What is it like to work with the Idumean corpus up close? Are there particular documents that have stayed with you or sparked unexpected questions in your research?
I had the chance to develop a strong familiarity with the Idumean corpus while creating the database. And yet I had to reread everything, and I still discovered new things. There are so many texts, so much information. Each time you can find a new understanding or rediscover something in the data. We are constantly evolving, reading new things, and that changes the way we approach texts. I feel like the Idumean corpus is my friend now. I’m more familiar with it, but at the same time, I’m like feeling that I need to crack the code as the documentation remains elusive in certain ways. I still ask myself: How can I make it speak? How can I make more sense of it?
This project is the perfect opportunity to continue to study. Five years is a long time to work through it, and I’m still a young scholar. When I see professors who have been studying this material for 20 years and still doubt everything, I think, “I need to learn more”. It takes time to go through it all. Now that I’m expanding my scope to Babylonia and Egypt I find myself thinking, “I could do this all day”.
In your postdoctoral work, you continue studying the Idumean corpus, but now with a focus on the fiscal system. What new insights do you hope to uncover through this shift in focus? How does it tie into the broader goals of the WORK-IT project?
This approach allows for a deeper exploration of a specific theme and the chance to dedicate time and attention to it. As I said, the Idumean corpus still holds many mysteries. By comparing it to the Babylonian and Egyptian models, I hope to find something similarity to what we already know from those cases.
For me, the Idumean corpus is really key to understanding the bigger picture of the project, especially since WORK-IT is all about taxation in the Levant. What’s interesting is that this corpus wasn’t meant to be seen—it wasn’t made for a public audience—so it doesn’t follow the same patterns as other kinds of sources.
Before, most of what we knew about the Persian period came from Hellenistic texts—that is, one culture writing about another. And that can be tricky. There’s always the risk of distortion. They didn’t share the same ideas, the same cultural references, or even the same way of seeing the world. So things might have seemed odd or unfamiliar to them. Plus, those texts often carried an ideological message—there’s propaganda in there. Sure, the authors might have been seen as historians in their time, but we have to be really careful about how we use those writings today. Sometimes the numbers they give are off—not necessarily because they wanted to lie, but because those numbers had symbolic or religious meaning. That made sense in their world, and people at the time would have understood it. But for us, it’s hard to tell what’s factual and what’s not.
What makes the administrative and economic texts different is that they weren’t written with any of that in mind. They’re just records—calculations, raw data. Even if they seem repetitive, they give us direct information we can work with. From there, we can build something solid, a real model of how things worked. So yeah, the Idumean corpus is at the heart of it all, but honestly, the whole project is really well thought out. All our different areas of expertise fit together perfectly. We’ve got solid documentation, archaeology, literature that brings in symbolic and historical depth, and even links to the modern economic world. It’ll be exciting to see what comes out of it. For now, it’s just a great experience to be part of.
Have any aspects of the Persian fiscal system surprised you or challenged existing assumptions? Do you see any parallels between ancient and modern bureaucracies or systems of taxation?
This question would be more relevant toward the end or a more advanced stage of the project. However, even now we can already see that the relationship between the agricultural economy and the fiscal system is very interesting, particularly in Idumea. There is a clear integration of fiscal interaction within the agricultural economy, which revolves mainly around barley and wheat. We also find a few mentions of other products like olive oil and wine. There are also references horses, donkeys, camels, or even have a mouse! In the end, we see a variety of products and animals, but the core focus remains agricultural.
It would be interesting to understand how this all functioned through the lens of the fiscal system. One key point will be to determine how the temple fits into this structure, and to better understand the place of business families within the system. In the Achaemenid Empire, there seems to have been a close integration between agriculture and fiscal extraction mechanisms. These mechanisms relied on a fragile balance of use, reuse, distribution, and redistribution of surplus, in order to support imperial functions. What I can already say is that taxation took different forms: payments in kind (such as agricultural products), in silver or coin, and other types of economic contributions. These were often adapted to local conditions and available resources.
What’s great about this project is that we can begin to understand the taxation system, or links to it, from the perspective of economic obligations related to workers and land. That interaction is something I want to explore further. Workers are mentioned in the texts. They were mobilized for official tasks, though we don’t always know exactly what they were doing since it’s not mention inside the texts. However, there are lists of construction materials, which may offer clues about projects. This is one of the challenges – to try and understand these operations better.
In our next post, doctoral researcher Daniele Soares shares how her journey from economics in Brazil to theology and biblical studies led her to explore the social and economic dynamics of Ezra and Nehemiah. Join us as we delve into how ancient texts speak to labor, power, and identity—and what it means to read the Bible through the lens of modern theory.