Life in Year One
What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine
1 of 1 copy available
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 listener 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.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
April 12, 2010 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781400195886
- File size: 189289 KB
- Duration: 06:34:21
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Arthur Morey delivers this well-done account of the world in which Pontius Pilate, Jesus of Nazareth, Herod, and the Apostles walked, worked, and breathed. Easygoing in pace, Morey's narration is more conversational than dramatic, a style that makes this detailed work accessible and interesting from the beginning. The large number of author's notes adds to the listener's understanding, but they easily could have bogged down the performance of this work. However, Morey skillfully reads the notes and then redirects the listener back to the main text without missing a beat. M.T.F. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine -
January 25, 2010
A society both familiar and strange emerges from this absorbing historical study. Korb (The Faith Between Us
) calls his retrospective “a lively romp through the land of Palestine,” circa 5 B.C.E.–70 C.E., but the picture he draws from archeology, ancient historical accounts, and religious texts is anything but lighthearted. For the average Jew, he contends, life was impoverished, taxes crushing, hygiene abysmal, crime outrageous, rulers—Roman and Jewish—rapacious or deranged, and death gruesome. (He details a typical crucifixion as well as Herod the Great’s fatal case of genital worms.) Confronting these harsh realities, he continues, was an all-encompassing religious culture featuring elaborate codes of purity, a sense of ambient holiness emanating from the Temple in Jerusalem, ancient traditions and dynamic new sects, from Pharisees to insurrectionary Zealots. The author tries to distance himself from historical-Jesus controversies, but can’t help gravitating to them (especially in his extensive footnotes, which are as interesting as the main text); he deploys his sources to speculate plausibly about Jesus the man and examine the appeal of Christianity’s response to contemporary social upheavals. Korb’s vivid, breezy prose makes accessible a mountain of scholarship that illuminates the past.
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