Climate factors into Scripture ... this is an interesting aspect often overlooked when reading through the Bible.
Remember this also.
Egypt was the bread basket for the world during this time. I remember a few classes about agriculture where the professor said that with the methods they used then, it would not be possible to produce the amount of grain that they were supposed have done in today’s climate.
Another thing to remember is when the Spanish came to what is now New Mexico, they ran into various Indian tribes that had moved down there to grow corn. The place where they moved from was to desolate to support agriculture any more.
We call that place Iowa, and have some of the best farm land in the world.
Climate shifts. Often dramatically.
However, when I visited the Outer Banks and/or Virginia Beach in the late 1960, I observed the hotels, beach, and water's edge in the exact same place as it is today.
Three mighty rivers once flowed through the Sahara
http://io9.com/three-mighty-rivers-once-flowed-through-the-sahara-1316516244
The world’s most famous desert isn’t always quite so dry as it is now—thanks to the Earth shifting on its axis, the Sahara’s climate gets gradually greener over tens of thousands of years. But you’d have to go back a long ways to find real, perennial rivers flowing through the Sahara outside of the Nile. But 100,000 years ago, the Sahara was awash with rivers that might well have led humanity’s ancestors to the Mediterranean.
That’s a possibility raised by new work from an international team of researchers, whose computer simulations suggest the presence of massive river systems in the Sahara between 130,000 and 100,000 years ago.
Milankovitch Cycles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
Milankovitch theory describes the collective effects of changes in the Earth’s movements upon its climate, named after Serbian geophysicist and astronomer Milutin Milankovich, who worked on it during his internment as a First World War prisoner of war (POW). Milankovich mathematically theorized that variations in eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession of the Earth’s orbit determined climatic patterns on Earth through orbital forcing.
The Earth’s orbit is an ellipse. The eccentricity is a measure of the departure of this ellipse from circularity. The shape of the Earth’s orbit varies in time between nearly circular (low eccentricity of 0.000055) and mildly elliptical (high eccentricity of 0.0679)[3] with the mean eccentricity of 0.0019 as geometric or logarithmic mean and 0.034 as arithmetic mean, the latter useless. The major component of these variations occurs on a period of 413,000 years (eccentricity variation of ±0.012). A number of other terms vary between components 95,000 and 125,000 years (with a beat period 400,000 years), and loosely combine into a 100,000-year cycle (variation of -0.03 to +0.02). The present eccentricity is 0.017.
From what I’ve read, In the time of the TURKS, they imposed a tax on all trees so the people went out and cut them down. No trees, no tax.
There was no "Palestine" it was "Judea".
Well just like today, very warm.
Having been to Israel, there is no way that I would consider the country, other than the immediate shoreline as being anything but HOT from late May to early October. Plus, the humidity can be quite high and the sun is very intense. Sure, if one frequents the beaches of Tel Aviv and up the coast, there are gentle to strong breezes which can keep one cool. However, venture a short distance from the shoreline, and one will sweat profusely.
didn’t read the whole article but I would say it’s about the same as today, mild and temperate, remember during Moses’ time they celebrated the first fruits (Shavuot/Pentecost)in May which means they had 2 growing seasons.