Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Life in Year One: What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine
    Life in Year One: What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine
    Life in Year One: What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine
    Audiobook6 hours

    Life in Year One: What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine

    Written by Scott Korb

    Narrated by Arthur Morey

    3/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    What was it like to live during the time of Jesus? Where did people live? Who did they marry? What was family life like? And how did people survive?

    These are just some of the questions that Scott Korb answers in this engaging new book, which explores what everyday life entailed two thousand years ago in first-century Palestine, that tumultuous era when the Roman Empire was at its zenith and a new religion-Christianity-was born.

    Culling information from primary sources, scholarly research, and his own travels and observations, Korb explores the nitty-gritty of real life back then-from how people fed, housed, and groomed themselves to how they kept themselves healthy. He guides the contemporary listener through the maze of customs and traditions that dictated life under the numerous groups, tribes, and peoples in the eastern Mediterranean that Rome governed two thousand years ago, and he illuminates the intriguing details of marriage, family life, health, and a host of other aspects of first-century life. The result is a book for everyone, from the armchair traveler to the amateur historian. With surprising revelations about politics and medicine, crime and personal hygiene, this book is smart and accessible popular history at its very best.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateApr 12, 2010
    ISBN9781400185887
    Life in Year One: What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine
    Author

    Scott Korb

    Scott Korb received his undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin and graduate degrees from Union Seminary and Columbia University. He has written for Harper's, Gastronomica, the Revealer, Commonweal, and Killing the Buddha. He lives in Brooklyn. Scott Korb is Professor in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University, USA. He is the associate editor of The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers (University of North Carolina Press, 2008); co-author of The Faith Between Us (Bloomsbury, 2007); and author of Life in Year One: What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine (Riverhead, 2010)

    Related to Life in Year One

    Related audiobooks

    History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Spitting in the Face of Empire: The Millions Interviews Nisi Shawl

      Oct 2, 2017

      I think of speculative fiction as basically taking care of all of our needs when it comes to imagining ourselves, imagining ourselves doing better, imagining ourselves in the future, imagining ourselves in the past. The post Spitting in the Face of

      8 min read

    • Article

      Kanishk Tharoor on Writing Outside of Western Traditions

      Mar 16, 2017

      For years I knew Kanishk Tharoor primarily as the author of thoughtful essays about history, in the broadest sense: not just what happened in the past but also how humans have explored the past, made sense of the past, contested the past. So when I s

      6 min read

    • Article

      Over the Brink of Disaster: The Millions Interviews Elisa Gabbert

      Aug 14, 2020

      The only way to get through time alive is to spend a lot of it pretending that everything’s fine. The post Over the Brink of Disaster: The Millions Interviews Elisa Gabbert appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Translation

      Feb 13, 2019

      AFTER a recent translation conference, a young colleague brought up an interesting question: “I keep hearing people say that they translate from the Spanish, they translate from the French. Why the?” Why indeed. This was asked of a carful of people,

      12 min read

    • Article

      Five Non-Fiction Books for Writers in an Emergency

      Jul 14, 2017

      I read non-fiction books that I thought might indirectly tell me something about fiction, even though they were really about something else. The post Five Non-Fiction Books for Writers in an Emergency appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Apply Aesthetic Pressure to the Language: An Interview with Paul Harding

      Jun 18, 2018

      This interview first appeared in Chinese at the Shanghai Review of Books on June 3, 2018. I spent my first Iowan winter day at home reading Tinkers, the 2010 Pulitzer Fiction Prize winner. Outside, snow began to fall. I poured myself a cup of hot tea

      19 min read

    • Article

      Vagrant & Vulnerable

      Aug 16, 2017

      Vagrant & Vulnerable
      12 min read

    • Article

      Cormac McCarthy Returns to the Kekulé Problem

      Nov 30, 2017

      Robert Musil, in his Man Without Qualities, wrote that a Soul is “That which crawls away and hides whenever someone mentions algebra.” According to his friend, Elias Canetti, Musil “felt at home and seemed natural among scientists,” as distinct from

      7 min read

    • Article

      VAGRANT & VULNERABLE

      Aug 16, 2017

      VAGRANT & VULNERABLE
      11 min read

    • Article

      Fire Season

      Oct 5, 2021

      Fire Season
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Ecstatic Excess of Translation: The Millions Interviews Soje

      May 23, 2022

      "Every translated word I put down is filtered through me, so there’s no word that is not mine. But there’s still this sense of communal ecstasy." The post The Ecstatic Excess of Translation: The Millions Interviews Soje appeared first on The Millions

      10 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Fiction No. 238

      Mar 15, 2018

      The Art of Fiction No. 238
      18 min read

    • Article

      Philologist Irene Vallejo: ‘Alexander The Great’s Library Was The First Step Towards The Internet’

      Nov 5, 2022

      Born in 1979, Irene Vallejo is a Spanish writer, historian and philologist, and a regular columnist in the newspaper El País. She had written several books, including novels, essays and children’s books before she published El infinito en un junco (I

      4 min read

    • Article

      A Book That Changed How I Think

      Oct 25, 2023

      The right book read at the right time can alter not just what you think, but how. The effect can feel like putting on a new set of glasses: Everything remains the same, but you view reality with sudden clarity. It can also be more unsettling—great wr

      6 min read

    • Article

      On The

      Aug 1, 2021

      On The
      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Life in Year One

    3/5

    26 ratings6 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)I first became a fan of Scott Korb because of his remarkable 2008 book The Faith Between Us, co-authored with Peter Bebergal, in which through a series of essays disguised as letters the two not only compare and contrast their differing religious beliefs (Catholicism and Judaism), but also what it's like to be intensely religious in the first place within their circles of mostly atheistic, arts-friendly intellectuals; and now Korb has another nonfiction book out, the much more straightforward Life in Year One, which presents in a series of systematic chapters exactly what the latest theories are regarding what actual day-to-day life was like for the people of the Middle East during the years that Jesus was literally alive (and by extension the entire first century of the Christian Era). As such, then, Korb inventively combines anthropology, sociology, history, literature and theology to present as all-encompassing a look at the first century AD as possible, offering up mostly things you would guess about these times anyway (essentially, that life was generally much shorter and more brutish than now), but also uncovering all kinds of interesting facts that will come as a surprise to most (such as just how many different sects of Judaism actually existed between 1 and 100 AD, Christians being merely one of them, and how little these groups generally got along with each other), and with Korb wisely avoiding the "bloated NPR-bait" trap of so many of these books by turning in a tight, always interesting 200-page manuscript for his own. A brisk and fascinating read, you certainly do not need to be religious yourself to get a lot of enjoyment out of Life in Year One, and it comes recommended to all who like their airport and beach titles to be more studious than trashy in nature.Out of 10: 9.0
    • 3/5
      Many who read the Bible, use the New Testament to define contemporary behavior. However, one can not truly understand the New Testament without first understanding what life in first century Palestine. The author taps on a number of scholarly sources to address money, life in the home, meals, bathing and health, its honor-shame society, religion, war and death. Although this book is scholarly, it is readable and should be a companion piece to any serious study of the New Testament.
    • 3/5
      Fairly interesting (and sometimes disturbing) about every day life in Israel around the time of Jesus' life. Though it claims not to be about Jesus, it references the gospel stories (Gnostic and traditional) often to cite examples of archaeological and historical findings.
    • 4/5
      This was an interesting journey into first-century Palestine, but it wasn't as good as I thought it would be. For someone who keeps insisting the book isn't about Jesus, the author sure talks about Jesus a lot. His numerous footnotes (on practically every page, sometimes more than one) range between fascinating to annoying, and I think the epilogue, about his own 21st-century trip to Bethlehem, was kind of out-of-place. But I did learn a lot, and I liked Korb's translations of King James Bible verses into plain English.
    • 3/5
      Entertaining more than a deep history. Some background on what was going on at that time.
    • 3/5
      Life in Year One as the cover states is about 'What the World Was Like in First Century Palestine'; or what the author has summarized life may have been like since no one actually knows. Throughout the book and even in the footnotes Korb makes sure to remind the reader that this book is not about Jesus. And the one fact we know that was true then as is now...the only thing you can be assured of is death and taxes.The book is a very fast read and is compartmentalized with each chapter covering its on particular subject matter of Roman Palestine from before Christ was born until the destruction of the Second Temple which was at the end of the Jewish War. The subject matter is more of a subjective description of what life was like for those who lived in the region. We are not given what daily life was like for any individual of any class but a mere summary of what the author thinks life for society would have been like.The author stayed with what very little is known of the time and tries not to speculate on most of the missing data that archeologist and historians have not been able to discern. So with the lack of factual data available the chapters are short but written in a way that you will flow through with the obligatory footnotes. As we all know there never was a country known as Palestine. Palestine was the name that Rome gave to this region of the world. So the political region of Palestine was ruled by Rome, the Hellenistic influence of Greece and their language and like most societies the people of this region were patriarchal.The short chapters give us the authors snapshot of what he feels life was like then compared to today, This is accomplished by chapters given us an overview of the political world, money, home life, food, baths, health, respect, religion, warfare, and death. Korb focuses mainly on the life of the lower class and the differences that may have existed out of necessity between an agricultural town, seaside town and a city. The book is almost like an overview of a tour book for someone who may be going to that time and place. In this book the authors strength seems to be in writing about secular subjects. And I am not sure about the mass illiteracy considering the Jewish emphasis in education. Be that as it may I found some interesting parts of the book such as the authors understanding of cleanliness and the difference between what we consider cleanliness and purity. Even though it is short it is obvious that a lot of research from a couple of researchers was used in aiding the author write this volume. I see this as a book you will read once.