One of the best kinds of jobs to have is one in which you can never be proven wrong. Kind of like Anthony Fauci during covid. He claimed (mendaciously) that he was “following the science” so anyone dissenting was obviously nothing more than an illiterate neanderthal. At the other end of the scale, in the tough jobs category, we’d include corporate CEO. Many of his decisions will have been validated or ridiculed by the time the next annual report needs to be prepared. Research scientists and the electrician who wired your home have tough jobs because there is no hiding their mistakes. But surely the cushiest job in the whole wide world is archeologist. After he has won acclaim for identifying a heap of old stones as an early library, a public toilet, or a shrine, he need never fear that the long-ago people who piled up the stones might some day leap out of the stone work yelling to the archeologist, “You idiot! Library? Really? It was never anything more than a pile of discarded stones!” No, archeologists are certainly safe. Anointed by their academic colleagues in reciprocal arrangements, and insulated from real-world ridicule by their esoteric credentials, they have the cushiest jobs.
Imagine my delight when about thirty years ago I read a fascinating book called The Economy of Cities written by Jane Jacobs in 1969. I quickly discovered that the archeologists mocked Jane Jacobs as a “just a housewife”. They laughed at her writing without a college degree or any formal education in the two fields in which she wrote so persuasively, economics and urban planning. And guess who comes off worst in her book; archeologists, that’s who.
You see, archeologists had always insisted, without fear of contradiction, that civilization had emerged from agriculture. First came farming. Farming produced surplus. Surplus allowed specialization. And specialization gave rise to cities. But Jane Jacobs called them out. There was no evidence for their theories, she explained. In reality, cities always come before agricultural development. Not cities as we picture them today with zoning boards and parking meters, but dense settlements—places where people gathered, traded, experimented, and learned from one another. In such environments, innovation thrives. People observe patterns. They try things. They improve upon what already exists. And to feed all the traders and tinkerers, agriculture thrived.
The Economy of Cities showed that agriculture emerged—not as a prerequisite for cities, but as a response to them. Farming was developed and refined because clustered populations needed reliable food supplies. In other words, economic creativity preceded agricultural stability, not the reverse. Life is not built by implementing tidy plans and hoping people conform. It is built by people showing up, engaging with one another, trading value—spiritual and material—and then shaping systems to support what is already alive. When famine threatened Egypt, Joseph brings survival not come through better plows or more rain. Salvation came through Joseph’s administrative genius—storage systems, logistics, planning, and distribution centered in Egypt’s cities. Grain matters, of course, but it is urban organization that transforms food into survival.
Cities didn’t grow because someone designed them on a drafting table. They grew because people needed one another to prosper and agriculture followed. People gather to trade and thereby more easily achieve the goal of wresting a living from an often reluctant earth. To service these early business professionals, there arose an army of butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers–and farmers. This is surely a far more logical and plausible explanation than the archeological hypothesis.
As Jane Jacobs helped me understand all this, I was doubly delighted because it conformed to what I had always known from the Torah. To me it has become obvious that the Five Books of Moses are the work of the Creator of the Universe and I therefore take every word seriously.
Consider these words:
You shall be blessed in the city, and you shall be blessed in the field. (Deuteronomy 28:3)
Scripture could just as easily have written that you’ll be blessed in the field and then you’ll be blessed in the city. But it didn’t. It specifically places the city before the fields. In other words, the blessing of the city’s economic productivity through trade, will then bring about the blessing of agriculture in the fields. Jane Jacobs: 1. Archeologists: 0. And The Economy of Cities occupies a prominent place in my library.
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I believe as you do about the first 5 books of the Bible and as a Christian the rest of the Bible as well. But what do you say to someone that says the books were passed down through the ages as stories and as we all know those stories change with each telling. So how do we know what is true?
Thank you for all your work. I love having a Rabbi to explain the Hebrew language to me. I have enjoyed you both for years. I pray for this country and Israel.