Delilah at the table

In the Sorek Valley, a living border between Hebrews and Philistines, meals are not served in separate courses but around a common hearth: a barley flatbread serves as plate and spoon, accompanied by oil, olives, goat cheese, and dried fruits. On ordinary days, the meal is frugal and plant-based; on feast days at the temple of Dagon, meat is roasted — and among the Philistines, pork, forbidden to their Hebrew neighbors, marks the difference. Drink (wine cut with water, grape juice) circulates from the same Aegean krater, a heritage of the ancestors who came from the sea.

Poured on bread, rubbed on meat, guardian of preserves: olive oil is the thread that connects every dish in the Sorek Valley. The Philistines made a prosperous trade of it, pressing olives from Ekron in vast workshops — it is this, more than anything, that perfumes Delilah's table.