The books of the Hebrew Bible were written thousands of years ago in a very different world from ours. Already in the Middle Ages, respected Jewish thinkers like Moses Maimonides and Abraham ibn Ezra realized that the more we know about the ancient Near East in biblical times, the better we understand the nuances of the biblical text. Maimonides went to great efforts to describe accurately what non-Jewish life was like in biblical times, often referring to the book, The Nabatean Agriculture, a dubious work that was the best that he could find.
