1986 Annual Meeting

050

Four Days—700 Lectures

Over 4,000 people attended about 700 lectures in four days in Atlanta, Georgia last November at the joint Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) and the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR).

Jordan was the featured country at the archaeological sessions. Unfortunately, only three Jordanians showed up—those whose expenses were paid by ASOR. The others, it was widely reported, had to cancel their trip because of severe budgetary constraints in Jordan. Moawiyah Ibrahim of Yarmouk University in Irbid, Jordan, publicly announced that this was not the reason for the failure of the others to come; rather it was because of busy schedules.

The sessions devoted to the archaeology of Jordan covered the Paleolithic (c. 1,500,000–10,000 B.C.) and Neolithic (c. 7500–4000 B.C.) periods, and then jumped to the Roman period. It was as if the Biblical periods that intervened did not exist in Jordan. This, of course, is a shame because Jordan is so rich in archaeology of the periods most relevant to the Hebrew Bible. It is difficult, if not impossible, to appreciate fully the archaeological record of the Biblical periods in the area of modern Israel without understanding what was happening at the same time in modern Jordan. Unfortunately, even Americans working in Jordan feel they must be careful of the public contacts they have with Israeli scholars and in the ways they connect their work with the Bible. Facts of life department!

Clearly the most exciting presentation on the Jordan program was the spectacular Neolithic statues from ‘Ain Ghazal. In 1974 construction workers in the outskirts of Amman cut through what turned out to be a major Neolithic settlement that had lain undisturbed for nearly 9,000 years. By 1981 almost ten percent of the site had been destroyed; at that point, however, Jordan’s Department of Antiquities was able to stop further damage by legal process. A salvage excavation was organized under the direction of the then Annual Professor of the American Center of Oriental Research, 051Gary Rollefson. Rollefson, later affiliated with Yarmouk University and now at San Diego State University, made the presentation on ‘Ain Ghazal at the Annual Meeting.

‘Ain Ghazal (Spring of the Gazelle) is one of the largest Neolithic sites ever discovered. It covers nearly 30 acres (about three times as large as contemporaneous Jericho)! Only one other Neolithic site in the entire Levant (Abu Hureyra in northern Syria) is of comparable size. ‘Ain Ghazal’s size alone is already changing ideas about the complexity of society in the Early Neolithic or PPNB (Pre-Pottery Neolithic B—c. 7250–6000 B.C.) period. ‘Ain Ghazal was a major population center at a time when scholars supposed man was still eking out an existence in nothing more complicated than a small agricultural village.

The evidence at ‘Ain Ghazal reflects sophisticated economic as well as social systems. Social distinctions, division of labor, long-distance trade, advanced technological processes—all can be found at ‘Ain Ghazal.

The walls of houses at ‘Ain Ghazal were made of undressed stones set in mud mortar; on the inside, the walls were covered with mud plaster and finished with white plaster; red ocher was used to decorate the walls. The floors, too, were finished with white plaster. Apparently the secret of manufacturing lime plaster was known to the inhabitants of ‘Ain Ghazal—a manufacturing pit may have been found—although lime plaster was not widely used thereafter until the Israelites settled in the Canaanite hill country in about 1200 B.C.

One large “public” building was found at ‘Ain Ghazal, possibly reflecting some form of public administration. The building was nearly 50 feet long.

A red coral bead, cowrie shells and a mother of pearl pendant indicate contact with the Red Sea, about 170 miles to the south. Cockle shells and sweet clam shells, with a single hole so they could be used as pendants, came from the Mediterranean, about 75 miles to the west.

Food was processed with querns, mortars, pestles, stone bowls and grinders. Most grinders were made of basalt that probably came from a basalt area 35 miles northeast of’Ain Ghazal.

Bracelets and pendants were made of polished limestone.

The raw material for an obsidian knife must have come from Anatolia. Beneath the floor of one house was found a cache of 84 flint blades that evidently had been wrapped in leather.

Bone tools—needles, a “thimble,” awls and spatulas—were evidently used in the sewing and weaving industry.

Although clay was used for figurines, both animal and human, it was used only rarely for pottery. The excavators found only about 25 potsherds, which suggests, however, that even in this so-called pre-pottery period, the inhabitants of ‘Ain Ghazal were already experimenting with pottery manufacturing.

The spiritual and religious life of ‘Ain Ghazal is best reflected in its burials. Over 80 human burials have been recovered. Most, lying on their sides, knees flexed, were found beneath the floors or in the courtyards of the houses. The skulls had been removed. A cache of four adult skulls was found separately, all facing the same direction (southwesterly). At least two of the skulls had been covered with plaster. Black circles for irises and black lines for eyeliners (probably of bitumen from the Dead Sea) highlighted the eyes. Rollefson suggests the skulls were reburied in connection with a special ceremony.

Startling Cache

The most spectacular finds, however, were two remarkable caches of human statues and busts made of plaster, found in 1983 and 1985. The 1983 cache, which has now been intensively studied, was found carefully deposited in a pit beneath a house in the central cluster of dwellings.

The excavation of this cache of statues and busts presented special problems. They were already cracked when discovered, and it was obvious that, once having been exposed during excavation, new cracks would develop as the figures dried out in the harsh Jordanian summer.

It was decided to remove the entire collection in a single block, in its protective sediment. In this way, final excavation could be accomplished under properly controlled laboratory conditions.

This has now been done, and the audience in Atlanta was treated to slides of the first restored statues, conserved under the direction of Kathryn Walker Tubb of London University’s Institute of Archaeology.

The cache was found to contain 12 large statues and at least 13 busts.^a The heads, torsos and legs are all hollow, but were probably originally filled with reeds and twigs that formed a kind of stickman skeleton. This “skeleton” was then tightly wrapped with coarse twine on which the plaster was molded to create the final form.

The statues are slightly less than three feet tall. The legs are short and stumpy; the torsos broad, flat, squat and, in most cases, without features; the necks are elongated. The faces, however, are quite expressive, reflecting considerable individuality. They may be intended to portray particular people. The eyes are made of white chalk, and are outlined with a green pigment and black eyeliner. Irises consist of circles made of black pigment. The cheeks of the statues tend to be pudgy, the noses upturned. At least one of the statues displays facial paint.

Another statue, found lying in the opposite direction from the rest, was obviously a female. In contrast to the featureless torsos, this statue displayed pendulous breasts and possibly wore a skirt. Two other statues also had breasts and one of these displayed female genitalia.

At nearby Jericho, excavations in the 1930s and 1950s uncovered fragmentary remains of contemporaneous statues, as well as of plastered skulls. The statues were constructed in the same way as at ‘Ain Ghazal.

At ‘Ain Ghazal the features on the faces of the statues are similar to those on the plastered skulls. This is also true at Jericho. Yet these features on the ‘Ain Ghazal faces differ from the features on the Jericho faces. Thus, at ‘Ain Ghazal all the statues and plastered skulls have black irises and eyeliners; at Jericho both the statues and plastered skulls have inset eyes of shell. This may reflect related, but distinct, societies.

According to most archaeologists, the plastered skulls were intended to be portraits of the deceased, The statues too were apparently intended as individual portrayals. According to Rollefson, the statues and the plastered skulls are cult symbols. Perhaps the statues (and the busts), as well as the plastered skulls, represent some form of ancient ancestor worship or ancestor veneration. Perhaps they were intended to portray now-deceased but still venerated individuals who were important either because of their kin relationship or their social or religious status. Further study is obviously required to appreciate the full significance of the magnificent finds from ‘Ain Ghazal.

052

God-Fearers? Yes!

The “God-fearers” was a subject of special interest at the sessions on Hellenistic Judaism, as a result of BAR’s recent coverage of the subject.^b More than twice as many people wanted to attend this session as could be accommodated in the assigned room. Interest in the subject ran so high, people were sitting on the floor, standing in the doorway and streaming out into the hall.

Tom Kraabel, dean of Luther College, who recently challenged the existence of the God-fearers,^c was forced to concede that God-fearers did in fact exist. What he was really contesting, Kraabel said, was the size and cohesiveness of the God-fearers; there were not millions of them, as sometimes claimed, and they did not form a distinct social class. The scholars who responded to Kraabel agreed that there may not have been millions and they may not have formed a distinct social class (it was difficult to know what Kraabel meant by social class), but, as Shaye Cohen of the Jewish Theological Seminary expressed the consensus, the God-fearers were “an important phenomenon” during the early centuries of the Common Era. Michael White of Oberlin College voiced the view of most scholars in the room when he concluded 053that “[Kraabel’s] revisionist position is overstated.”

Nevertheless, Kraabel got high marks for many aspects of his analysis. In the words of Carl Holladay, associate dean of the Candler School of Theology at Emory University:

“Kraabel has done us a service in calling for a more comprehensively conceived historiography that enables us to understand Diaspora Judaism in its own right, independent of Christianity and Christian writings. He has rightly underscored the theological tendencies that have informed Luke-Acts, and its successors, Protestant-Lutheran historians.

“Our chief sources for understanding Judaism in this time and place are a set of Christian writings, the New Testament. Kraabel criticizes the way in which this has tilted genuine historical inquiry away from investigating Diaspora Judaism as a historical phenomenon in its own right, but rather always in relation to Christianity, as if during the mid-first century A.D. there was extensive contact between churches and synagogues, and as if there occurred a reverse in the flow of traffic as religious Gentiles stopped going to synagogues and started going to Christian churches. Seen this way, Diaspora synagogues become important stages in Christian history, not Jewish history. In contrast to this approach, Kraabel is asking for Diaspora Judaism to be given its own hearing, independent of Christian history, independent of the portrait we find in Acts.

“He is actually arguing for a larger methodological point. He protests a form of Christian historiography that (a) reads all history, Jewish and Christian, as religious history in which every point of contact between Jews and Gentiles is interpreted in terms of ‘faith,’ rather than, say, social or political intercourse, and (b) reads Jewish history through Christian eyes, thus interpreting Hebrew Scriptures from the vantage point of the New Testament, that is, reading it as Old Testament, and thus relating the Jewish canon to the Christian canon in terms of a promise/fulfillment scheme that inevitably makes Jewish history a prolegomenon to Christian history, or that relates the two in terms of a Law/Gospel dialectic. In either case, what emerges is a form of Christian triumphalism. It is against this that Kraabel rightly protests.”

Political Nuggets or Fools’ Gold?

The presentation that drew by far the largest attendance at the Atlanta meeting was an AAR session featuring presidential candidate Jesse Jackson. Enthusiastically introduced by Martin Marty, senior editor of Christian Century and professor of the history of Christianity in America at the University of Chicago, Jackson delivered an anti-Reagan tirade clothed in Biblical rhetoric.

Comparing Reagan to South Africa’s P. W. Botha (“Reagan is in the same category as Botha”), Jackson charged that the American President was “race-conscious, hostile and unmerciful: he’s a mean man.”

Other Jackson nuggets: Reagan applies “not a means test, but a mean test.”

“Good religion is not having the general secretary of the Communist Party [Mikhail Gorbachev] correct the President of the United States about what happened at the summit meeting at Reykjavik [Iceland].”

“Miss Liberty without Mr. Justice is a wayward woman.”

“Our youth engage in violence to redirect their aggressive rage.”

“Ivan Boesky got caught worshipping the golden calf.”

“The plight of the Soviet Jews and the Palestinians on the West Bank must be measured by the same yardstick.”

“Grenada is the first war America has won since World War II.”

Jackson characterized presidential hopeful Pat Robertson as selling “right-wing politics wrapped in a few Bible verses, just like a hot dog.”

In the end, one was left with the clear impression that the Bible’s plain “moral imperatives,” as Jackson identified them, required a vote for him as President of the United States.

Jackson was warmly applauded, and this reporter could find no one in the audience who, like himself, found Jackson’s talk wholly inappropriate to a scholarly gathering. If current presidential politics and advocacy of particular candidates is to be the subject of supposedly scholarly discussion, at least the presentation should be balanced. Other candidates, or their spokespersons, should surely be given equal time.

Special recognition at a plenary SBL session was given to Kent Richards, who served for two 3 year terms as SBL’s unpaid executive secretary. As such, he has been a principal organizer of the Annual Meeting. With the growth of the organization and the increasing attendance at the Annual Meeting, SBL correctly decided that it must now have a full-time, paid executive director. While it is searching for a person to fill this position, however, it prevailed on Richards to continue to serve. Smart move! Some are urging that Richards himself accept the new full-time position. He has the devotion, the experience, and—above all—the competence. In recognition of his past contributions to SBL, Richards, who is a collector of limited editions, was presented with two limited edition volumes: a beautiful Song of Songs and the poetry of Philip Levine, Richards’s former teacher. Richards is professor of Old Testament at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver. He also serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of our sister publication Bible Review.

If the sessions of the Annual Meeting sound like a maelstrom, they are. But it’s hard to beat them for scholarly excitement. Many of the ideas presented at these sessions will eventually find their way into articles in BAR and Bible Review. One of the papers at the annual meeting is discussed at greater length in “Dever’s ‘Sermon on the Mound,’” in this issue.

More Non-Scholars Attend

Although I can’t prove it, I have the sense that more and more unaffiliated lay people are attending the Annual Meeting, perhaps in part because of these annual reports. It takes a layperson of special interest, but it is a wonderful, mind-spinning introduction to the scholarly world. Next year, the Annual Meeting will be held in Boston from December 5 to 8, with the archaeology of Turkey highlighted at the archaeology sessions. But, as always, the Bible will be the principal focus and there will be hundreds of sessions to choose from. So, if you think you might be one of those people of special interest, do come.

To get advance information about the 1987 Annual Meeting, write to: Scholars Press, P.O. Box 1608, Decatur, GA 30031–1608, or phone (404) 636–4757.