up in the middle of the night for any reason, you ended up stepping on everyone else.
Israelites considered dogs so disgusting they wouldn’t even own one, let alone keep one in the house. But farm animals? Sure. Every night Dad brought the milk goat into the house to sleep. (You’re asking why , right? So no one stole it. Plus, the extra body heat kept the house warm.)
Apart from the smell, animals don’t care where they poop. Goats will happily drop loads of dung balls just about anywhere. If you were an Israelite boy, guess whose job it would be to clean out the poop in the morning?
Just so this doesn’t totally gross you out, the family slept on a floor eighteen inches higher than where the animals slept. This prevented poop balls from rolling across the floor to your sleeping mat. Makes a guy look forward to summer nights when you could sleep on the roof, huh?
Ash Heaps and Trash
Ovens were made of clay or stone and were usually outside in the courtyard. After all, your mom wouldn’t want the house to smell like smoke, right? But when rainy season came, you had to cook indoors. Then things got smoky. Eventually the smoke escaped out a window.
17 Household trash? When the oven got full of ashes, Mom scraped them out and dumped them in a pile behind the house, along with broken pottery. When poor Job ended up covered with pus-filled boils, he went out behind his house, “took a piece of broken pottery and scraped himself with it as he sat among the ashes” (Job 2:8).
WHAT TO DO WITH THE DOO?
You have four guesses as to what happened to all the goat, donkey, sheep, and ox poo.
It was
(a) packed around the fruit trees
(b) dumped in a big ol’ heap in the yard
(c) dried and used as fuel
(d) dumped into the toilet with the human excrement
If you guessed (a), you are so right! Jesus talked about a farmer fertilizing a fig tree. In the original Greek, fertilize means “to cast dung” (Luke 13:8). Wow! They threw the stuff? One of the biggest blessings farmers wanted was to sit peacefully under a fig tree and think (Micah 4:4). You’d wanna pick a tree that hadn’t been dunged recently.
If you guessed (b), you are also right! Dung ended up in the dunghill. These days the polite term is manure pile. The Israelites sometimes beefed up their valuable fertilizer by trampling straw in it with their feet. In Isaiah 25:10 – 11, God says the Moabites would “spread out their hands in it, as a swimmer spreads out his hands to swim.” Hey! Wanna be on the Moabite swim team in the Bronze Age Olympics?
If you guessed (c), the answer is also correct. When God told Ezekiel to burn human poop and Ezekiel got grossed out, God told him he could cook his food over flaming cow manure instead (Ezekiel 4:15).
The only wrong answer in this quiz was (d). Toss animal dung down the toilet with human waste. C’mon! That’s wasteful!
GET SMARTER
The Hebrew word Madmenah means “Dunghill,” and it was similiar to the names of two Israelite towns named Madmannah (See Joshua 15:31 and Isaiah 10:31). Some Bible scholars say these were fertilizer-producing centers. You’d think that only a madman would live in Madmannah, but hey, they had loads of dung. Why throw the stuff away when you can sell it?
On the other hand, smart Israelites found work elsewhere. Only the most desperate people took such filthy jobs. The Bible says God lifts the needy “out of the dunghill” (Psalm 113:7, KJV). It was the kind of job you prayed God would get you out of.
Don’t want to live in Manure Pile? Hey, like your parents say, if you want a good job when you grow up, study hard now. Sometimes school is boring, but it’s even more boring to have a dead-end job and low wages for the rest of your life.
The Malls of Hazor
There were no shopping malls in Bible times, but there were shops. Every so often there was a city, and cities had market streets. Spend a day in town and, wow, you got to see shops of carpenters, mat weavers, potters, bakers, cheese makers, goldsmiths, or farmers selling vegetables. Exciting, huh?
Of course, cities back then were pretty small. Little ones covered only an acre or two and had a few hundred people. (That’s a city ? Yup.) A world-class city like Hazor spread over 175 acres and had a population of 40,000. Ho! Monster metropolis or what?
Back then, cities usually sat on a hill and had high stone walls. Being on a hill was a must. You never could tell when an enemy army might want to try attacking you. (Yeah, to rob your fancy “mall.”)
Sometimes the markets had more than just cheese and bread. Sometimes there was stuff from other countries. Israel was on the caravan roads between Syria and Egypt, and camels constantly plodded through, loaded with spices and silk and perfume and all kinds of high-priced goodies.
When is Garbage Day?
There are, um, some things about ancient cities you should know. Like, they were usually crowded and had narrow streets and alleys zigzagging all over the place. Worse yet, there was no garbage collection. It was like a permanent New York City garbage strike. So where did rubbish end up? If it was small stuff, it got chucked into the alleys. Folks weren’t particular back then and there weren’t laws against littering. But if, say, your goat died, it’s not like you could get away with dumping it in the street. You had to haul that away.
The Local Dump
Jerusalem had a huge, open, stinky garbage dump just outside the city in the Valley of Hinnom (Gehenna). All day and all night long, fires burned the garbage, popping and sizzling and sending up foul-smelling smoke. Usually the wind carried the smoke away, but sometimes it blew back toward the city.
The Gehenna Dump was just swarming with flies, and fly maggots squirmed in and out of rotting food and oozing dead things and dung. The Gehenna Dump was so bad that Jesus used it to describe what hell was like — a place where “their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:47 – 48).
NOT-SO-FUN FACT:
Sometimes enemy armies surrounded ancient cities and besieged them for years, not letting anyone in or out. When the people inside the city ran out of food and water, they might be forced to eat their own dung and drink their own urine.
(See Isaiah 36:12.)
The Dung Gate
The dump was just outside the Dung Gate , and if that doesn’t give you an idea of the kind of make-you-gag garbage that was dragged through it, nothing will. Rubbish, garbage, carcasses, dung, you name it.
You gotta wonder what Nehemiah was thinking when he sent the choir out singing. He said, “I also assigned two large choirs to give thanks. One was to proceed on top of the wall to the right, toward the Dung Gate” (Nehemiah 12:31). Well, they had just rebuilt the Dung Gate, so it didn’t stink so badly yet. Otherwise the singers might’ve gagged and fallen off the wall.
Sewage in the City
You won’t find it in the New International Version — the translators were too polite — but the King James Version of the Bible talks six times about men urinating against the city walls (1 Kings 14:10). You just gotta know that with thousands of men and boys watering the walls every day—get a few sunny days in a row and, Whoooeeee! — them walls would reek!
Back then, most Israelite cities had no sewage systems—just open gutters that ran along alleys. These yellow streams trickled down the streets. Israel was dry and dusty, so when Isaiah 10:6 talks about “mud in the streets,” it’s not necessarily talking about rain mixing with dust to make this (ahem) “mud.”
And were you wondering where city folks did “number two”? They had toilets in their courtyards. If you wonder what on earth they did when their toilets got full, well, we won’t even go there.
PUBLIC LATRINES
Derek Dundee of Mallabassa, Missouri asks: “Did Israelite men only pee on walls? That’s gross!” No, Derek, if a building was torn down, guys would urinate among the rubble too. After King Jehu demolished the temple of Baal, the Israelites used it as a public latrine (urinal) for hundreds of years (2 Kings 10:27). Must’ve been real stinky by that time, ’cause, like, no one ever cleaned it!
Street Cleaners
There were no garbage men or street cleaners in ancient Israel — not human at least. But ever see a nature show where buzzards are gulping down a rotten corpse and the narrator says, “The vulture is the garbage collector of Africa”? And jackals are such good scavengers that they’re called “street cleaners” in many African cities.
Back in Israel, the cleaning crews were canines. The dogs of the day looked like dirty coyotes. They prowled around the cities, half wild, as they ate garbage. As far as the dogs were concerned, there wasn’t enough garbage, and they often wandered around howling and looking for food. It’s a good thing they did clean the streets! That’s where little boys and girls played (Zechariah 8:5)!
GET STRONGER
Does your bedroom look like some alley in ancient Israel? If there are dirty duds ditched on the floor and discolored underpants decorating the doorknobs, you need to do some serious “street cleaning.” (Don’t count on any wild dogs doing the job for you.)
Worse yet, does your room look like the Jerusalem dump, with mold growing on plates of abandoned spaghetti under your bed, and maggots crawling through half-eaten peaches? Listen, an important part of being a man is keeping things neat. God told King Hezekiah that the most important job he had to do before he died was to put his house in order (2 Kings 20:1). So why not start with your heart and then tackle your room?
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