Threshing (Bechoros 26)

Today, there's a reference to a threshing floor, a bes ha-granos, and apparently there are a lot of kohanim who are surreptitiously hanging around that spot.

So what exactly is threshing anyway, and what is a threshing floor? So this is something that has largely disappeared in the 19th and 20th century as, uh, modern machinery has taken over the process of threshing.

Threshing is, if you look at this picture here, basically a separation of the wheat from the chaff, a phrase that is now proverbial in English, but most people don't even know what that means.

Uh, the wheat, of course, is the material that you actually can eat, the edible, uh, you know, kernel of the wheat.

Uh, but, uh, surrounding it is a shell, a husk, which is called the chaff.

And so somehow you have to separate these things out.

Today, we do it with these modern combines.

Like, look at this one here, a big John Deere that, uh, sucks up all of the, uh, growing stalks of wheat and then beats it up in this machinery and, uh, separates the- the heavy wheat kernels, which we'll then make into flour and into bread, from the chaff, the husks, and things like that, and the straw that'll all get, uh, blown away during the winnowing process.

Uh, in the ancient world, this was done primarily either by foot or by animal, and you'd have this large, usually round area, like in this picture here, which shows traditional threshing, [clears throat] and you'd have, like, beasts of burden, sometimes with heavy things on the ground behind them, attached to them by a yoke, that would walk around.

You'd put all the- the cut wheat onto the threshing floor, and then you'd, you literally walk on it and put weight on it.

That would crush the, uh, the husks and separate the- the outsides from the kernels of wheat themselves.

Uh, and then you would, you know, throw it all up into the air, and the light chaff, the light shells, et cetera, would all blow away, and you would be left with a pile of the actual kernels that you would then make into flour.

So you needed a, a, some kind of surface which was clear of obviously building and vegetation and stuff like that, where you could, like, put all this wheat down and you could walk on it.

So most of these, uh, threshing floors were in a public or quasi-public area where many people could come get to them.

Uh, they had to be relatively centrally located.

These were largely built over once we got to modern threshing methods.

There was no need to transport the wheat and then to, you know, break it all up and make it into kernels and chaff and so on.

So here's a couple of archeological, uh, examples.

Here's one outside of, uh, Bethlehem, Beit Lechem.

Uh, you can see it's, it's a large area.

They're usually, uh, flat, sometimes earthen on the bottom.

Sometimes they're actually tilted a little bit so that the, uh, rain will slow, will fall off it, and the moisture won't be retained, like, in a big puddle.

It'd be kind of a, a waste to put all your wheat in a big puddle and then try to, uh, thresh it.

Uh, sometimes they're paved, either with small stones or even dug right down into the bedrock.

But at any rate, this is like a quasi-public place where people would come with all of their grain to, uh, get it ready for production into flour and, and, and then, uh, bread.