The Nutrition of Abraham and Sarah on The Way To Canaan

 Nadene Goldfoot                                            

Speaking of threshing floors used in the baking of bread;  we only have to walk or drive down to the bakery and buy a loaf of bread. What kind of food did Abraham and Sarah eat 3,000 years ago,  especially on their trek from Ur on the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia to Canaan?  

From Ur, Abraham traveled 700 miles to the borders of present-day Iraq, another 700 miles into Syria, another 800 down to Egypt by the inland road, and then back into Canaan - which is now Israel.  It is a journey that today's pilgrim, for reasons of international polity, cannot easily replicate. But even though much of the route is difficult of access, and although many of the cities Abraham knew are now only ruins, there are nonetheless rewards for today's traveler, spiritual monuments to the man and his faith. Begin, then, in the Ur of history and imagination, and end at Hebron, where, under Israeli protection, the faiths, however briefly, meet.

They might have traveled by camels.  It's a very long trek.  That would have made carrying food much easier.  

When Abraham strode upon the stage at Ur, he was by Semitic reckoning already a man of 75. And Ur was then a capital city of more than 100,000 inhabitants, a place of beauty, graced with towers, palaces, temples, law courts, market squares, statues, shrines, gardens, mosaics, friezes, reliefs and monuments. 

Abraham is one of the early homo sapiens that we know about, making an entrance of our history after Adam and Eve of the year 5783 BCE Jewish time. Abraham was born in about  1948 BCE.   They were the updated models after Neandertals, the homo sapiens who have been around for a long time, now.   I went back 9 generations starting with Abraham's father, Terah, to get to Shem, one of Noah's sons. 4 more generations back and one arrives at Enoch.                                 

Our babies can nurse their mothers for the first 2 years of their lives.  Then mothers found food for themselves in nature, such as berries and nuts, fruit on trees such as dates, apples, and seeds and grasses to munch on.  They would chew it, and then spit it into the mouths of their babies.    It looked rather like baby food our babies are fed from cans and bottles created by Gerbers.    

The human lineage going way back was of Australopithecus afarensis, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.  It took thousands of years being at each stage to develop the mind and body which happened by genes mutating to go along with adapting to their environment. 

The question is, when did homo sapiens start eating animals?  The answer is 2.6 million years ago.  The first major evolutionary change in the human diet was the incorporation of meat and marrow from large animals, which occurred by at least 2.6 million years ago.  That was way before Abraham's day.                                    

I bet they would have loved to come upon a hamburger stand when on their trek, but none existed back then  Abraham and Sarah lived during the 2nd millennium or was born about the year 1948 BCE, only about 4,000 years ago.  Ur, connected to Babylon, was like the New York City of that day.  3,000 more years and they would see lots of hamburger stands in the year 1948 after World War II.  

He left it for the hinterland of Canaan to start a new life out in less populated countryside. They may have had dried meat in their backpacks, and some form of pita or even matzo made from wheat.  They walked near the river so may have eaten fish along the way to Haran.  They needed to walk even if they came with camels as walking is good for the heart, and they must have walked a lot more than today's humans.    

One wonders how that came to be that humans started eating animals.    Could it have happened that they came upon a carcass of one hit by lightning so there was one cooked, so to speak, and they smelled it and tasted it as it made them salivate and become hungrier and they were then sated?  That would have opened their eyes to a new source of food.                  

  Also, they might have studied other animals in their purview and saw that they ate other animals, so besides staying out of the limelight of being the next meal, thought of their own tummy growling and what might they include in their own diet.   

Those who became meat eaters found they were stronger than others.  I know a boxer who ate a good beef dinner before a boxing match and found he had more energy so won his bouts.  These meat eaters would have become a more dominant group, multiplying.   

Animal-based foods (meat, poultry, fish, eggs, and dairy foods) tend to be good sources of complete protein, while plant-based foods (fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts, and seeds) often lack one or more essential amino acid.

Today, vegans are the thing.  More and more people are turning to a vegan diet.  Well, we do have 7.98 billion people on planet earth and its getting harder and harder to feed and water that many.  Here, Russians are leaving their country, worried about not having the necessities of life under this regime by being forced into serving the army in an unwanted war.  Other Europeans worry about keeping warm during the winter and needing fuel.  

No such worries for Abraham.  He just worried about producing more of his own children and had to work on that.  Those were the days of very low population of the world.  

Resource:

https://www.history.com/news/humans-evolution-neanderthals-denisovans#:~:text=The%20human%20lineage%20of%20Australopithecus,erectus%2C%20Neanderthals%20and%20Homo%20sapiens.