A Mickey Mouse Operation

038

Query: Why is Disney World like Kansas City? Answer: Both proved hopelessly inept and inadequate in hosting the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) and the American Academy of Religion (AAR).^a It will be a long time before the Annual Meeting returns to Orlando.

It started early. With hundreds of people assembled to listen to four great scholars talk about the latest on ancient seals and seal impressions, no one from the hotel was there to tell us how to turn out the lights so we could see the slides. But that was just one of the problems. The only audio equipment was a standup mike. Maybe they were expecting standup comics? Without a podium, the presenter had to hold his paper in his hand and at the same time work the slide-advance button. Compounding the problem, no light was provided so that the presenter could see his notes when the house lights were finally turned out to see the slides.

Efforts to correct the situation naturally delayed the session. After ten minutes, I announced to the audience that Walt Disney was apparently unable to provide us with appropriate audiovisual equipment. With rare efficiency, a Disney representative appeared at the end of the first paper, not so much to apologize as to assure us that the Dolphin and the Swan, the major hotels on the grounds of Disney World and the location of most of the conference rooms, were run, not by the Disney organization, but by an independent operator. In short, it wasn’t Disney’s fault!

The next session I went to, on the archaeology of Jerusalem, was having the same problems; as a result, it started 20 minutes late—practically a disaster considering how tightly scheduled the sessions are to begin with.

But that was only the beginning. Buffet and restaurant lines were impossibly long and slow—and expensive. A cup of coffee in the hotel lobby was $3. And we were trapped. You couldn’t walk to a nearby restaurant. As I heard someone remark, “You could go into town; it’s only a $40 cab ride.” That’s an exaggeration; it’s only about $25. I say “about” because the cabs don’t have meters, and the cost can vary from driver to driver. And there is little taxicab competition. Disney cleverly allows only one company to pick up regularly at Disney World. With this service, a cab to the airport costs $44. A group 039of us shared one on the way home; one of my fellow passengers remarked about the “groundswell of dissatisfaction” with Disney World that most participants were talking about. The other quipped, “It is a volcanic groundswell.” The anger in many cases was palpable.

How about sleeping? Well, the beds were good, and the rooms were nice. The only problem was the wake-up service. It wasn’t working right. Many of us got an unwanted wake-up call at 6 a.m. that the hotel staff couldn’t seem to turn off. The hotel operator explained that there was nothing they could do about it; the problem was with the “computer in the basement,” over which the telephone operators had no control. The wake-up calls went out randomly, the operator told me. Maybe I would be lucky the next morning.

Even when wide awake, it was difficult to find the various conference rooms where a particular session was being held. The Dolphin Hotel is not only architecturally complex (even more than the ancient structures we were trying to study), but extremely poorly designed. And there were very few people to ask for directions. For the first two days, everyone seemed perpetually lost.

Say you wanted to sneak off for a couple of hours in the late afternoon to go to one of the amusement parks for which Disney World is famous. I chose Epcot. To enter, you had to pay the day rate: $42. Once there, the theme was “buy, buy, buy.” But let’s face it: The kids loved it. The problem was ours. Disney World was not made for scholars.

In one respect my comparison of Disney World with Kansas City is inapt. As one prominent European scholar told me, Disney World looks like Babylon, right down to the gardens, which can hardly be said of Kansas City.

Nevertheless, the quality of the scholarship made up for it all.

A clear highlight of the meeting of nearly 7,300 scholars was the first public announcement of a little lump of clay (called a bulla) impressed with the seal of King Hezekiah, one of the most important kings of Judah, who ruled from about 715 to 687 B.C. During his long reign, Hezekiah enforced a religious reform, purging the society of syncretistic elements and centralizing the worship of Yahweh in Jerusalem. He also dug the famous tunnel named after him, which brought water into the city of Jerusalem during the ultimately unsuccessful siege of the Assyrian monarch Sennacherib in 701 B.C. The bulla was presented by Professor Frank Moore Cross of Harvard in a session organized by the Biblical Archaeology Society. The bulla is in the private collection of Shlomo Moussaieff of London and Herzliya, Israel. Professor 040Cross has prepared a special report for BAR on this extraordinary find.

Moussaieff is also the owner of another star of the Annual Meeting—the seal of an Ammonite king, not seen for approximately 2,500 years. It is the only seal of an Ammonite king yet discovered. The seal belonged to King Ba‘alis, who ruled the kingdom of Ammon across the Jordan River at the time Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians in the early sixth century B.C. He is mentioned by the prophet Jeremiah as plotting to assassinate Gedaliah, who was appointed governor of Judah by the Babylonians (Jeremiah 40:14). The name Ba‘alis means “Ba‘al saves.” The seal was presented in a paper by Robert Deutsch of Haifa University in Israel, who, like Professor Cross, has prepared a report for BAR.

Question: Where did these two extraordinary finds come from? Answer: the antiquities market. In other words, no one really knows where. In a separate paper, André Lemaire of the Sorbonne noted that over 90 percent of inscribed seals from Israel and Judah come from the antiquities market; their provenance is unknown.

Why don’t more seals show up in the many controlled excavations that have been carried out in the region over the last century—especially now that controlled excavations carefully sift the dirt for small finds? And how are the seals that come onto the antiquities market found? No one knows. In a private discussion, Cross suggested they probably come from illegally excavated tombs. “You don’t find tombs when digging tells,” he said, adding, “Archaeologists are not much interested in tombs.” (I’m not sure I agree with the latter statement, especially if tombs offer the opportunity to recover important seals.) But, that would not explain the bullae—bullae aren’t found in tombs. True, he conceded. The bullae must have come from excavations. A major collection of over 200 bullae published in 1986 by Nahman Avigad^b “certainly came from an excavation in Jerusalem,” Cross said. That means they were either stolen from a legal excavation or they came from a still-undiscovered illegal excavation.^c

The debate over the tenth century B.C., the time of the United Monarchy of David and Solomon, continued unabated at the Annual Meeting. Two issues are involved. The first concerns what evidence we have that dates to the tenth century B.C. Israel Finkelstein, a leading Israeli archaeologist presently codirecting (with David Ussishkin) excavations at Megiddo, has recently proposed lowering by a century the date of what was thought to be 11th- and 10th-century pottery. What archaeologists had thought was 11th-century pottery is actually 10th-century, and what was thought to be 10th-century is really 9th-century, says Finkelstein.

The second issue questions whether a United Monarchy, and even David and Solomon, ever existed. Was there a settlement at Jerusalem when David was supposed to have conquered it? And if David and Solomon did exist, was their “kingdom” really a small chiefdom rather than a true state?

Finkelstein’s revised, lower chronology has been opposed by another archaeological star, Amihai Mazar of Hebrew University, who is currently directing excavations at Tel Rehov in the Jordan Valley. Finkelstein and Mazar have clashed swords in a series of articles in the scholarly journal Levant,¹ wherein Finkelstein has accused Mazar of having a “sentimental, somewhat romantic approach” to the issue, and of being wedded to “orthodox biblical ideology.”² In Orlando, Mazar declared Finkelstein’s revised chronology “completely impossible.”

The evidence from Mazar’s excavation at Tel Rehov is indeed compelling. There he has delineated two major strata (each with sub-phases) from the tenth to ninth century B.C. In one of the rooms in the upper, later stratum was a deposit of carbonized grain; the floors and walls of this stratum were supported by wooden beams. Both the grain and the wood were subjected to carbon 14 tests. The grain, which was placed there near the time of the destruction of this stratum, dated from 916 to 832 B.C. (with a probability of 95 percent). The wooden beams, which were placed there when the building was constructed, dated to the tenth century B.C.³ The lower, earlier stratum must therefore be dated even earlier in the tenth century B.C. This provides a solid chronological typology for the tenth to ninth century B.C.

Much of Finkelstein’s case for a lower chronology is based on pottery from Tel Jezreel, where Finkelstein’s colleague David Ussishkin has excavated a destruction level that he attributes to Jehu’s attack on Jezreel in the ninth century B.C. (about 843 B.C.), as described in the Bible (2 Kings 9). The pottery found in this destruction level, argues Finkelstein, must be ninth century, and it is the 041same (or “somewhat similar,” to use Finkelstein’s words)⁴ as pottery found elsewhere (including at Megiddo) that has been attributed (wrongly, in Finkelstein’s view) to the tenth century. Mazar first notes the irony that Finkelstein himself must rely on the Bible—yes, the Bible—to identify Jezreel’s destruction level and its date. Mazar does not disagree with this identification. But, he says, some of the same forms of pottery used in the tenth century continued to be used in the ninth century, as shown by the pottery from Tel Rehov (and Hazor).^d

This is not the end of the debate. It will doubtless continue in a number of forums. My sense is that the tide is flowing against Finkelstein’s position, although he continues to be regarded as a brilliant theorist and a knowledgeable and careful excavator. The matter will not be resolved by counting votes, but it is nevertheless significant, at least to us nonexpert bystanders, that not only Amihai Mazar but Amnon Ben-Tor of Hebrew University (currently excavating Hazor), Lawrence Stager of Harvard (currently excavating Ashkelon) and William Dever of the University of Arizona (the excavator of Gezer and former director of the Albright Institute in Jerusalem) all seem to be coming out against Finkelstein. And no one of note appears to be coming to his aid. Even Finkelstein’s eminent codirector at Megiddo, David Ussishkin, while lowering the date of what was previously considered the Solomonic gate at Megiddo from the tenth to the ninth century (on stratigraphic grounds), has not come out four-square in favor of Finkelstein’s revision of the pottery chronology.

Jane Cahill, following her article on Jerusalem in BAR,^e expanded her analysis of the Stepped-Stone Structure to demonstrate that Jerusalem was indeed an important city in the tenth century B.C. when David captured it. The Stepped-Stone Structure is unparalleled in Canaan, she said. We must go to Ras Shamra (Ugarit), in Syria, or even to Troy, in Anatolia, to find anything as massive and monumental.

But when was it built? Interestingly, the earliest excavator of the structure, Irish archaeologist R.A.S. Macalister, who dug here in the 1920s, dated it to the Jebusite period, the Jebusites being the people who, according to the Bible, lived in Jerusalem at the time David captured it. Subsequent excavators, Dame Kathleen Kenyon and Yigal Shiloh, dated the Stepped-Stone Structure much later, however—to after David’s conquest.

The key to dating the structure is the terraces below and adjacent to it. All agree that these terraces are early. According to Cahill, who is preparing the final report on this area for the Shiloh excavation (Shiloh died in 1987 without completing a final report), both the Stepped-Stone Structure and the terraces beneath, with their spine and perpendicular rib walls, are part of the same structure, architecturally interlocked, bonded together. The latest pottery in the rubble core between the rib walls dates to the 13th to 12th century B.C., the Late Bronze Age. David captured the city in about 1000 B.C. So the Stepped-Stone Structure defended the city when David captured it.

The Stepped-Stone Structure stood at the northeast corner of the city, at the most vulnerable spot in its defenses. The structure survives today to a height of 60 courses. Cahill associates the structure with the Fortress of Zion, which the Bible says defended the city when David captured it (2 Samuel 5:7).

Cahill contrasted this structure—massive, technologically complex and architecturally sophisticated (it probably served as foundation and support for a huge fortress above it)—with the simple village architecture in the small sites surrounding Jerusalem at the time: Jerusalem must have been a powerful center. Cahill picked up a suggestion made long ago by Professor Benjamin Mazar, that the Jebusites were a Hittite people. The Stepped-Stone Structure lends some support to this hypothesis, she said.

On the other hand, another speaker, Gunnar Lehman of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Beer-Sheva, stressed how few people lived in early Israel. According to estimates based on recent archaeological surveys, in the entire Late Bronze Age central hill country, there were only about 4,400 people living in villages before the arrival of the Israelites. The largest pre-Israelite settlement was Hebron, with a mere 600 people. Many more people lived here in Iron Age I (1200–1000 B.C.), presumably incoming Israelites. But even then the numbers were small, especially in Judah. Although 184 settlements with Iron Age I remains have been surveyed, almost all of them are in Israel; only 18 sites are in Judah. The total population of Israel and Judah at this time was about 22,000 people.

For Iron Age IIa (the tenth century B.C., the period of the United Monarchy), 206 sites have been located in this area, with an estimated population of 46,000 people. But only 34 of these sites are in Judah, home to a mere 8,000 people. Lehman questioned whether the kingdom of Solomon, with a power base of only 8,000 people, could possibly have been as grand and influential as the Bible paints it.

In a note of caution, Lehman emphasized that there could have been a substantial number of nomads and others who did not live in permanent houses; their shelters would not have survived, and therefore his numbers may need to be increased. Also he assumed that 064200 people lived in each hectare (about 2.5 acres). Others assume 250 or even 300 people per hectare. But even if his figures were increased by 50 percent, they would still be relatively small. He admitted that he was, frankly, surprised by the data.

Another bit of interesting evidence that points to a later development of Israel and Judah as states: André Lemaire reports that the earliest inscribed Hebrew seals date only to about 800 B.C. (Two possible exceptions, which may or may not be earlier, are probably Philistine rather than Hebrew.)⁵

Research on the Dead Sea Scrolls continues apace. As usual, several sessions were devoted to the scrolls. In one of the most interesting talks, Eugene Ulrich of the University of Notre Dame described the fluidity of the Biblical texts from Qumran, which date from about 250 B.C. to nearly 70 A.D. Later, at some time in the second or possibly the third century A.D. (we don’t have enough late datable texts to be certain exactly when), there was an “abrupt freezing point” of the text. Up to that time, as the Biblical texts from Qumran show, there was a “fully accepted pluriformity,” Ulrich said. (A similar conclusion can be derived from Biblical quotations in the New Testament, the Talmud, Josephus and other early sources.) In short, a variety of textual editions were acceptable, as reflected, for example, in surviving Qumran texts of Exodus, Jeremiah and Daniel. Ulrich’s study indicates that the Jewish sages who standarized the Biblical text had no particular basis for choosing one edition of a book over another. Moreover, there is little or no evidence that they consciously collected and then compared the various editions when they finally determined the canon, the authoritative list of authoritative texts.

Ulrich distinguished canon from textual fluidity. From the third century B.C. to the first century A.D. (the period of the Qumran texts), there was no Biblical canon although the Torah (the five books of Moses) was considered authoritative, as were several varying collections of prophetical books and of psalms. But there was no Bible as we know it, although there were various editions of Holy Scripture.

In Jewish tradition, the third section of the Hebrew Bible is known as the Writings (Kethuvim in Hebrew). (The first two sections are the Torah and the Prophets; the latter consists of the former prophets, or historical books, and the latter prophets, or the literary prophets.) The evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls indicates that numerous books in addition to the Torah and Prophets were considered authoritative at Qumran. As Matthias Henze of Rice University stated in another talk, “Authority precedes canonicity.” Some of the Qumran texts made the eventual authoritative list of the Writings; others did not. Different faith communities ultimately made different decisions regarding which ones made the canon. Judith made it into the Catholic Bible, but not the Jewish Bible. Enoch made it into neither, but it did make it into at least one eastern faith community’s canon. Jubilees was an authoritative text at Qumran, but it didn’t make it into the canon of any surviving faith community.

What led to the canonization of the Hebrew Bible, or more precisely, the Scriptures of Judaism? The two Jewish revolts against Rome (in 66–70 A.D. and 132–135 A.D.), opined Ulrich. The Jews had lost lives and their land, and they were threatened with the loss of their culture. With the rise of Christianity, they were faced even with the loss of their identity. This turmoil resulted in the canonization of the Hebrew Bible.

Many other important talks could be highlighted. After all, there were nearly 500 papers presented at the Annual Meeting. They varied from “Baby Becky, Menarche, and Prepubescent Betrothal/Marriage in Ancient Israel” to “Body Language in the Gospel of Thomas.” An entire session, consisting of five papers, was devoted to the excavations at Ashkelon (directed by Lawrence Stager). Another session, consisting of eight papers, was devoted to “Ugaritic Studies and Northwest Semitic Epigraphy.” On and on it went, at an almost dizzying pace. No review of the Annual Meeting can make any claim to comprehensiveness.

For the second year, ASOR (the American Schools of Oriental Research) was not a part of the Annual Meeting. ASOR, the premier American organization of Near Eastern archaeologists, held its own meeting at another Orlando hotel three days before the larger meeting.

Many ASOR members still regret the split—the result of financial considerations, personalities and pride. But the 065secession now seems permanent. Despite denials, the rancor runs deep.

In some ways the ASOR meeting was the more pleasant of the two. It was clearly cozier, less frantic. With only 300 participants, there was more time to chat and socialize. At the same time, session after session of purely descriptive and often technical dig reports of little wider significance was, frankly, boring. Interestingly, ASOR president Joe Seger chaired a more general session at the SBL Annual Meeting—“Major Excavations of Biblical Interest.” Eric Meyers, ASOR’s immediate past president, chaired a session at the SBL Annual Meeting on “Jewish, Christian and Pagan Interaction in Late Antique Syria.” More sessions like this are needed at the ASOR meeting if it is to draw a significant number of people. Truth be told, most of the papers at the ASOR meeting were given by junior faculty; the stars were, for the most part, at the SBL Annual Meeting.

ASOR is planning its meeting next year in Boston, just before the Annual Meeting. This time, however, ASOR will overlap with the Annual Meeting, thereby making it even more difficult to attend both meetings. There is less and less reason for ASOR to hold its meeting in the same city as, and during the days just before, the Annual Meeting. Fewer and fewer people are attending both meetings. Of the 300 or so attendees at the ASOR meeting, I would guess that fewer than 50 went on to attend the Annual Meeting. And those who did probably can afford to attend two completely separate meetings and would find it more comfortable to do so, rather than sit through one meeting right after the other. Wall-to-wall lectures for nearly a solid week can be exhausting. The questions relating to ASOR’s meeting remain difficult. And ASOR continues to face a doubtful future—just as it gears up to celebrate its centennial in 2000.

Query: Why is Disney World like Kansas City? Answer: Both proved hopelessly inept and inadequate in hosting the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) and the American Academy of Religion (AAR).a It will be a long time before the Annual Meeting returns to Orlando. It started early. With hundreds of people assembled to listen to four great scholars talk about the latest on ancient seals and seal impressions, no one from the hotel was there to tell us how to turn out the lights so we could see the slides. But that was just one of […]