CITIES OF FARMERS

Modern agrarians seek to “re-member” the land, but they cannot afford to forget the city, with half the world's population now living in cities. Certainly North Americans cannot do so, since four out of five of us (including myself) reside in metropolitan areas. Even with in the confines of the much less deeply urbanized world of the biblical writers, the city is never long out of sight. For Israelites, as for virtually all other residents of the ancient Near East (except perhaps the most remote desert dwellers), the existence of cities was a fact already established for millennia. Scholars often cite the biblical suspicion of cities, and there is some truth to that. No city has an entirely positive reputation among the biblical writers; no capital city, including Jerusalem, escapes prophetic denunciation and predictions of doom. It is telling that according to the account of the Israelites' entry into Canaan, they were content to burn Jericho, the world's oldest continually inhabited city, rather than take it over for themselves.