The Golden Bough of Kōkab: Traditional Rural Muslim Arabic Agricultural Narrative from Western Lower Galilee

Abstract

In 1915, J. Frazer’s The Golden Bough identified a core motif in ancient Mediterranean religions: the ritual sacrifice of a vegetation deity, often embodied in grain, to ensure the renewal of the agricultural cycle. Traditional Mediterranean threshing methods used by Arab peasants in Palestine until the 1950s–1960s involved trampling the grain and beating it with stones and pitchforks for days to separate it from the straw and chaff, a laborious process that evoked dismemberment. This article presents a text recorded in Kōkab Abu-l-Ḥēja, an Arab Muslim village in the western Lower Galilee, in 2018, accompanied by transcription, translation, and linguistic notes addressing some salient linguistic aspects. The text represents a specimen of agricultural narrative, that is, a description of traditional farming activities, specifically the reaping and threshing of grain. The text was narrated in a variety of the traditional rural Muslim dialect of Kōkab Abu-l-Ḥēja by a woman who was seventy-five years old at the time this article was written.