Come to the Annual (Additional) Meeting
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For several years, we at the Biblical Archaeology Society (BAS) have been organizing sessions at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). Our sessions have been exceptionally well attended and exceptionally well received. Criticism has been nil.
In this endeavor, I have worked directly with SBL’s able executive secretary, Kent Richards, informing him as these sessions developed, one by one. After the Annual Meeting in Orlando last November, I received a telephone call from the chairman of SBL’s program committee, Peter Richardson of the University of Toronto, telling me that I may proceed the same way for the 1999 Annual Meeting in Boston, but that after that they would like to bring me “into the process” of program development. I was agreeable. In the meantime I kept not only Richards, but also Richardson, informed of my progress in developing sessions for the 1999 Boston meeting.
On March 2 of this year, I received another telephone call from program chair Richardson, informing me that the Program Committee had had a meeting (I had never been informed that there was to be such a meeting) and that the committee had rejected a program that I had been developing on one of the most important excavations in Israel, the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, directed by Harvard’s Lawrence Stager. I was stunned—and told Richardson so. He explained that the committee decided it already had sufficient of what he called “general” sessions and that, in any case, there had been a session on Ashkelon last year. My argument that the committee should allow the participants at the meeting to decide whether they wanted to attend the Ashkelon session or some other session proved unavailing.
When I told executive secretary Kent Richards that I would not be a part of this insult, he told me about the possibility of an “additional” meeting: Numerous organizations had “additional” simultaneous meetings listed at the end of the program. BAS, he said, could have its own sessions, including the session on Ashkelon, listed as an “additional” meeting. Richards assured me that there would be a notice in the main section of the program directing people to our “additional” program at the back and that we would be provided appropriate lecture halls at central times in the three-and-a-half-day program.
So that is what we have done. And it is a stellar program—as exciting as any we have ever organized. In addition to the session on Ashkelon—which includes the first report to be given by Robert Ballard, the underwater explorer who found the Titanic, on the exploration of what appears to be a Phoenician wreck off the Mediterranean coast of Ashkelon—we are bringing a number of foreign scholars to the meeting, including Manfred Bietak of Vienna who will report on his important excavations of the Hyksos capital, ancient Avaris, at Tell ed-Dab‘a in Egypt; Wolf Niemeier from Heidelberg, who will talk about Mycenaean relations with Bible lands, especially based on his excavations at Miletus in Turkey; Avraham Biran from Jerusalem, the excavator of Dan, who will give a paper on Canaanite and Israelite fortifications; and Trude Dothan, also from Jerusalem, who will talk about intercultural influence at Deir el-Balah. In addition, Alan Millard and Philip Davies from England will participate in a session on the Exodus. Bill Dever will speak on archaeology’s contribution to textual criticism. And Noel Freedman, general editor of the Anchor Bible series, will be 019speaking on his counter consensus ideas regarding emendations to the Biblical text. The chairs of the BAS sessions include two former presidents of SBL, Frank Cross and Philip King, and the successor to Cross’s chair at Harvard, Peter Machinist.
This is just a taste of what has been planned. The complete program is listed in the box below. I look forward to seeing you in Boston.
For several years, we at the Biblical Archaeology Society (BAS) have been organizing sessions at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). Our sessions have been exceptionally well attended and exceptionally well received. Criticism has been nil. In this endeavor, I have worked directly with SBL’s able executive secretary, Kent Richards, informing him as these sessions developed, one by one. After the Annual Meeting in Orlando last November, I received a telephone call from the chairman of SBL’s program committee, Peter Richardson of the University of Toronto, telling me that I may proceed the same […]
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