June for us is a busy month. Hubby is busy finishing up his English classes. While I scurry about getting ready for our summer travels, as we usually visit and catch up with friends and churches. We’ll be traveling quite a bit this summer too, as usual. And I really wish you could join us!
Most service-related occupations were carried out in the marketplace. An important place in the life of Oriental communities for conducting business, and more. As we learned in other posts of this series, the marketplace also served as a gathering place, a type of employment office, and even as a preliminary courthouse.
As we have already learned in this series, the occupations and tasks carried out by men and women were many and varied. And we also learned that because many trades were a mix of cottage industry and manufacturing on a larger scale, the home and field section tends to cross over with jobs in the marketplace.
Work and vocation, as instituted by God, are good. Scripture opens with God at work, creating the entire world and giving man and woman their first occupations: farming and homemaking. He set them to care for the earth, work for their own living, and make or grow what they needed.
Shepherding is one of man’s oldest occupations, second only to gardening and farming. Abel was the first in the Bible to keep sheep. But the first mention of a nomadic herdsman came later in Genesis chapter 4 with Jabal: the father of those who live in tents and have lifestock. Afterward, nomadic stock keeping quickly became a common occupation.
Pagan cultures in Biblical times devalued women, granting them little more dignity than animals. Even Greek philosophers, with their great learning, regarded them as inferior creatures by nature. Aristotle once said, “Woman may be said to be an inferior to man.”
Signora Sheila