2 Women Grinding Grain

Matthew 24:41-42: Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left. Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come.

Luke 6:1-5:
One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and his disciples began to pick some heads of grain, rub them in their hands and eat the kernels.

Some of the Pharisees asked, "Why are you doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?"

Jesus answered them, "Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God, and taking the consecrated bread, he ate what is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions." Then Jesus said to them, "The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath."

Preparing a Meal
I never had a suitable appreciation for the work needed to prepare a meal in antiquity. In order to make bread and any other grain-based food, such as oatmeal, grain needed to be ground for approximately four hours a day. This was no easy task, and according to rabbinic law the first task a woman could hand over to a slave was grinding grain.

Mills were made of stone, and of great variety. At its most basic, a large stone was placed on top of another. Kernels of grain were placed in between them, and women rotated the top stone until the hard coatings of the kernels were ground off.

This was often accomplished by two women sitting opposite each other, one pushing and pulling on the right and the other on the left, which gives added meaning to Jesus’ words regarding the Last Day, quoted above. "...one will be taken, and the other left." There was no task more integrated; when one woman disappeared, the other one couldn't finish without changing her pattern.

It also adds punch to the second passage quoted above; the disciples must've been starving to eat those kernels. "Rubbing them in their hands" would have required a lot of work to make them eatable, and a few kernels of grain isn't going to help you out much. Furthermore, it was hard work to remove the outer shell, and Jews took the Sabbath very seriously. For the disciples to break the Sabbath with the Pharisees nearby took a lot of hunger!

Their desperation explains the next analogy: David and his companions were more than 'hungry,' when they ate the consecrated bread, allocated to priests. They had to eat! And such must have been the state of the disciples.

Breakfast was often barley porridge, which required the steps mentioned above for wheat as well as soaking the kernels overnight, drying them and roasting them until the seed coatings were loose enough to pound out the grain.

Other Cooking
Olive oil required, after the men picked them from the tree, cleaning them in hot water, removing the pits, trampling them to remove the oil, crushing the remaining pulp to get out extra oil, and bottling it. The bitter part of the olive, amurca, was turned into a pesticide and furniture polish, among other things.

Wine – and most grapes were turned into wine or raisins - required similar work. While these were annual processes, it was common for something to need to be done. Homes in fishing villages would not have had space for much of this, and I would think that they probably had village groves and vineyards.

Vinegar was made, butter churned, and salt ground. Vegetables and herbs, though sold at the market, were mostly grown at home, which required planting the seeds, weeding the garden, picking the vegetables, etc. Fruit was often dried, frequently on the roof, or, presumably, turned into jam or preserves. Many families kept bees for honey, and the comb had to be removed and cleaned, and the honey processed.

Preserved fish, purchased in areas outside of the immediate vicinity of the Sea of Galilee or other body of water, had to be soaked in water, often two or three times, until enough salt was removed to eat them. The salt that soaked off was probably sifted out of the water and stored for future use; salt plates were used as fuel for the fire. The children’s fish, and there were always children around, had to be de-boned and quartered – no buying filets.

Fuel for the oven had to be cut and stored (wood, husks, grass, etc.) or, in the case of dung, gathered up and salted. Soot from the oven had to be cleaned off the walls. Even some of the items used for cooking were homemade: many things were stored in baskets, many of which were probably woven at home, and additional items such as sieves were made of basketry. Some serving items were probably carved at home from wood cut on the farm.

All that on top of watching the children, cleaning, laundry, and a variety of other tasks! I used to think busyness was a modern phenomenon, but it sounds unlikely.

Ovens were cheap and some families had two, one in the courtyard and one in the common room. Kitchens weren’t used much in the first century, and the common room served as a place for children to play, food to be cooked and eaten, construction work to be done, etc. Weather around the Sea of Galilee is fairly mild, and these things were probably done in the courtyard for most of the year. It was also very humid, and in a place and time with high humidity and no air conditioning, the out-of-doors must have been preferable for both cooking and other activities during the hot summer months. The families sometimes ate on the roofs, which were flat and suitable places to chat, study Torah and dry fruit.