Jim
You refer to the "luxuriant Aijalon" many times the reason why Abraham would
have supposedly chosen to live there versus
"modest" Hebron.
One brief recap of human settlement patterns in Palestine is in order.
You should read " The Geography of the Bible" by Denis Baly"
According to Mr Baly:
" early inhabitants avoided the forests and marshes and confined,
therefore, to the Southern Coast Plains and the foothills. They avoided the
forests and marshes of Sharon, the forests of Ephraim and Judah and the swampy
lowland of Esdraelon."
The reason is , forests take a lot of work to clear if you hadn't noticed.
Says Baly:
"Even in prosperity the villages kept to the foothills and houses were never
built upon cultivable land."
There are several reasons people in the Levant settled first along the
central ridge.
1. Defense. A village is defenseless at the bottom of a valley. So is a
shepherd. Like everyone else, Abraham would have
kept to the ridges and moutain sides for safety.
2. Water. Most conveniently a line of springs ran along the central ridge
from about Shechem to a point south of Hebron and
the people were smart enough to build their villages on them.
3. Open land. The hills were less densely forested than the valleys and
Shephela, yet they were fertile. The earliest civilizations always
inhabited hillsides first because of the difficulty, and
danger...remember, this is a land teeming with lions, aurochs
and bears, in clearing dense forests .
If you wanted to venture down the hill with an axe to clear land you
weren't likely to have a lot of company...
This is true even for US settlement patterns from the 1600's to the
1800's. Scottish Highlanders penetrated the dense forests of Kentucky
primarily out of a desire to get away from the tax on moonshine imposed by
President Washington. Now they had the proper
motivation....
The Aijalon may have been rich and lush, but it was also densely covered by
forests, it wasn't the wide open space we see today.
Abraham would have had to clear the land he wanted...any land already
cleared was obviously owned by someone else.
Nor would he had lived on the valley floor, no one did. This would have
left him on a ridge as before.
Yes, northern Canaan had denser forests than the south, as well as a good
deal of maquis....and that was the problem.
Too much work...and much more dangerous. Bandits, marauders, and all
manner of hooligans lived in those dark forests and they
do many such areas around the word...ever heard of the "Valley of the Bandits"
just north of Bethel?
Mt Carmel was famous as a hide out for murderers and thieves.
The pollen in soil cores show the northern forests, by and large, weren't
cut down on a large scale by the Hebrews. Massive
deforestation took place much later.
Rob Acosta
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