3.  Why was it necessary to build a tower in a Canaanite vineyard, as suggested in Isaiah 5. 2 and Mark 12. 1?

FOOTNOTES: 

[3] Amos 5. 19.

CHAPTER IX

KEEPING HOUSE INSTEAD OF CAMPING OUT

Let us suppose that we have been invited to spend a day or two as guests in the home of one of these Hebrew families who have just settled in Canaan and begun to learn the new arts and customs of the land.  It is one of the poorer homes.  We have slept through the night on our mat spread on the dirt floor of the house, with our cloak over us to keep us warm.  Before daylight we are awakened by the older people moving about in the dim light of the burning wick in the saucer of oil.  Soon everyone is awake.  The mats are rolled up and piled in a corner.  In the early dawn one of the older girls takes a jar on her shoulder and goes for water to the spring, which is outside the village half way up the hill.

If we are expecting to be called to breakfast, we shall be disappointed.  There is no regular morning meal, although everyone helps himself to a bite or two of bread from the bread basket in the corner of the room.  By and by father and the older boys take the ox and the ass from the shed just back of the one-roomed house (we are lucky if the animals were not kept all night in the house itself) and start for the field.  And the women also have their day’s work before them in the house.  First of all, there is a bag of wheat to be ground into flour.

HOME TASKS

In the desert the wheat or barley, when they had it, was merely pounded between two rough stones such as could be picked up anywhere.  The flour, or meal, which was made in this way was not very good.  Here in Canaan, each house had a rude stone hand-mill for grinding grain.  It consists of a large lower stone with a saddle-shaped hollow on the upper side.  The upper stone is somewhat like a large, very heavy rolling pin.  The grain is poured into the hollow and the upper stone is rolled back and forth over it while the flour gradually sifts out over the sides on to the cloth which is spread on the ground underneath the mill.  It is a monotonous task, and very often two people work it together, one feeding in the grain and the other turning the millstone.  This is pleasanter, as each worker is “company” for the other.  Perhaps our hostess will let us roll the millstone for her while she feeds in the grain and sweeps up the flour from the cloth on the ground.

=Baking bread.=—­After the wheat is ground into flour there is bread to be baked.  On the plains they do not use much yeast-bread, for this requires an oven for baking and one cannot carry heavy ovens from camp to camp.  But in Canaan each family has its oven.  It is made of baked clay and looks like a section of tiling standing on end, about two feet high, the clay being about an inch and a half thick.  There is a cover of the same material.  Sometimes the fire is made on the inside and the loaves of dough plastered on the outside.  More often the loaves are placed on a baking tray, let down on the inside of the oven, and the fire built all around and over it outside.