elites in the capital cities of Samaria in the north and Jerusalem in the south. Those elites clustered around the king and included the priests, the scribes, the tax collectors, and no doubt other powerful people. Those urban elites extracted wealth from the small, at-risk peasant-farmers who at best lived a precarious subsistence life. The process of extraction included taxation and high interest rates on loans. These were financial arrangements that drove many of the peasants into hopeless debt so that they were rendered helpless in the economy.

While that arrangement was exploitative, it no doubt appeared, at least from an urban perspective, to be normal, because the surplus wealth and the high standard of living it made possible seemed natural and guaranteed. The power people who operated theSettings

From North Korean defector to YouTube star

21-year-old Kang Na-ra fled to South Korea from the North in 2014 and is now a beauty and cosmetics social media influencer in Seoul. She said while the South Korean products still triumph, North Korean products are increasingly jumping on the K-beauty bandwagon. Michelle Hennessy reports.

21-year-old Kang Na-Ra is a beauty influencer in South Korea. But the products she's reviewing here can't be bought where she lives in Seoul.

That's because these beauty items are from North Korea. Kang is originally from the North she's a defector who fled just five years ago.

Reuters brought her the North Korean cosmetics, which can also be bought in Russia and China. Here she's filming a comparison between products from the communist North, and the beauty-obsessed South.

Kang