The Birth of a Trope: Women Grinding Grain with Rotary Hand Mills in Early Bible Dictionaries

The image of two women grinding grain with a rotary hand mill became a common biblical trope in the 19th and early 20th centuries, even though it was based on an 18th-century Scottish woodcut rather than ancient Near Eastern evidence. Bible dictionaries and later travel literature used this image to reinforce Orientalist ideas about the Holy Land as timeless and “biblical,” while also distorting the actual history of grain-grinding technology in the Levant.

Chapter from Ancient Technologies, Methods of Production and Installations in Israel—Essays in Honor of Rafael Frankel
M. Eisenberg, U. ‘Ad, and E. Ayalon (eds), The Zinman Institute of Archaeology, Haifa, 2025.

By Jennie Ebeling
Department of Archaeology
University of Evansville
March 2026

                                                                                  Click here for article