The assumption has been that when biblical kings fought, productivity would suffer. What do the sheep say?
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The assumption has been that when biblical kings fought, productivity would suffer. What do the sheep say?
09:00 AM • April 25 2026 IDT
The 10th to the eighth centuries B.C.E. were a bloody time in the Southern Levant following the Late Bronze Age collapse in the 12th century B.C.E. In Anatolia, the Hittite empire was destroyed; the Egyptian empire was beaten back from the Levant to the Nile; and in the Levant, the great Canaanite city-states crumbled and the people went back to the land.
Where a void develops, a new power rushes in. It was also a time marked by the Sea Peoples sailing out of the Aegean and raiding Egypt and the other lands across the sea (us!) and the Arameans rising and spreading from Mesopotamia.
Thus in the late 12th century B.C.E. the Kingdom of Aram-Damascus would emerge in what are today Syria and Iraq. South of it, the Kingdom of Israel would arise, in about the 11th or 10th century B.C.E. Aram-Damascus would reach its peak in the ninth century B.C.E., though clinging on until being crushed by the Neo-Assyrian empire in 732 B.C.E.
Throughout the time in which Aram and Israel lived cheek by jowl, it seems the neighboring kingdoms had mixed feelings about one another, as manifested by the fact that their relations ranged the gamut from pragmatic alliance to ferocious war.
The burning question of the day is how the shepherds felt about all this.
How did ordinary folk in the borderlands between the two kingdoms cope when conflict was exploding? What did pastoralists who just want to graze their bovids do when armies decked out in the latest metal alloys wrestled back and forth? Did the herdsmen keep their herbivores safe closer to home when spears were flying?
It's been widely assumed they did. Finds in Gath published in 2023 corroborates the savagery at which the Bible merely hints – "Then Hazael king of Aram went up, and fought against Gath" – 2 Kings 12:18. Recent excavation has demonstrated that the city had been burned down in one howling conflagration. Doesn't sound like a great time to roam far with the flock, especially not sheep, a delicate animal as domestic herbivores go.
But they didn't, at least in the vicinity of Hazor, an ancient city between Aram and Israel. The herders seem to have mucked on as usual, according to a new paper by Cheryl Makarewicz of the University of Haifa and Kiel University with colleagues, published in April in PLOS One.
How can we know that more than 3,000 years after the event? Based on where animals ate. How do we know where the animals of Hazor ate? By means of isotopic analysis of the teeth of their sheep and goats, which indicated they grazed not only locally around Hazor but also further afield in the Golan Heights. The Hazorites also had cows, but the team didn't check their teeth.
Isotopes are atoms of the same element with different numbers of neutrons – like carbon 12, carbon 13 and carbon 14. Isotope ratios differ based on location, diet and climate, creating a unique "signature" that enables archaeologists to deduce the origins of a cow, a soldier, a shoe or a dagger. Like, an axe found in Sweden from 3,400 years ago turned out to have been made with copper from Cyprus.
In short, isotopic analysis can tell whether goats and sheep of Hazor subsisted solely on local grass or if they exhibit the isotopic signatures of distant vegetation.
Thusly did the team infer that even the time of war defined as Iron Age IIA, the shepherds' land use transcended regional politics.
"Everyday movement of herders and their flocks to distant pastures was not restricted," they conclude. It seems the flare-ups in the Iron Age IIA did not constrain agricultural and pastoralist production, at least in the case of the herders of Hazor.
"The data challenge previous assumptions about ancient borders and show that they were permeable and local in nature," Makarewicz said in a statement. Ordinary people could go about their daily routines.
How far in the Golan did the goats of Hazor ordinarily roam? No answer to that question ensued but more to the point, the research at this point cannot distinguish between two base scenarios.
One is that even during Iron Age IIA, when Aram and Israel did fight, during active conflict the shepherds would stick to home, and would graze in the Golan during hiatuses. Another is that they would wander about as usual and if they saw (or heard) fighting in the Iron Age IIA, they'd walk the other way, but not abandon the land.
But they only roamed north, not south nor west – why? It wasn't Aram stopping them.
Were there even any borders back then? Not like today. Boundaries between territories in antiquity were fluid and depended on the circumstances. But we can talk about borderlands between territories controlled by different cities.
Borderlands between territories in the biblical era could be permeable or non-permeable.
A permeable borderland would involve the elites fighting but hate of a "dangerous other" wouldn't percolate down to the people. The kings could throw armies at one another but life below their lofty level would go on. Shepherds could simply avoid active battlefields, regulated not by far-off grimacing leaders but by intercommunity negotiations and traditional tribal arrangements, the team suggests.
In non-permeable borderlands, the rift stretched from the top of society to the bottom and life at the bottom would have been constrained. The flow of goods between the sides would diminish or disappear. Politics would supersede traditional pasture access agreements. If that had been the case in Hazor in the hostile period, Iron Age IIA, then we wouldn't expect to find the isotopic signature of the Golan in the city's animals. But there they were.
What if an area was one "permeable" and became "non-permeable", if hostilities exploded and trickled down? Could that have been discerned? Theoretically it could, the team claims: They'd likely have observed a shift from sheep husbandry to goats.
Sheep are delicate flowers who need suitable pasture and water while goats are a resilient lot who do not require "high-quality forage" to thrive, and can be easier to handle in a territory under strain. But anyway, what they found isn't that, but that the movement of herds was not restricted even during periods of military tension.
To be clear, the health of the herd mattered to the kings too, who extracted taxes from the people in the form of produce. Jars of grain, wine and oil as well as animals would be forked over to the ruling classes, a practice the elites surely would not willingly forgo just when attacking the neighbors.
Bechar had been surprised by the result that despite struggles between the elites, the shepherds continued migrating with their herds, maintaining almost normal daily lives.
"This indicates local agreements, connections between communities, and collaborations that are not always evident in historical sources, but that allowed ordinary people to make a living even as the political border changed around them," she explained.
Archaeologist Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University, who isn't connected with the research, applauded the new paper and stressed that it shows that kings might exchange blows but the people do what they do. He supports the interpretation that "real" boundaries for the farmers, where they could or could not take their animals, depended less on kings and more on family.
Apparently the shepherds of Hazor only went north; they did not usher their animals south or west, and that is ostensibly strange. Clearly they didn't cavil at feeding the animals in areas where Aramean soldiers might lurk but eschewed lands associated with their own people, the Kingdom of Israel.
"I argue that the most important social structure in antiquity in general, and here specifically, and in the Iron Age even more specifically is the local kinship-based group: the clan, the tribe," Maeir says. "These kingdoms were highly centralized, with a king sitting in a capital and maintaining troops all over to control the kingdom, but in fact in almost all cases, the ancient kingdoms were structures based on a complex patron-client relationship.
"They were like a coalition where a dynamic leader/king was managing a coalition of regional sheikhs," he explains.
The implication is that the Hazorites had kinfolk to the north in Aram, with foraging agreements in place, but the people to the south might be Israelite and not Aramean, but they weren't family.
In other words, maybe the Hazorite shepherds stuck to the Hula Valley where Hazor is, and to the Golan, over generations because of kinship ties and they wouldn't risk losing the herd to strangers, albeit in their own kingdom. Like Bedouin tribes today, they knew where the boundaries between territories are without artificial boundary markers, he suggests.
This study is confined to the domestic animals of Hazor. How widely could these finds apply? Maeir says they saw a similar phenomenon with the animals of biblical Gath, at Tel es-Safi. Sheep and goats were grazing around the city and further afield too.
Of course, loyalty is an ephemeral thing, much like a sheep's well-being. Like today, if the king in the Israelite capital of Samaria was pusillanimous and ineffectual, if his table was mean and bare but in Damascus the Arameans were feasting, the sheikhs might have switched loyalties.
Speaking to reporters in London, Hakan Fidan also said he believed issues related to Iran's nuclear program could be resolved at the next round of talks in Pakistan.
"We stand with those in Iran who stand for freedom. I believe that a day will come when this horrible tyranny will disappear."
The launchers were located in the areas of Deir El Zahrani, Reman, and Al-Saamiya in southern Lebanon, north of the Forward Defense Line established by the IDF.
This spirit of persistence is perhaps why, even with exhausted legs, many are already thinking about next year.