Bread, lentil stew, olive oil and wine, with meat on special days and the occasional fish brought from far away. Archaeology gives us a surprisingly detailed picture of the ancient table. Here is what excavations, bones, seeds and ancient texts tell us.
Bread was the center of the diet
In the Bronze and Iron Ages, bread was the staple food. A person ate roughly 150 to 200 kg of wheat and barley a year, and cereals supplied about half or more of daily calories. Bread was baked almost every day, in small domed clay ovens called tabuns. The ovens were heated with dried dung, and flat dough was pressed against the hot inner walls. Grain was also cooked as porridge, and fermented into beer (see our page on ancient beer and wine).
Lentils, chickpeas and the everyday stew
The main hot meal of most days was a stew of lentils, other legumes and vegetables, eaten with bread. Seeds of lentils, chickpeas, peas, beans and bitter vetch turn up again and again in excavations, from Early Bronze Age Jericho to Iron Age sites in Jordan. The Hebrew word nazid describes this kind of stew, and it is the dish in the biblical story of Jacob and Esau.
Meat was for special occasions
Sheep and goats were the animals most often eaten, but they were valuable for milk, wool and breeding, so meat was a luxury rather than a daily food. Cattle were mostly work animals and were eaten on special occasions. Deer and gazelle were still hunted. Chickens were rare in the Iron Age and became a common farm animal only in the Hellenistic period (4th–2nd centuries BCE). Domestic camels appear in the south from the late 10th century BCE.
Pork: Pigs were rare at most Iron Age Judahite sites, while the Philistine cities on the coast show more pig bones, and even dog bones with butchery marks at Ashkelon. Sites in the northern kingdom of Israel also show pork consumption. Archaeologists stress that the picture varies by site and period, so it is not a simple “Philistines ate pork, Israelites did not” rule.
Fish: an imported luxury
Jerusalem sits far from the sea, yet its Iron Age rubbish heaps contain fish bones. Specialists identified Nile perch from Egypt, sea bream and mullet from the Mediterranean, and catfish from fresh water. The fish probably arrived dried, salted or smoked. The Bible mentions a Fish Gate in Jerusalem, and the book of Nehemiah describes men from Tyre selling fish in the city. Fish trade continued even after Jerusalem was destroyed in 586 BCE.
Olive oil, figs, pomegranates, almonds and honey
Olive oil was both food and a major industry. At Ekron (Tel Miqne), archaeologists found over a hundred olive presses from the 7th century BCE, in what is considered the largest known oil-production center of the ancient world, perhaps making hundreds of tons a year. Even earlier, large-scale oil production was already underway at Philistine Gath in the 11th century BCE.
Fruits and nuts found at ancient sites include figs, pomegranates, grapes, almonds and dates. A jar of dried figs survived at Beth-Shemesh.
The famous “milk and honey” is partly confirmed. At Tel Rehov in the Jordan Valley, archaeologists found about thirty clay beehives from the 10th–9th centuries BCE, the oldest known apiary in the world, which may have produced up to about half a ton of honey a year. The bees appear to belong to an Anatolian subspecies, so they may have been imported. Date and grape syrup were also called “honey” in the Bible.
How food was cooked
| Method | What we know |
|---|---|
| Baking | Tabun ovens, hot coals and griddles. The Bible mentions all three ways of baking bread. |
| Boiling and stewing | Open clay cooking pots over hearths or on stands. Meat, when there was any, was usually boiled with vegetables. |
| Roasting | Preferred for large amounts of meat or a whole animal, over an open flame or on a spit. |
| Frying | Mentioned in biblical texts and possible in Bronze Age pots. Direct archaeological proof is limited, so we treat it as a likely but minor method. |
| Cooking vessels | The Philistines brought a new kind of small cooking jug from the Aegean and introduced the hearth. Later Judahite pots combined both traditions, and some were made in Jerusalem and traded to the Negev. |
Grown locally or imported?
Most staples were local: grain, legumes, olives, grapes, figs, sheep and goats. Judah’s regions even specialized, with olives in the lowlands, vineyards in the hills and dates around the Dead Sea. But the land was also part of a wide trade network:
- Exports: Canaanite jars carried wine and oil to Egypt from the Early Bronze Age. A 14th-century BCE shipwreck at Uluburun off Turkey carried about 150 such jars filled with terebinth resin, and pollen shows it came from Israel.
- Imports: Nile perch from Egypt, Mediterranean fish through Phoenician traders, and exotic plants such as fenugreek and Cyprus vetch found in a 14th-century BCE palace at Beth-Shemesh.
- Long-distance goods: Domestic camels, which appear from the late 10th century BCE, made longer overland trade routes possible, bringing exotic goods within reach of elite tables.
Scholars still debate how large the early wine and oil exports to Egypt really were, and whether production mostly served local markets.
See it in person. You can stand where this food was grown, pressed and eaten: the City of David in Jerusalem, Tel Rehov in the Jordan Valley, Tel Beth-Shemesh in the Judean Shephelah, Tel Miqne (Ekron) and Tel es-Safi (Gath). Contact us to build a private tour around the ancient table, or read about beer and wine in ancient Israel.
Sources and further reading
Koh, Yasur-Landau and Cline, 2014; Bloch et al., 2010 (Tel Rehov beehives); Spiciarich, Lernau, Sapir-Hen, Shalev and Gadot, 2022 (fish in ancient Jerusalem); Perry-Gal et al., 2015 (chickens); Sapir-Hen and Ben-Yosef, 2013 (camels); Manor et al. (Beth-Shemesh palace plants, BASOR 381); Genz, 2003 (cash crops in the Early Bronze Age); Penn Museum, Canaan and Ancient Israel; Vermeersch, “What was on the menu in the land of milk and honey?”, World Archaeology; Maeir, Tell es-Safi/Gath excavation reports.