If it were up to me, I would change the name of the Annual Meeting (the joint annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, the American Academy of Religion and the American Schools of Oriental Research [ASOR]) to the Annual Miracle. It simply blows my mind to see 8,000 Bible scholars and archaeologists get together for four days (this past year in Philadelphia from November 18–21) to give and listen to over a thousand lectures, sometimes dozens to choose from given simultaneously, often with four or five enticing subjects at the same time. No one can attend more than a small percentage of them, and I always worry that my choices are not representative.1 But, as they say, what can you do!
The winner of this year’s prize for the lecture with the most esoteric title is Jack Lightstone of Concordia University. The title: “From Rabbinic Priestly Scribes to Rabbinic Sages: A Socio-Rhetorical Perspective on Tosefta’s (Dis)simulation [sic] of Mishnah’s Rhetorical Features.” The runner-up is Stuart Creason of the University of Chicago, who gave a paper entitled: “The Interaction of Syntax, Verb Form and Discourse 053Structure in the Karatepe Inscription.”
I do not mean to make fun of these papers. They are serious papers for specialists. But an overall look at the titles indicates that specialization is proceeding not only apace, but with lightning speed. There is too much dross and not enough gold. Too many scholars know that the only way to get their school to pay their way to the meeting is to give a paper; that they want to come to the Annual Meeting to learn should be enough to get their way paid.
As there are too many poor specialized papers, there are too few major synthetic papers by leading scholars. One reason, it is said, is that they are fearful of making mistakes, of being pilloried by their colleagues. They are too risk averse.
Archaeologists, too, are sometimes reluctant to publish reports, it is sometimes said, because they fear exposing themselves to criticism. It is safer to say nothing. Well, perhaps so. A paper by Jodi Magness of Tufts University examined a dig report on a synagogue excavation in Galilee. The excavators, who laudably had published a massive final report on their excavation, said they had found two synagogues, one on top of the other. Based on her study of the evidence made available by the final report, Magness said the excavators had misinterpreted the evidence: There was only one synagogue that had two phases. Eric Meyers, one of the excavators and soon-to-be-retiring president of ASOR, disagrees. Magness failed to look at the architectural evidence, he says; Magness looked only at the pottery and the stratigraphy. This is obviously only the beginning of an intense debate. Already two international experts, Israel’s Ehud Netzer and American Dennis Groh, have at least tentatively endorsed Magness’s findings.
Among the other archaeological offerings, a paper on the Edomites by Tel Aviv University’s Itzhaq Beit-Arieh especially intrigued me. Until the last few decades, almost everything we’ve known about Israel’s perennial enemy, the Edomites, came from the Bible. Now archaeology is bringing this elusive people and their distinctive culture out of the shadows, with some extraordinary new finds at Edomite religious shrines in the desert of Judah. I won’t say more about this because much of the material will soon be the subject of articles in BAR.
Overall, the hottest topics continue to be the historical Jesus and, a closely aligned topic, the relationship between Judaism and Christianity during the early centuries of the Common Era. Most of the sessions on these topics were filled to overflowing. The floors and aisles, as well as the seats were filled; people at the doorway bent with cupped ears in the hope of hearing scholars like John Meier (A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus), Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet) and N.T. Wright (Jesus and the Triumph of God), all of whom spoke at one session on the subject. If I detect a theme, it is that if we are to better understand Jesus, we must better understand the Judaism of his time. As John Meier said, the Council of Chalcedon decided that Jesus was “both truly divine and truly (not somewhat) human. If he was truly human, he was truly Jewish.”
At another session on the same subject, the participants explored ways in which Rabbinic literature, despite the fact that it was written down centuries after Jesus, can enlighten the Jewish background of Christianity, but also how early Christian literature, including the New Testament, can help us better understand Judaism and Rabbinic literature. As argued by Herbert Basser of Queen’s University in Canada, “Both the New Testament and Rabbinic literature have a common heritage at some primary level. [Each] is enriched by our knowledge of the other.” New scholarly paths are opening up.
BAR readers who are interested in historical Jesus research and related issues may want to subscribe to our sister publication, Bible Review, which is planning special features on these issues in the coming year by some of the world’s leading scholars—in “language meant to be understood,” as we say at the Biblical Archaeology Society. That is not to say that there will be agreement. On the contrary, there will be considerable disagreement. But we guarantee that you will have a deeper understanding of the issues and will have enough information to decide for yourself where you stand on these issues.
Among the anniversaries marked at the meetings was the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Women’s Bible, edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Stanton and the women who worked with her reproduced and commented on passages in the Bible, in both the Old and New Testaments, in which women were accorded inferior status or were conspicuous by their absence. As explained by Bernard Levinson of Indiana University, Stanton was shunned by the church of her day because of her claims to feminine equality and by the women’s movement because of her historical-critical approach to Scripture.
In a related session on Biblical law, an insightful paper asked why ancient Israelite society placed a cultural value on virginity, as did ancient Greek and ancient Near Eastern societies generally. Tikva Frymer-Kensky of the University of Chicago offered at least six possible explanations: (1) men want to assure their paternity; (2) women were considered property and men did not want to buy damaged goods, so to speak; (3) a fertile field must be pure; (4) requiring virginity by law was a way to assert state control; (5) fathers wanted to maintain control of their families; (6) it is related to the incest taboo (if a father can’t have her, no one else can). Frymer-Kensky admitted that, in the end, we are left with speculation.
One other paper deserves special mention; this paper is treated in the postscript on the next page.
I hope this gives some idea of the range of papers and why anyone with an interest in the Bible or archaeology should attend. Next year’s Annual Meeting has the added attraction of being in culinary heaven, New Orleans. Hope to see you there—if not in a lecture hall, at least in a restaurant.
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Travel Scholarships: How to Apply
BAR is again offering travel scholarships to speakers at the next Annual Meeting, scheduled for New Orleans, La., November 23–26, 1996. If you cannot afford to attend without a scholarship and are either an Arab national from Arab lands, an Israeli Ph.D. candidate or an Israeli woman who has obtained a Ph.D. within 10 years of the application date, you are eligible to apply. The scholarships include $800 to help defray the costs of travel from the Middle East and $200 for registration fees, meals and lodging.
To apply, tell us the title of your paper and write a brief description. Let us know your background, education and experience. Be sure to indicate how you meet our eligibility requirements and to notify us when your paper has been accepted to the Annual Meeting program. (It is the applicant’s responsibility to arrange a place on the program. Deadlines for receipt of program proposals are in early March for ASOR, AAR and SBL.)
Mail your application to BAR, Meeting Scholarships, 4710 41st St., NW, Washington, DC 20016, by June 1, 1996.
Scholar Claims Bible Scholars Suppress Palestinian History in Favor of Israelites
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Twenty years ago—in the third issue of BAR—I wrote an article entitled “Kathleen Kenyon’s Anti-Zionist Politics—Does It Affect Her Work?” The article shocked and angered many in the academic world, which was not accustomed to this kind of journalism—or rather was not accustomed to asking this kind of question in public.
We have come a long way in 20 years. What I suggested may have been implicit in Kenyon’s work has become very nearly explicit in a paper delivered by Keith W. Whitelam at the Annual Meeting last November. A professor of religious studies at the University of Stirling, in Scotland, Whitelam accuses Biblical scholars and archaeologists, especially Israeli Zionists, of distorting ancient history in order to suppress the history of the ancient Palestinians who were there long before the Israelites.
Apparently Whitelam’s paper was considered so significant that it was delivered in one of the very few sessions sponsored jointly by the Society of Biblical Literature, the American Academy of Religion and the American Schools of Oriental Research. Almost all of the other talks are sponsored by one or the other, sometimes by two, but only on the rarest of occasions by all three.
Let it be said at the outset that Whitelam is no kook. He is smart and articulate. What he says is grounded in serious scholarship. In part, that is what makes it so insidious. In another session, on archaeological fakes, the distinguished senior research fellow in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oscar Muscarella, admonished the audience to beware of forgeries of ancient Greek vases built up from a genuine potsherd base; good forgers know that a suspicious curator will probably take a scraping from the base to test the authenticity of the entire vase. Whitelam constructs his argument similarly. On an authentic scholarly base, he builds faked scholarship.
For Whitelam, the scholarly effort to reconstruct “the ancient past … is a political act.” The key word here is “is”; not “was,” but “is.” This “political” reconstruction, in Whitelam’s judgment, “continues.”
The 19th-century purview, says Whitelam, based on its understanding of “the rational, superiority of European and Western civilization which has its main taproot in the supposed ethical monotheism of ancient Israel” is an ideology that still “continues” (emphasis supplied). Biblical scholarship of the 19th century and early 20th century “dehumanizes” and “devalues indigenous cultures and histories.” He contends that these attitudes also dominate current scholarship.
Whitelam quotes an address by the Bishop of Salisbury to the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1903 in which the bishop referred to “the abomination of Canaanite culture which was superseded by the Israelite culture.”
Whitelam then proceeds to examine the work of the dean of Biblical archaeologists from the 1930s to the 1960s, William Foxwell Albright. Whitelam declares him guilty of an “undisguised racism which is staggering … in its intensity” because he attempted to defend the herem, the destruction of towns and their entire populations during the Israelite conquest of Canaan.
Whitelam claims that it is impossible to write objective, disinterested history. This is a widely held view of modern historians. Yet that can never be the end of the observation. To make it balanced, several additional things must be said. First, some historians are clearly more biased, more ideologically motivated, than others. Second, historians, Biblical and otherwise, can be expected to try to become aware of their biases, to examine them carefully and to try very hard to avoid letting these biases affect their work. Third, some historians are much better at avoiding biased accounts than others. Whitelam’s biases are painfully obvious; this is in marked contrast, as we shall see, to the work of the best archaeologists and Biblical scholars working today.
In judging Albright, Whitelam focuses on a vulnerable observation concerning the herem, damning Albright as a “racist” and ignoring an extraordinary body of scholarship that remains unrivalled, although a significant part of it is dated. It is a mark of patricidal scholars like Whitelam that they judge their scholarly fathers, not by the standards of their day, but by current standards. It is not that these patricidal scholars are totally wrong, only zthat they are woefully unbalanced and mean-spirited. But that is not the worst of Whitelam.
Whitelam rightfully speaks out against earlier generations of scholars who understood history as an evolutionary development by which later peoples replaced earlier peoples in a continually enlightened stream of progress. According to this now outmoded historiography, Israel replaced (and improved on) earlier civilizations (just as Christianity replaced and improved on Judaism).
With considerable cunning, Whitelam applies these principles to current scholars, especially Israeli scholars.
The fact is that in the last decade more and more Biblical scholars and archaeologists have been very careful to try to be as objective and balanced as possible. They have been remarkably good at redressing the biases of past scholarship, deserving our praise rather than our condemnation.
Moreover, recent scholarship has been unusually successful in its appreciation of non-Israelite cultures. No one would deny the Tendenz of Biblical authors to favor the Israelites in preference to other peoples (although the Israelites are also roundly condemned by Biblical authors when they deviate from God’s laws). But mainstream scholarship has been assiduous in redressing this Tendenz.
The pre-Biblical (and contemporaneous) civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia have long been the subject of intense, appreciative and independent scholarship.
More recently, Israel’s arch-enemy, the Philistines, whose name was once synonymous with crass boorishness, 056have been brought out of the shadows. We now understand the Philistines to have had a distinctive material culture in many ways superior to that of the Israelites. We know this thanks primarily to the work of two Israeli archaeologists, Trude and Moshe Dothan.
Other scholars are bringing to light in considerable distinctiveness the Edomites, the Moabites, the Arameans, the Hurrians and other contemporaneous cultures.
The Canaanites (who Whitelam thinks have been especially badly treated; he refers to them as Palestinians) have also been the subject of much recent research. Their literary output, as reflected in the Ugaritic tablets, has been widely praised as a predecessor of Israelite literary output. (Whitelam mentions the Ugaritic tablets as if he were the first scholar to appreciate their literary significance and elevated morality, as if other scholars were trying to suppress appreciation of them.) Modern archaeologists have also stressed the continuities between Late Bronze Age Canaanite civilization and Early Iron Age Israelite civilization.
Recent finds unearthed by Israeli archaeologists show that some Israelites believed that their God Yahweh had a female consort.
The conquest of Canaan, as described in the Bible, has been the subject of intense criticism. Many scholars, both here and in Israel, regard early Israel as made up mostly of Canaanite peasants.
As I write this, I have just read a column by the distinguished Bible scholar Bernhard Anderson that is to appear in our sister magazine, Bible Review. Anderson refers to Psalm 29 as “an ancient poem that Israel may have adapted from Canaanite culture.” This raises no eyebrows on anyone’s part.
This is surely enough to show that modern scholars are hard at work—and with considerable success—to give us as objective an account of ancient history as they possibly can. They surely have no hesitation in redressing what may be seen as the Biblical authors’ bias, recognizing that the Biblical authors’ primary concern was with theology, not history.
None of this finds its way into Whitelam’s purview. Whitelam justifies his concentration on Albright’s discussion of the herem because this same “rhetoric … has been taken up and reinforced by Israeli scholarship after 1948 … and continues to defend a construction of the past which devalues indigenous cultures and histories. The rhetoric of biblical studies, just like the rhetoric of much of modern Zionism, refuses to acknowledge the inherent value of indigenous culture and its right to its own history.”
Whitelam calls his paper “Inventing Ancient Israel.” It was invented to perpetuate what he calls the “stranglehold on the study of Palestine and the ancient Near East which biblical specialists, historians and archaeologists have exerted” so as to “exclude” the study of “Palestinian history, and with it Palestinian religion.”
“The Palestinian intifada,” Whitelam tells us, “ha[s] … contributed to the continued fracturing” of an “imagined past” that left no room for a history of the indigenous population.
Because of this “displacement of ancient Palestinian history … ‘Israel can make claims [here Whitelam is quoting Professor Edward Said] for its historical presence based on its timeless attachment to a place, and supports its universalism by absolutely rejecting, with tangible military force, any other historical or temporal (in this case Arab Palestinian) counterclaims’” (parentheses in original).
According to Whitelam, Biblical scholars are part of a contemporary cabal to deprive Palestinians of their land: “Biblical studies has formed part of the complex arrangement of scholarly, economic, and military power by which Palestinians have been denied a contemporary presence or history,” he writes. Again quoting Said, Whitelam states, “‘It is as if the Zionist web of detail and its drama choked off the Palestinians.’”
Biblical studies’ search for ancient Israel is illegitimate because it does not give equal weight to Palestinian, by which he means Canaanite, history. “There has been no rhetoric available by which to articulate and pursue the history of ancient Palestine.”
According to Whitelam, what appear to be objective historical studies are simply “a profaned detached objectivity.” Modern Israeli scholarship has “reinforced” this obliteration of Palestinian history, says Whitelam. “Biblical studies, as a discipline, has evolved a rhetoric … which has dispossessed Palestinians of a land and a past.”
“Palestinian history” must be “freed from the tyranny of the discourse of biblical studies.” Whitelam calls upon scholars “to expose the political and religious interests which have motivated the invention of ancient Israel.”
This is a dangerously politicized history. After Whitelam’s talk, University of Judaism scholar Ziony Zevit expressed the fear that positions like Whitelam’s 069could, by their divisiveness, destroy the field of Biblical studies. A similar politicization of scholarship has in fact destroyed some historical disciplines.
Because there is no such thing as completely unbiased objective history, Whitelam apparently feels free to give us a completely politicized history, with all his tendentiousness revealed like dirty shirttails flapping in the wind. Unlike most scholars today, Whitelam makes no effort to produce unbiased history or even to conceal his own obvious biases. That is probably why Whitelam’s friend and co-author Robert Coote has said that this paper of Whitelam’s has gone “over the top.” The distinguished Israeli Bible scholar Avraham Malamat used stronger language in a letter read to the audience; he called it “outrageous … anti-Bible and anti-Israel.”
Let me be plain: There is nothing wrong with calling for an examination of ancient Canaanite civilization.2 There is nothing wrong with such a pursuit, nor should anyone criticize another scholar’s interest in ancient Israel or in the relationship between ancient Israel and contemporary civilizations. What is wrong—and here Whitelam is egregiously guilty—is the pursuit of history—either Canaanite or Israelite—in the service of a modern political agenda. Yes, some scholars in the past have been guilty of using ancient Israelite history in support of the Zionist cause. But at least in recent years, they were making a determined effort to be objective and unbiased. That cannot be said of Keith Whitelam.
We can only hope that people like Whitelam will not gain sufficient force to destroy our field—just at the time when politicians and diplomats are trying so hard—and with considerable success—to bring peace to the Middle East.
Hershel Shanks (d. 2021) was the Editor of BAR and the founder of the Biblical Archaeology Society. He was a retired lawyer who still maintained his membership in the other BAR.
For a change, I am not the only one reviewing the Annual Meeting. The New York Times sent two correspondents. John Wilford solved the problem of so many lectures by writing about only one, a paper on the Hurrians. The paper’s religion correspondent Gustav Niebuhr solved the dilemma differently: “For the visitor who lacked a specialty, there was a problem. [The program book] described all the sessions and offered full-page maps on how to find them. But it offered no suggestions on what to attend. And the choice was truly daunting.”Niebuhr solved the problem by attending only sessions relating to what he called “contemporary American issues.” But he admits that he was able to attend only a “very small sample” even of this restricted category.
