A Life of Albright

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Leona Running has written an adoring biography of the dean of Biblical archaeologists, William Foxwell Albright.^a Now Professor of Biblical Languages at Andrews University, Dr. Running served as secretary and assistant to the great American archaeologist during the last years of his life. The book, as she says in the preface, is “a labor of love undertaken in grateful homage by a devoted disciple toward a revered teacher—yet at the same time a genuine attempt to present objectively the man as he really was.”

The biography’s major flaw is its failure to place Albright’s scholarly achievement within the context of the intellectual history of his time. Indeed, Dr. Running describes Albright’s scholarly achievement itself only in the most casual way. We are told, almost ad naseum, the title of a paper he delivered here and a lecture there. Each of his almost 30 honorary degrees is mentioned. Innumerable positions in academic societies are catalogued and scholarly honors recounted. But of the content of his intellectual contribution, precious little is said.

The spectacular breadth and encyclopedic scope of Albright’s scholarly concerns are referred to again and again. In an age of specialists, he was truly the last of the great generalists. Frank M. Cross, Jr., described this aspect of his scholarship at a luncheon near the end of Albright’s life:

“Albright has listed his profession as ‘orientalist’. The whole of the ancient Near East has been his bailiwick, its geography and archaeology, its languages and literature, its history and religion. I suspect that he is the last such orientalist: a generalist with the specialist’s precision in designated areas of Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Anatolian, and Syro-Palestinian studies … Each of the great discoveries in the Near East has galvanized Albright with excitement, and he has been found regularly in the forefront of those who endeavored to interpret the new data and to build new syntheses comprehending the new evidence.”

Yet one comes away from this biography without any idea of the major themes of his contribution, let alone the substance of his ideas. When occasionally the content of a paper is described, it is unrelated to the intellectual ferment of which it was a part. Ernest Jones’ great biography of Freud—a biography of a teacher by a loving student—keeps coming to mind by way of contrast; if only Dr. Running had used this as a model.

Albright matured as a scholar during the ascendancy of the form-critical ideas associated with Julius Wellhausen. Orthodox churchmen were stunned and offended by the idea that the Pentateuch was composed of independently written strands (the major ones being identified as J, E, P, and D), which were later combined by editors or redactors who failed to smooth out many repetitions and inconsistencies. It was into this world that Albright came as a scientist par excellence, proving at every turn the amazing accuracy of the Biblical memory. It was indeed true! And herein lay a good deal of Albright’s support and appeal. Albright’s relationship—conscious or unconscious—to the form-critical movement swirling about him is largely untouched. We are not even told how Albright related his archaeological views to his own theological commitment.

Albright’s place in the history of the development of archaeological field methods is also ignored—perhaps because here he was not a guiding star. Nevertheless, his career spanned the development of these methods; and his relation to this archaeological development needs to be explored. Stratigraphy was practically coined in his lifetime. To what extent did he dig stratigraphically? Did he use the latest methods or advance them at Tel el-Ful and Tell Beit Mirsim? The fact is that Fisher and Reisner’s excavations at Samaria in 1923–24 represented a high water mark of 022stratigraphic digging at the time, from which Albright’s technique (as well as others of that generation) was a retreat.

Even in the area of Albright’s greatest methodological contribution—ceramic typologies—the reader is left with the feeling that accurate pottery dating was largely Albright’s creation at Tell Beit Mirsim but without any clear idea of the specifics, what went before, what happened after, how Albright did it, how much depends on accurate stratigraphy, what the major lines are, etc. No mention is made of the fact that even today a major debate continues as to the date of Albright’s level G at Tell Beit Mirsim.

Albright was certainly not an isolated scholar. Indeed, he was a part of almost everything that was going on in archaeology during his long life. True, Dr. Running tells us that this was so, but it would have been a far better book if she had described rather than told us.

When on occasion the author does describe at some length a particular Albrightian contribution; she fails to qualify it in terms of subsequent developments in the field. She quotes at length from Albright’s “landmark study” which he entitled “Abram the Hebrew: A New Archaeological Interpretation”. There Albright places Abraham in the Middle Bronze I period which he dates from 2,000 B.C. to 1,800 B.C. Abraham was a donkey caravaneer, Albright tells us, an occupation he associates with the Apiru (i.e., the caravaneers), a word which ultimately became Ibri or Hebrew. Not only does Dr. Running fail to place these conclusions in the stream of contemporaneous scholarship, she also fails to tell us that more recent scholarship has seriously questioned, if not demolished, almost every element of Albright’s hypothesis. Many scholars believe that Albright fixed the end of MBI about 200 years too late; that the patriarchal age cannot be associated with the Middle Bronze I period (it should be placed in the MBII period, a period of substantially different social and archaeological attributes); the patriarchs were not semi-nomads, and Apiru probably is not associated with Hebrew.

Over a period of 30 years, Albright struggled to transcribe and translate the fascinating inscriptions Sir Flinders Petrie found in the turquoise mines of Serabit el-Khadem, deep in the Sinai desert. Known as Proto-Sinaitic, these inscriptions likely hold the key to the invention of the alphabet. Dr. Running tells us that Albright returned to the problem of transcribing and translating these inscriptions about once every ten years, that stories on Albright’s trip to examine the inscriptions in situ appeared in the New York Times, the Providence Journal, the Dallas Times Herald, the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun and other newspapers (together with the dates the stories appeared), and that 25 copies of his last monograph on the inscriptions were sent to scholars in the United States, France, England, Germany, Italy, Israel and India. However, from this book we get no sense of the struggle which went into this 30-year effort, the problems encountered, or the fact that Albright’s early efforts (which he also published) were in his own words “without much success.” Neither are we told how far Albright was ultimately successful in his effort, nor the extent to which his transcriptions and translations have been accepted by the scholarly community.

One final example Dr. Running tells us that even before he excavated Tell Beit Mirsim, Albright identified it as Biblical Debir, an identification confirmed, according to Albright, by the excavation. Although the identification was not “conclusive”, it was “practically certain”, Albright said. After the Six Day War in 1967, Israeli scholars, with newly gained access to the area around Hebron, revived the suggestion, originally put forward by Kurt Galling, that another site, Tell Rabud, was in fact Biblical Debir. When Albright arrived in Israel in 1969, his first remark on deplaning was, “Tell Beit Mirsim is still Debir.” According to one observer, Albright was very angry that the Biblical identification of his great excavation was being brought into question. However, Dr. Running does not tell us how Albright identified Tell Beit Mirsim as Debir, the basis on which Israeli scholars opted for Tell Rabud, or which had the better side of the debate. The entire sequence of events would provide an excellent example of the problems encountered in Biblical geography and topography, but the reader is told only that Albright opted for Tell Beit Mirsim and certain Israeli scholars for another site.

044Dr. Running does succeed in giving us a picture of the man. She is especially good in describing his younger years. Born in Chile, the son of a Methodist missionary, young William felt from the beginning the weight of extreme nearsightedness, a condition that worsened as he grew older, until at his death he was almost totally blind. When William turned five, the Albrights were on furlough in Iowa, staying at the family farm. It was then that the nearsighted little boy grabbed one of the moving pulleys on a haying machine. As he drew it to him to see the interesting rope more clearly, it burned the flesh and ligaments of his fingers, leaving the child with a permanently crippled left hand. The fingers healed curled up, and an operation to straighten them many years later could not give him full use of his left hand. Lonely, isolated, scarred, but loved, the child turned to books and learning. Spurred by a Protestant work ethic, he compensated for the obstacles which God had strewn in his path.

His early insecurities gave way in later years to a quiet and imperturbable confidence, a confidence that easily allowed him to change his mind as new evidence came in or old evidence was better analyzed. This willingness to change his mind was one of his hallmarks. What never changed throughout his life was his kindliness, a thoroughgoing Protestant charitableness toward his fellowmen, and a quiet, understated sense of humor. He had no feuds, no irrational excesses, and only the most occasional emotional flareups. He was totally dedicated to his scholarship and seemingly lived far above the level of “personalities”. He was loved and respected by all, and for thirty years bestrode the world of Biblical archaeology like a colossus, its acknowledged dean.

Yet somehow, in the end, there is something missing from this portrait. Beneath the scholar, there must have been a man. Shortly before his marriage at age 30, Albright made detailed observations concerning his own physical nature and carefully recorded them in an Assyrian cuneiform code—never dreaming that 50 years later the code would be cracked by a biographer also fluent in Assyrian cuneiform (Dr. Running discretely refrains from further describing his observations). The story is symbolic of the protective covers that lay between the scholar and the man. To the world, he was pure scholar—in Max Weber’s terminology, the ideal scholar.

No doubt he wanted it that way. The story is told that a new president of Johns Hopkins saw the great scholar walking across the campus. The new president walked over and introduced himself to Albright and told Albright how happy he was to meet him. Then he asked Albright “What do your good friends call you?” “Professor Albright” was the innocent reply.

Leona Running has written an adoring biography of the dean of Biblical archaeologists, William Foxwell Albright.a Now Professor of Biblical Languages at Andrews University, Dr. Running served as secretary and assistant to the great American archaeologist during the last years of his life. The book, as she says in the preface, is “a labor of love undertaken in grateful homage by a devoted disciple toward a revered teacher—yet at the same time a genuine attempt to present objectively the man as he really was.” The biography’s major flaw is its failure to place Albright’s scholarly achievement within the context […]