Hospitality and Leisure

Please, let a little water be brought, and wash your feet and rest under the tree. I will bring some bread, so that you may refresh yourselves.

Genesis 18:4-5

Terracotta figurine of a musician playing double flute, from Tel Mal?ata, ca. 600 B.C.E. (Courtesy I. Beit-Arieh)

Hospitality - feeding and offering protection to people outside one's family - was a sacred duty, and foot washing was a social necessity since people normally walked barefoot or in open sandals. The footbath in the front left corner of the ground floor is emblematic of the obligations of hospitality. Here visitors would have been invited to wash their feet before being led upstairs to the meal.

Communal festivals provided opportunities for relaxation and sumptuous eating and drinking, necessary counterpoints to the strenuous labor and frugality that characterized most people's lives. On such occasions musical instruments like the double pipe, resting against a pillar upstairs, would have accompanied singing and dancing.

Several board games were played, including a game with twenty squares, first attested nearly two thousand years earlier in Ur. A twenty-square game board has been scratched into a loose stone on the ground floor. The players throw sheep knucklebones (astragali) like dice to determine the movements of the game pieces.

Toys included dolls of straw and wood, which have not survived, and many, though not all, of the ceramic animal figurines found in excavations. Tops could be made by inserting a pointed stick through a pierced disk. The "buzz" was a small pottery disk that spun and whirred on a twisted string looped over the fingers.