Benjamin Mazar Reminisces

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“It was different then,” the archaeologist said. “Today there are institutes and technicians, engineers, directors and subdirectors!”

“Back then, we had nothing,” he said. “But it was a wonderful period. A time of life. A time of courage; no, more than courage. There was a greatness to it all. Beth She’arim was an example of pure idealism.”

Professor Benjamin Mazar has seen much since his initial probings around the ruins of Beth She’arim in 1936. The first archaeological excavation permit issued by the reborn State of Israel was in his name, allowing him to begin research at Tell Qasile in 1949. He has led important digs at Ein Gedi and at the edge of the Temple precincts in Jerusalem. He has served as president of Hebrew University and of the Israel Exploration Society. He has been chairman of the Archaeological Board of Israel and is a fellow of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Just last summer he was elected president of the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament. During a career that has spanned almost half a century, he has been awarded honors without number.

Now 77, Professor Mazar recently reminisced about Biblical archaeology in the pioneering days of the 1930s and ’40s. He also reflected on the growth and current direction of the discipline.

In 1936, he was just 30 years old and wanted to test a few archaeological theories on the slopes of the hill of al-Sheikh Burayk in the Lower Galilee. When he arrived at the site of what was subsequently to be identified as Beth She’arim, Mazar had little in the way of financial resources, but he did have some background, including a classical education from universities in Berlin and Giessen, a doctorate based on “Studies and Old History of Syria and Palestine” and more than seven years’ experience living in the British Mandate of Palestine. During that time he had conducted some excavations at Ramat Rahel near Jerusalem and had met and learned from the great American archaeologist William Foxwell Albright.

Mazar reminisced about Albright, “When I arrived in Jerusalem, from the very beginning he captured my heart. I was very close to him. He was an extraordinary scholar, a very interesting personality, and the best archaeologist active in Israel at that time.”

As young Mazar stood at Beth She’arim in 1936, he intended to follow Albright’s well-thought-out ideas 063regarding careful, comprehensive excavations. “I spent some time with Albright at Tell Beit Mirsim and saw what he was doing there. He showed me how important it was to take a simple place and study it stratigraphically, in order to get a very clear understanding of the development of the site through the ages. Albright used pottery to do this; he was the first to obtain a really clear picture of the development of pottery.”

“I saw, from Albright, how necessary it was to make a stratigraphical archaeological chronology,” he continued. “One must obtain an overall view. This development in approach was a tremendous achievement for archaeology.”

Beth She’arim proved “that it was possible to start an excavation without any money at all,” said Mazar, smiling. “I started with two or three crazy volunteers. They were young kibbutzniks, maybe 17 or 18 years old. They told me to pay them afterward—after the Messiah arrives.”

One of those early “volunteers” was a man who later became one of Israel’s most eminent and successful archaeologists himself—Pesach Bar Adon. “I discovered Bar Adon sitting on a horse,” Professor Mazar said. “I took him off the horse and into my excavations. And he became an archaeologist too! He was with me from the earliest stages.” Later, Bar Adon excavated the famous Cave of the Treasures at Nahal Mishmar near the Dead Sea Scroll Caves.

The tiny Jewish community at Beth She’arim was both family and friends for young Benjamin Mazar. In the history of the British Mandate, 1936 was a troubled time. There were riots and murders. Mazar remembers an event that exemplified the sometimes tragic course that Arab-Jewish hostility followed.

Alexander Zaid lived at Beth She’arim with his wife Tsipora and their children. He served as the region’s shomer, its watchman. His job was to guard the Jewish lands purchased by the fund called Keren Kayemet until these lands could be settled with Jewish communities. At that time, Beth She’arim was an isolated spot along a dirt road. The nearest Jewish communities were Nesher, in one direction, and Kfar Yehoshua in the other—each about six miles from Beth She’arim. Alexander Zaid guarded the land between. One day, in the second year of the excavations, the shomer paid the price of the land with his life. While patrolling his territory, he was ambushed and shot. Zaid’s granddaughter told BAR that the assassin, Kassem Ahmed Tabash, was apprehended by the Jewish Defense Forces; he had been hired to kill Zaid by the Jerusalemite Mufti, Haj Amin el-Husseini.

“They were real pioneers, halutzim!” Professor Mazar recalled. “I have the greatest respect for this family. They came from Russia. Alexander came from Siberia; Tsipora was from Lithuania. They came to the Land at the beginning of the century, in 1904 or 1905.”

“The Zaids had a philosophy of life that was clear and simple,” Professor Mazar remarked. “Land, idealism, Zionism. That was all. They knew what had to be done, and they did it.”

“Alexander taught his children,” the professor said. “Yes, he taught us all. They lived in a pioneer’s house. In the winter rainy season, it was always a problem to find a place in the house where the rain wasn’t dripping on you. But somehow, there was always warmth. The door was always open to any visitor.”

“In the evening, they used to sit and read the Bible,” he said. “Often, we’d talk about what it was like to live in Biblical times. But we’d also talk of the future, how the Jewish homeland would be built, how a Jewish state would function. My excavation was very important to them. It was a symbol of their past. They felt it was important to reveal Jewish antiquities, to demonstrate the roots of Jewish pioneering idealism. Biblical archaeology was part of Zionist idealism.”

When Alexander Zaid was killed, the British Mandate law required that a death benefit be paid to his widow, Tsipora. “But she, herself, was a shomer,” Professor Mazar said. “And a very good rider, too. She didn’t want any money from the government. In fact, she held the British Mandate responsible for the death of her husband and wanted nothing to do with the British. And this is the way the excavation received its first funds.”

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“Tsipora Zaid decided to put the money into the excavation of Beth She’arim,” the archaeologist recalled. “But she had conditions. She would sign the money over to the work provided she never saw the money herself and provided she didn’t have to even see a bureaucrat and provided she could sign the necessary papers only in the presence of friends. And this was done. And we received 600 Palestine Pounds for the excavation.”

“Moshe Yaffe also lived at Beth She’arim,” Mazar remembered. “He lived alone, in the ruins of an old Arab house. He helped with the excavations, but he also had other interests, such as keeping snakes. Once, when a government supervisor came to inspect our work, he entered one of our tents and found Yaffe’s snake collection. That supervisor left in a hurry, and we never heard from him again.”

Professor Mazar recounted a visit he made to Pinhas Reutenberg, then head of the electric authority, with a request to extend electric power to Beth She’arim. “It was a tremendous expense. It meant many kilometers of wire, and I don’t know how many poles. But they did it. It was important for archaeology, and this was important to Pinhas Reutenberg, and so it happened!”

“This was how we worked. This was our little community. Everyone was a strong idealist. Everyone had a keen interest in the excavations, because finding Jewish antiquities reinforced the meaning of Zionism and strengthened the reasons for creating a Jewish state. We were interested in building a homeland, and Jewish antiquities were part of its foundation.”

Archaeologists tend to organize history into successive “periods,” and this includes their own times. For Professor Mazar, the excavations at Beth She’arim came at the end of the second period of recent Biblical archaeology.

The first period occurred during the last years of Ottoman Turkish control over Eretz Israel—from the late 19th century until the end of the First World War. This was the era of people like Sir William Flinders Petrie, the great English Egyptologist, who discovered the concepts of stratigraphic archaeology and dating by recognition of pottery sequences.

The second period coincided with the time of the British Mandate, according to Professor Mazar. This was a time of intensified activity. Several organizations, such as the American Schools of Oriental Research, the French École Biblique et Archéologique and the British School of Archaeology, came to the fore at this time. Several universities, such as the University of Philadelphia and the University of Chicago began sponsoring archaeological research. During this era, Professor Mazar said, Biblical archaeologists wanted their work to be comprehensive. “There was a need to be very far-reaching, to develop an 065overall picture, to understand relationships,” he said. “There was a new interest in art and in defining the art of each period.”

The third period coincided with the creation and development of the State of Israel. “This was a time of tremendous revolution in the history of archaeology,” Professor Mazar said. “An Israeli Department of Antiquities was created. Jewish scholars played, at a very minimum, a very significant role in archaeology here.”

“Since the creation of the State of Israel, we have witnessed immense growth both in the number of sites being excavated and in the number of people and organizations involved in the work,” he said. “For example, consider the work started at Hazor by Yigael Yadin, an excellent Israeli scholar and archaeologist. That work continues even now, and the work is very impressive, by any standard.”

Although there are a number of foreign groups conducting archaeological research in Israel today, Professor Mazar explained that most of the work is being done by Israelis, often in cooperation with foreign institutions. The Israel Exploration Society, in particular, has taken a prominent role in recent years, particularly in the Jerusalem area, providing new impetus to continue research started more than a century ago by Captain Charles Warren of the London-based Palestine Exploration Fund.

Archaeological activity in Israel is now undergoing a major expansion, Professor Mazar remarked. Work is continuously being intensified, and there’s no sign of it even stabilizing.

“There are excavations throughout the entire country,” he said, “and also in many parts of the occupied areas. There has been much activity in the field of archaeological surveying, and a strong interest in prehistory. There have been great refinements in stratigraphy and in the study of ancient fortifications, art and pottery”

“Modern archaeologists have also realized that they shouldn’t be restricted to the study of important ancient cities,” Professor Mazar noted. “We must also be concerned with broader aspects of the whole of ancient society. We are looking into the daily life of common people, their activities, their farms, their water supplies. Everything in the life of a human being is becoming a proper subject for an archaeologist to study.”

“There has been a new interest in epigraphy,” he continued, “especially in the First Temple Period.”

“Discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls have played very important roles in scholarship,” he observed, “because they reawaken concern for the relationship between the material archaeological studies and the intellectual Bible studies. There was a time when some scholars tried to separate the two, but it is obvious now that this was an attempt to escape from something that doesn’t need to be avoided at all.”

“Seventy years ago, people were arguing about whether the Bible was or was not true. Now we know this was a very childish argument,” he said. “The Bible is the literature of about a thousand years. And you can’t apply the question of true or not true to it. Its scope is too great, and matters of truth involve precise detail.”

“We are now involved in a process, in putting things together,” Mazar asserted. “We have actually solved nothing. And it’s likely archaeology will never solve anything. What we now seek is to understand. We must study relationships and only then hope to understand.”

“It was different then,” the archaeologist said. “Today there are institutes and technicians, engineers, directors and subdirectors!” “Back then, we had nothing,” he said. “But it was a wonderful period. A time of life. A time of courage; no, more than courage. There was a greatness to it all. Beth She’arim was an example of pure idealism.” Professor Benjamin Mazar has seen much since his initial probings around the ruins of Beth She’arim in 1936. The first archaeological excavation permit issued by the reborn State of Israel was in his name, allowing him to begin research at Tell Qasile […]