Roundup of Annual Meetings

041

The Annual Meetings were held in San Antonio, Texas, this year. They say that you can go outside the city where there are no buildings and the land is so flat that if you take a good pair of binoculars, you can see the back of your head.

The talks at the Annual Meetings were anything but flat, however. There were lots of peaks—and a few valleys, too. More about these later.

During the week of November 17 through 23, more academic conferences were held and papers delivered than you can shake a stick at. The Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), the Near Eastern Archaeology Society (NEAS) and the American Academy of Religion (AAR) all held their annual meeting during that week. The Biblical Archaeology Society, publisher of BAR, also held its seventh Bible and Archaeology Fest, with more than 200 laypeople participating (see box). In all, over 9,000 scholars descended on San Antonio with their manuscripts, PowerPoint presentations and assorted esoterica.

I spent the week meeting with scholars, many of whom are old friends, listening to papers and keeping an eye out for material that might make an article in BAR. That means primarily I go to the ASOR meeting, which runs from Wednesday through Saturday, and then to the SBL meeting, which starts Saturday afternoon and closes on Tuesday.

But, because of time conflicts, I couldn’t attend the NEAS meeting. I wish NEAS would meet at another time. NEAS is an evangelical Christian archaeological association. I may be the only associate member of NEAS; because I cannot sign the statement of faith required of a 042full member, a new category of associate membership was created for me (and perhaps some others). I have all the rights and privileges of full members except the right to vote. I would like to attend their meetings, but, as the Yiddish saying has it, you can’t dance at two weddings at the same time.

That’s not the primary reason, however, why I would like NEAS to meet at another time. It’s because I think the result would be positive for the evangelical scholars in NEAS. I interact with a lot of evangelical scholars, and I know they are not monolithic; they range from very conservative to quite liberal. But we always have an unspoken premise to our conversations: We discuss and argue on the basis of the evidence, not about matters of faith. In this respect there’s no difference between an evangelical scholar and a Catholic scholar, a Greek Orthodox scholar, an Israeli and/or Jewish scholar—and any other kind of scholar, including a secular scholar. But, truth to tell, there is a bias against evangelical scholars. There is a suspicion they allow their faith to get in the way of their scholarship. Sometimes that is true—but it’s also true of other scholars, against whom I do not detect the same bias. That is why I wish NEAS would meet at a different time from the principal organization of Near Eastern archaeologists, ASOR. The evangelical Near Eastern scholars should be interacting with their non-evangelical colleagues, not isolated in their own colloquium. The isolation fosters the wrong kind of image. True, I’ve seen some of my evangelical friends wander over to the ASOR meeting to catch a paper or two. But this is unlikely to dispel the impression given by a separate meeting that results in evangelical scholars’ not participating in some of the important debates and discussions that occur at the ASOR meeting. It is important for evangelical scholars to interact with non-evangelical scholars and for these other scholars to interact with evangelical scholars, just as it is for the many Israeli scholars who come to these meetings to interact with non-Israeli scholars (and vice versa.)

I admit to having a special interest in the light that 043archaeology sheds on the Bible and life in Bible times. This is not true of all Near Eastern archaeologists. That is fine. Those scholars who are interested in other aspects of the Near Eastern archaeological world are entitled to follow their own pursuits, just as I do. But I sometimes sense a lack of interest in what I still call Biblical archaeology, and I would like to see more focus on that aspect of archaeology at these meetings. NEAS scholars could bring it.

Incidentally, the contingent of Israeli scholars was particularly large and impressive this year, many of them from the Israel Antiquities Authority. IAA director Shuka Dorfman wisely retained a trainer to instruct his people in how to make an impressive public presentation, and it paid off. But of course this pertained only to style, not substance. That was the scholars’ own, not the result of a trainer. Gideon Avni, director of excavations at the IAA, was especially impressive with widely different presentations— one on the Holy Sepulchre Church, the other on ancient 044agriculture in the Negev.

I have another beef I need to get off my chest—this time with the ASOR meeting. Last year I criticized the ASOR program because it had sessions on the archaeology of Jordan, of Syria, of Cyprus, of Mesopotamia, of Anatolia and of Arabia, but not on the archaeology of Israel (see First Person, “Off the Map,” July/August 2003). This year that omission was corrected. This year’s ASOR program did include a session on the archaeology of Israel. But I was also critical of another omission last year: There was nothing on the archaeology of the New Testament. Has archaeology no insights into the text of the New Testament? Is there no context, no background, no illumination to the text of the New Testament that archaeology can provide? As I looked at the ASOR program in San Antonio, it seemed to me there were more presentations about Nabateans than about Christians.

The only significant discussion of the New Testament that I could find in the ASOR meeting was at a plenary session known as the Presidential Forum, devoted this year to a discussion of Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ. The principal presentation was delivered by William Fulco, an ASOR member who served as an adviser to Mel Gibson and translated the dialogue into Aramaic. Professor Fulco, a Jesuit priest who teaches at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, delivered an entertaining anecdotal talk that did not defend the historical accuracy of the film—it was simply a work of art, Fulco claimed. Fulco’s talk was unusual, however, in another respect. He did not mention Jews, Judaism or anti-Semitism. It was like the elephant in the room that no one seemed to notice. The matter was discussed, however, in no uncertain terms, by the three respondents. One of them, John Dominic Crossan, a former Catholic priest and prominent Jesus scholar, declared the film guilty of 045“depraved indifference.” As more than one of the respondents noted, little Jewish kids in the film turned into evil snakes. Many of those attending the session wondered, however, what this film, fascinating though it may be, was doing as the topic of a plenary session at the ASOR meeting. Where was the archaeological component?

I mention this simply because it emphasizes how strange it is that no session on New Testament archaeology was included in the program.^a A number of scholars I talked to had no explanation. Plenty of scholars work in areas that would be included in New Testament archaeology—the excavation of New Testament sites, new understandings of the travels of Paul, dining customs that provide a context for New Testament stories, studies of the economy and social structure of the Galilee at the time of Jesus, and on and on.

At the SBL meeting, in contrast to ASOR, there were a number of talks on New Testament archaeology. For example, an entire session at the SBL meeting was devoted to papers considering an important book titled Ante Pacem: Archaeological Evidence of Church Life Before Constantine, by Graydon Snyder (Mercer, 2003). At another SBL session, Douglas Boin of the University of Texas gave a talk entitled, “Discovering Augustine’s Ostia: Evidence for Christianity in the Late Antique Period.” Still another SBL session was devoted to “Archaeology of Religion in the Greco-Roman Period.” And archaeologist Rami Arav gave a paper that asked, “How Hellenized Was Galilee at the Time of Jesus: The Case of Bethsaida.” Why there were no similar sessions or papers at the ASOR meeting remains a puzzle.

What makes this situation particularly odd is that the leaders of ASOR include devout Christians. The president of ASOR is also president of a Seventh-Day Adventist college. The secretary of the organization is a Baptist minister who is himself a leader in applying archaeological insights to early Christianity.

Perhaps there is a built-in bias in professional archaeology against New Testament—or Christian—archaeology. In a 4000-word article on “Biblical Archaeology” for The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, William Dever, one of America’s most prominent archaeologists, devotes but a single paragraph (the last one) to New Testament archaeology as a part of Biblical archaeology. The paragraph is simply dismissive: “There is little to be said about archaeology and New Testament studies … The theological issues involved in the study of Christian origins have not 046been thought amenable to archaeological investigation in the same way as the origins of early Israel.” I wonder if scholars who use archaeological materials to illuminate the New Testament—and there are many such scholars—would agree with this. I wonder if Dever himself would agree with it. And I wonder how Eric Meyers, a distinguished archaeologist in the New Testament period who served as editor-in-chief of the encyclopedia, let Dever get away with this.

But at least Dever raises the question. In an equally lengthy article on “Archaeology and the Bible” in Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, Thomas Levy of the University of California, San Diego, doesn’t even mention the New Testament.

The place of New Testament archaeology is something the profession might well pay more attention to. If anyone has a better explanation than I have been able to find for why ASOR largely ignores New Testament archaeology, I’d love to hear it. Perhaps next year ASOR will have a session on New Testament archaeology. And while we’re on the subject, in addition to exploring the archaeology of the New Testament and early Christianity, how about a session at next year’s ASOR meeting on the archaeology of early Rabbinic Judaism?

I must add that the ASOR program was nevertheless rich and informative, which only made these omissions stand out. Joe Uziel of Bar-Ilan Univeristy explained how the small group of Philistines who came to the coast of Canaan was eventually assimilated into the larger Canaanite culture in which it lived, and how ultimately a new cultural entity emerged that was different from the original Philistines’. To demonstrate this, Uziel showed a Philistine inscription that included non-Semitic (Philistine) names and Semitic (Canaanite names). In some respects, the same thing 047happened, Uziel suggested, to the Israelites. But for the Israelites we do not have the distinctive material cultural features that help archaeologists distinguish between Philistine and Canaanite artifacts.

An offbeat paper was given by Adam Aja of Harvard University, who introduced himself as “the toilet boy.” The topic of his paper: “Dirt, Dung and Drains: Waste Management in the Iron Age,” a subject, he admitted, that “remains rather embarrassing for polite society.” The Biblical writers were not quite as squeamish, or delicate, as we sometimes are. The Bible often refers to a male as someone who, in the words of the King James Version, “pisseth against the wall” (1 Samuel 25:22, 34; 1 Kings 14:10; 16:11; 21:21; 2 Kings 9:8). The New Jewish Publication Society translation cleans this up by referring to the phrase simply as “male.” It then drops a footnote explaining that “literally” it says, “One who pees against a wall.” Most other modern English translations also clean up the Hebrew text. The Bible also describes the murder of the Moabite king Eglon while he was sitting on the toilet (Judges 3:12–30).^b

Aja presented archaeological evidence on land and at sea, assuring us that in Biblical times people had the same biological needs as we do. At sea, sailors apparently had no toilets and simply “hung their posteriors over the stern to relieve themselves.” Aja showed a picture of a Cypro-Phoenician vessel from between 700 and 600 B.C.E. clearly picturing a sailor in this position. Aja noted that modern sailors often talk of going to “caulk the steering beam” 048when they wish to relieve themselves in this way, suggesting they are no different from ancient sailors in this respect.

Toilets have been found in a few excavations, including two examples from Jerusalem between the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E.. The toilet seats are made of stone and sat over cesspits in what must have been bathrooms in elegant, wealthy homes.^c Common people probably used chamber pots. But no pots have been found that seem to have been used specifically for this purpose. David Ilan of Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem suggested that, in determining what a pot was used for, we should look at the needs. On this basis, some of the kraters, which have been discovered in abundance, could have served more than one purpose—including as chamber pots.

Papers at both the ASOR meeting and the SBL meeting dealt with the question of inscriptions and other artifacts that come not from professional excavations but from the antiquities market. Many such items have been illegally looted. All have no archaeological context to help interpret them. Because we don’t know where they were found, they are known in the profession as “unprovenanced.” The official position of ASOR and the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) is that they will not even look at unprovenanced items—they can’t be published in their journals, nor can papers about them be given at their scholarly meetings. Nor are scholars permitted under these rules to opine on the authenticity of unprovenanced artifacts, lest that increase their value (although 049apparently it is all right to pronounce such artifacts to be forgeries). Former ASOR president Eric Meyers of Duke University, speaking at an SBL session sponsored by the Biblical Archaeology Society, spoke of the limited exceptions that he (and ASOR) would allow to these rules, the main one being that if the antiquities authority of the country in which the unprovenanced item was found says that it is important enough to warrant publication, then it is all right for a scholar appointed by that authority to study and publish it.

Meyers was critical of Israeli law because antiquities dealers are legal in Israel. Meyers would outlaw antiquities dealers, as well as collectors: “These [antiquities] shops and private collectors are the major outlets for looting … The law also indirectly encourages forgery … The law of Israel enables a huge, illicit trade in antiquities to flourish in their own country. Until the law is changed in Israel with respect to [antiquities dealers and collectors], not a lot can happen.” Meyers would apparently favor a law that not only outlawed antiquities dealers and collectors but would also make it unlawful for a private party to authenticate an unprovenanced article or to publish (and study) it. There is nothing in Israeli law, lamented Meyers, “that prohibits private individuals from authenticating items in private collections, let alone prohibit them from being published in such publications as BAR. The collusion between collectors, authenticators, and publishers is something that needs to be addressed in the laws and in the court of public opinion.”

What ever happened to freedom of speech, Professor Meyers? The archaeological establishment clearly wants to regulate what scholars can study and what publishers can publish, if not by law, then by peer pressure. (For more on Meyers’s views, see the First Person column in this issue—Ed.)

Under recently passed American law, importing antiquities from Iraq can be a criminal offense. Professor Patty Gerstenblith of DePaul University College of Law, who co-chaired an ASOR session on “The Ethics of Collecting and Communicating the Near Eastern Past,” warned that someone who authenticates or publishes an unprovenanced artifact could be called to testify before a grand jury investigating criminal importation.

Professor James Harrell, an expert in ancient stone from the University of Toledo and secretary of ASMOSIA (Association for the Study of Marble and Other Stones in Antiquity), expressed the anti-establishment position at the Biblical Archaeology Society session:

I want to make it clear at the outset that I believe unprovenanced artifacts should be studied. It may well be that publicizing such objects, and thereby giving them value, only encourages thieves to steal more of them. The resulting loss of archaeological context is lamentable; however, I do not think we should compound the tragedy by ignoring real artifacts just because we do not know where they come from. Unprovenanced artifacts can be historically significant and I believe it is our duty, as students of the past, to study them.

Instead of ignoring these finds, Harrell suggested that scientific protocols be developed to test the authenticity of questioned finds. These protocols would be similar to those of the ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials) for industrial methodologies. Harrell expressed his own view that with a proper study by a panel of experts, “the panel will usually come up with a definitive conclusion on the authenticity of an object.”

Harrell said one problem is that “in the current climate, work on unprovenanced artifacts is often vilified.” For example, the president of the Society for Archaeological Sciences told Harrell that the majority of its executive committee considered the study of unprovenanced objects to be “immoral.” But Harrell was confident that he could find experts to serve on panels to determine authenticity.

To insure that all sides would be represented at our SBL session, the Biblical Archaeology Society invited Uzi Dahari, deputy director of the Israel Antiquities Authority, to present a paper. Dahari was also chairman of the IAA committee that found both the James ossuary inscription (which mentions Jesus) and the so-called Jehoash inscription, to be forgeries. Dahari is absolutely certain that both inscriptions are modern forgeries. The scientific results, which Dahari displayed on the screen (and which no one but Harrell—who remained unconvinced—understood), demonstrated (at least to Dahari’s satisfaction) that the signs of forgery were obvious to anyone who was willing to look. Dahari also presented schematic images that showed paraffin under the ink of the so-called Three-Shekel ostracon and the Widow’s Plea ostracon,^d demonstrating that they, too, are easily detected as forgeries (despite tests to the contrary previously conducted at the behest of the owner, collector Shlomo Moussaieff). In the seal impression of “Hezekiah ben Ahaz,”^e Dahari said the IAA found fluoride in the water used to make the bulla. Fluoride 050is a modern addition to tap water in Israel to prevent tooth decay. The fluoride not only unmasks the forger (stupid fellow, using tap water), but also indicates the forgery was probably made in Israel rather than in an adjacent country.

Dahari concluded his presentation with a highly personal diatribe against BAR and its editor. He refused to allow it to be published in BAR because he will not publish anything in BAR, but he did make available a copy from which a reporter could quote (see box).

Although the academic establishment, including ASOR policy makers, remains adamantly opposed to the publication of unprovenanced finds,^f the people prominently involved in enunciating these policies have no need for the unprovenanced finds in their own research. Scholars who do have such a need often take a different position. Professor Sidnie White Crawford, of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, president of the William F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem and a leading Dead Sea Scroll scholar, gave a paper at ASOR recounting the purchase of most of the scrolls from the looters themselves through middlemen (antiquities dealers). She concluded her talk by expressing the hope that this history of the road that led to the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls might be helpful in finding a solution to the present dilemma. At the Biblical Archaeology Society session at SBL, Professor Bezalel Porten of Hebrew University, the world’s leading expert on the Elephantine Papyri (Jewish documents from mid-first millennium B.C.E. Egypt), argued that scholars could not afford to ignore the hundreds of Aramaic ostraca that are now coming from the antiquities market in Israel, many of which he and Israeli paleographer Ada Yardeni are publishing.

At the ASOR meeting Professor Piotr Michalowski of the University of Michigan and the editor of the Journal of Cuneiform Studies (but carefully noting that he was speaking as an individual and not as editor of the journal), made the same argument with respect to the thousands of cuneiform tablets that are currently coming on the antiquities market after being looted in southern Iraq. You are asking us to ignore “an enormous storehouse of knowledge,” he said. That the looted tablets have no context makes them no different from the thousands of other cuneiform tablets that scholars study. “Ninety-nine percent of the interpretation [of the international corpus of cuneiform tablets] is based on tablets that have no context,” he said. “They were either looted or come from sites that were not well excavated or come from secondary contexts.” The newly looted tablets that are coming out of Iraq and onto the antiquities market, he said, present the scholarly world with “a unique historical moment.”^g

Professor John Russell of the Massachusetts College of Art, who had just returned from 9 months in Iraq as a cultural adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, explained that as many as 3,000 cuneiform tablets a week were being trucked out of Iraq into Syria and Jordan for sale in the international antiquities market. Johns Hopkins professor Jerome Cooper quickly computed that at this rate, in two years the number of tablets thus lost would equal the total number of cuneiform tablets that had been discovered in the last 150 years. He made a plea for the publication of these looted tablets—another exception to the strict policy of ignoring archaeological artifacts that have been looted. We are all against looting, Professor Cooper noted, but ignoring all these tablets is like killing the poet and then proceeding to destroy his poetry. Although the destruction of sites is 051terrible, he said, only the texts can bring them back. (In Op-Ed pieces in the Wall St. Journal and in the Chicago Tribune, I have argued that the only way to recover a substantial portion of the artifacts that are being looted in Iraq is to buy them. The least expensive place to do this is Iraq. The general counsel of the Field Museum, in a letter to the editor of the Tribune, said that the only people who would agree with this suggestion were Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, and Phillip de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.)

Having interacted with some of the looters while in Iraq, Professor Russell expressed some sympathy for them. “Don’t blame the villagers,” he said. “They’re poor.” They loot to eat. One solution might be to enlist them in a legitimate excavation, although that cannot be done at the moment in light of the security situation in Iraq. No one had a satisfactory solution to the situation in Iraq.

Feelings on whether scholars are permitted to study, publish and authenticate—and whether museums can display—unprovenanced artifacts that have come from the antiquities market run extremely high in the academic world. It is not simply a matter on which scholars can disagree. It is more: What looks like an academic debate has become a matter of morality, of right and wrong. Those who disagree with the establishment policy are evil. Those who would study unprovenanced artifacts, test them for authenticity or publish them are condemned as immoral. Antiquities dealers, collectors and museums such as the Metropolitan Museum in New York that display unprovenanced artifacts are equated with looters. The money of prominent collectors is considered tainted and unacceptable. The White-Levy Archaeological Publication Fund has made millions of dollars available to scholars to write excavation reports of old excavations for which the excavator has failed to complete a final report. No one disputes that this money is badly needed and enormously effective. Yet schools like the University of Cincinnati and Bryn Mawr College will not permit their scholars to apply for such grants. For them, this is dirty money. Leon Levy, an honorary ASOR trustee and co-founder of the Publication Fund—and an antiquities collector—who died last spring, left a bequest to ASOR and its affiliated overseas schools. One of these affiliated schools, the American Center for Oriental Research (ACOR) in Amman (whose director, Pierre Bikai, is among the staunchest advocates of shunning any unprovenanced objects) declined to accept the bequest. “We didn’t need the money,” was the explanation he gave me for turning it down. On the other hand, another ASOR-affiliated overseas school, the Albright Institute in Jerusalem, acknowledged Levy’s bequest to it “with gratitude,” noting that “Levy and his wife, Shelby White, have long supported the mission of the Albright Institute and we are grateful for this remembrance.” At an SBL session, however, ASOR vice president Larry Herr pronounced the private collecting of antiquities to be “hugely unethical.”

This is clearly an issue that divides the profession. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe the rank-and-file members don’t share the views of the ASOR leadership that makes policy. I’m reminded of the debate over whether ASOR should change the name of its magazine from Biblical Archaeologist to Near Eastern Archaeology. When the leadership decided to take a poll of ASOR members, more than 80 percent of the respondants voted to retain the name Biblical Archaeologist. So naturally they changed the name to Near Eastern Archaeology. That’s democracy for you!

Next year the Annual Meetings will be in Philadelphia, the birthplace of our Constitution—perhaps a good place to revive democracy in ASOR.

The Annual Meetings were held in San Antonio, Texas, this year. They say that you can go outside the city where there are no buildings and the land is so flat that if you take a good pair of binoculars, you can see the back of your head.