From Hunting and Gathering to the Agrotechnology of Biblical Times

By the time the Israelites entered Canaan, all major food plants and animals had been domesticated and the agrotechnology needed to exploit these resources was, for the most part, well developed.

The roots of this agrotechnology, however, lie in the Chalcolithic period and Early Bronze Age and to a lesser degree in the still earlier Neolithic period.

For hundreds of thousands of years before the Pottery Neolithic period (c. 5500–4500 B.C.E.), hunting and gathering were the main human subsistence activities in the Near East. In the Pottery Neolithic period, however, hunting and gathering became much less important than farming and food production. Most of the major plant crops, such as cereals (wheat, barley) and legumes (pea, lentil, bitter vetch and chickpea), were domesticated and farmed for the first time in the Neolithic period. Sheep, goats, pigs and cattle were also raised and exploited by villagers at this time. The famous British archaeologist V. Gordon Childe called this change in subsistence strategies—from hunting and gathering to farming and livestock raising—the “Neolithic Revolution.”