“The Bible Comes to Life” could well be the secondary title for “The Book and the Spade,” an exhibit on archaeology and the Bible which can be seen currently through December 1977 (Sunday through Thursday afternoons) at the Jewish Museum in New York City. Models, maps, charts, and photographs supplement over one hundred ancient objects to carry the viewer through the sweep of more than 2000 years of Biblical history.
After seeing a 15-minute audio-visual introduction and explanatory models of excavations, the visitor follows Abraham through Mesopotamia, and Moses and the Hebrews in Egypt. At the next stop, I saw a young visitor patting the wall of a reconstruction of an Israelite house (with its stone floor, mud brick walls, and roof of branches); he remarked in wonder, “The people who lived here were just like us!”
The exhibit continues with carefully chosen objects illustrating the development and division of the Monarchy, quotations from the Prophets and depictions of invasion and conquest by Assyria, Babalonia, Persia, Greece, and Rome; it is clear why artifacts from these areas as well as from Egypt and Israel itself are needed to tell the Biblical story.
Most of the objects are small scale; one of the largest is the seated bronze figure of the Egyptian god Horus (see illustration) on loan from the collection of Joseph Ternbach. The soil of Syria yielded the exquisite ivory carving of a cow tenderly caring for her calf (see illustration) on loan from the collection of Leon Pomerance; it signifies the intimate relationship of past, present, and future, which is the key to understanding the exhibit’s content and its reason for being. As another of the many young student visitors said, “I didn’t know they knew how to do so much in the olden days, but, after all, they were my ancestors!”
Among the texts which are displayed, the most important is a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls which documents life among the Qumran community. An Aramaic papyrus of 430 B.C. proves to be a very practical marriage agreement from the island of Elephantine in Upper Egypt where a Jewish colony lived during the fifth century B.C.
In addition to the Ternbach and Pomerance collections, lenders to the exhibition include Stanley Batkin, Morris Traub, the Dagon Collection, the Brooklyn Museum, Hebrew Union College and the Yale University Art Gallery. Many of the pieces are from the permanent collection of the Jewish Museum, which is to be commended for effectively showing the flow of Biblical history as illustrated by archaeological discoveries.
The Bible Comes to Life” could well be the secondary title for “The Book and the Spade,” an exhibit on archaeology and the Bible which can be seen currently through December 1977 (Sunday through Thursday afternoons) at the Jewish Museum in New York City. Models, maps, charts, and photographs supplement over one hundred ancient objects to carry the viewer through the sweep of more than 2000 years of Biblical history. After seeing a 15-minute audio-visual introduction and explanatory models of excavations, the visitor follows Abraham through Mesopotamia, and Moses and the Hebrews in Egypt. At the next stop, I […]
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