Absorbing Archaeology at the Jerusalem Congress

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A congress on Biblical archaeology can’t help but be successful in Jerusalem. The subject seeps from Jerusalem’s stones. And the Second International Congress on Biblical Archaeology, held between June 24 and July 4, 1990, was indeed successful.^a

Imagine: The festive opening held in the ancient Citadel of the Old City, a structure dating back to Herodian times and even earlier. More than 600 people from all over the world—from Japan to Brazil, from South Africa to Norway, from Czechoslovakia and Romania to the United States, Canada, England and France, indeed from 25 countries from the four corners of the earth, including many of the greatest living Biblical scholars and archaeologists—seated on stone tiers, listening first to a brass ensemble play Vivaldi and Handel; then to greetings from the president of Israel, Chaim Herzog (for whose entrance we all rise); the mayor of the city, Teddy Kollek; and the chairman of the organizing committee, the venerable Israeli archaeologist and excavator of Tel Dan, Avraham Biran.

In the words of Professor Biran:

“It is fitting that we meet for the opening session here, in the Jerusalem Citadel, where history and legend, fact and fancy, religion and politics, reality and imagination meet, challenge and complement each other. It was Napoleon who urged his soldiers to glory by appealing to their vision of 40 centuries of history. For us, meeting in this awe-inspiring setting, the wings of history, ancient and modern, beat all around us.”

The year 1990 marks the centenary of the first scientific excavation of a tell in Palestine—William Flinders Petrie’s excavation of Tell el-Hesi. So the evening’s program consisted of informal histories of the national schools—the French, the British, the Germans, the Italians, the Americans and the Israelis—that have worked in the land of Israel, with pictures projected onto a huge outdoor screen. (The Israelis were also marking the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Israel Exploration Society.) By far the most fascinating presentation of the evening was that of Yolande Hodson on behalf of the London-based Palestine Exploration Fund, who drew on the PEF’s extraordinary pictorial and textual archives and who recounted the adventures and accomplishments of giants like Charles Warren, Claude Conder, Charles Wilson and Petrie himself, to name only a few.

Two days of papers came next, then two and a half days of field trips to archaeological sites, then back to the lecture hall. Participants could choose from a variety of field trips. At most of the sites, the excavators themselves were there to greet the visitors and explain the site. No one could see them all. Choosing was difficult. At Lachish, in the shadow of the great mound conquered by Sennacherib, the crowd ate in what amounted to a beautiful outdoor cafe set up for the occasion in a grove of pine trees; Israeli flags fluttered in the cool afternoon breeze, tiers of elaborately arranged fruit adorned the tables. As we ate, we looked up at the gateways, entry towers and defense walls of Lachish, recently and impressively reconstructed.

The congress lectures were, as usual, a mixed bag. But the common reaction among veterans was that the program was less focused—and consequently, less interesting—at this congress than at the First International Congress of Biblical Archaeology, six years ago.^b Then the issue of Biblical vs. Syro-Palestinian archaeology seemed to organize the discussion. A major problem—the emergence of Israel as a nation—provided a central theme to be explored. At this congress, the topics and titles often sounded better than the lectures. No central Biblical issue was explored. (As William Dever said in his paper concerning the archaeological enterprise as a whole, “culture and cultural change, not questions of Biblical history, became the focus of fieldwork and research.”)

And Yigael Yadin, Israel’s most charismatic, wide-ranging and creative archaeologist, was missing from this congress. He died in 1984. Yigal Shiloh, the excavator of the City of David, the oldest inhabited part of Jerusalem, had also died—at age 50—since the last congress. His presence—and absence—was especially keenly felt on a tour of the City of David.

Also missing from this year’s list of luminaries was Benjamin Mazar, the doyen of Israeli archaeologists, now in his eighties. A disagreement over the organization of the congress left him on the outside, so he spent the week at Nahariya, a coastal resort town in northern Israel. A number of foreign scholars made pilgrimages to Nahariya to see him.

Nevertheless, a wide variety of trenchant papers were delivered by major scholars. We especially enjoyed Sharon Herbert’s presentation on Tel Anafa, discussing the Hellenization of the site and the difficulty in determining the ethnicity of the inhabitants, and Baruch Levine’s analysis of the ideological function of open-air cult sites as deduced from their architecture and design, thus defining what it means to be “in the presence of the Lord.”

Frank Cross spoke about a fad that developed in the 11th century B.C. (the time of the Judges): Archers (perhaps warriors) inscribed their names and often their titles on bronze arrowheads; he described two such arrowheads, as yet unpublished, and explained how they could be dated by the shape and stance of the letters.

Gabriel Barkay considered whether the cultural break marked by the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. was as sharp as generally assumed. Although in 586 B.C. the kingdom of Judah came 052to an end, the Babylonian onslaught left Galilee, Samaria and the Negev unaffected. In the land of Benjamin, just north of Jerusalem, no destruction levels have been found in excavated sites. The same is true south of Jerusalem. Even in Jerusalem itself occupation was uninterrupted by the Babylonian destruction, and the same ceramic traditions persisted for another half-century and more.

One criticism of the congress was that relatively few women were given positions on the program. For this reason, at least one prominent American archaeologist, Carol Meyers of Duke University, stayed away in protest. Her husband Eric Meyers, president of the American Schools of Oriental Research (the principal American organization of professional Near Eastern archaeologists) made the following statement:

“Though the Congress was truly rich in so many ways, its most glaring lack was the absence of women presenters. In view of the fact that women in archaeology world-wide and in Israel, in particular, play so central a role, it is regrettable that more did not participate in an official way. In addition, I would like to see a greater sensitivity on the part of all speakers to the issue of inclusive language.”

The session on the Dead Sea Scrolls belied BAR’s prediction in at least one respect. We said that it would be held in a room too small for all those who wanted to hear.^c Thus forewarned, the organizers scheduled the event for a large auditorium. They were not disappointed; the turnout, in the words of Shemaryabu Talmon, who introduced the speakers, was “massive.”

Talmon explained that the Dead Sea Scrolls are so important because they enlarge our understanding of the transmission history of the Biblical text, as well as the diversity of ancient Judaism and the background of nascent Christianity. Moreover, they are the descriptions not by outsiders, but by the insiders themselves. They are the bridge “between Mikra and Mishnah.” (Mikra is the Hebrew word for “reading” and refers to the Pentateuch or more generally the Hebrew Bible; Mishnah is the core document of the Talmud, assembled in about 200 A.D.)

Jonas Greenfield, a member of the newly active Israeli Oversight Committee and the recent recipient of a new scroll assignment from J. T. Milik, recounted the impressively large amount of scroll material that has been published and that is about to be published. He blamed “sensation-seekers” for the 053controversy surrounding scroll publication. He noted that Frank Cross, an original member of the scroll publication team had “passed on” most of his texts to his students and that John Strugnell, another original member and now chief editor of the team, had likewise “divested himself” of many of his texts, as had J. T. Milik, the third surviving member of the team.

Greenfield hoped that all the texts would be published by the “end of the decade.”

Joseph Baumgarten, recently assigned the Damascus Document (also from J. T. Milik), described these fragments and the laws they contained. Fragments of eight manuscripts of the Damascus Document have survived on 18 plates. The largest fragment contains 275 lines, the smallest only 18. The total is 689 lines. Dated paleographically, the fragments range from the Hasmonean to the Herodian period. Prior to the discovery of these fragments from Cave 4 at Qumran, the Damascus Document was known only from two medieval copies recovered at the end of the last century in the famous Cairo Genizah.^d About half (326 lines) of the textual material in the Qumran fragments is also contained in manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah. The other half consists of material that was previously unknown; the previously unknown material includes passages from both the beginning and end of the work. The corpus of laws from the Damascus Document will be doubled when the fragments from Qumran are published. According to Baumgarten, “a new appraisal of the genre and purpose of the Damascus Document would now be in order.” But this can be done—at least by scholars other than Baumgarten—only when the fragments are published and thereby made available to the entire scholarly world.

As if to prove BAR wrong—BAR had said Baumgarten would describe the fragments, but would not show them—Baumgarten flashed slides of the fragments on the screen. Of course the few seconds during which they appeared were insufficient to study them. The result was that the audience was tantalized, if not taunted. Someone in the audience sought to take pictures of the projected slides, but he was asked to stop.

I cannot close without telling you about a special event for those attending the congress under the auspices of the Biblical Archaeology Society. We had a banquet at a fantastic restaurant in a rambling old 19th-century stone 054structure outside of Lifta, just west of Jerusalem, in the Judean Hills overlooking the border between Judah and Benjamin. As I greeted everyone, I told them I didn’t know how good the food would be, but the building and the view were incredible. The food was just as good. We invited some senior Israeli scholars to join us for the dinner—Shemaryahu Talmon, Moshe Weinfeld, Ephraim Stern, Gabriel Barkay, Vassilios Tzaferis, Michal Artzy. Each of them told me afterwards how impressed he or she was with the BAR group of over 40 people. We were equally impressed with the warmth and knowledge of the scholars—a truly memorable occasion, as, on the whole, was the entire congress.

A congress on Biblical archaeology can’t help but be successful in Jerusalem. The subject seeps from Jerusalem’s stones. And the Second International Congress on Biblical Archaeology, held between June 24 and July 4, 1990, was indeed successful.a Imagine: The festive opening held in the ancient Citadel of the Old City, a structure dating back to Herodian times and even earlier. More than 600 people from all over the world—from Japan to Brazil, from South Africa to Norway, from Czechoslovakia and Romania to the United States, Canada, England and France, indeed from 25 countries from the four corners of […]