The Book Albright Never Finished

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One of the greatest Biblical archaeologists of the 20th century, William Foxwell Albright, left an unfinished book manuscript when he died in 1971. But this is no secret to his friends, students and admirers. BAR readers were told of the manuscript’s existence nine years ago (see “Major Unpublished Book on the Religion of Israel,” BAR 01:02).

In 1975 Albright’s biography appeared, providing additional information on the uncompleted book.¹ According to Albright’s biographers, the manuscript, entitled The History of the Religion of Israel, was written between the autumn of 1958 and the summer of 1959, while Albright was a guest professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. The book was to have been published in the series The Jews: Their History, Culture and Religion, edited by the Seminary’s chancellor, Louis Finkelstein. The Seminary provided Albright with an office and a research assistant and secretary (Dr. Finkelstein’s daughter, Emunah).

In July 1959 the work was evidently laid aside when about 150,000 words of the projected 250,000 words had been written. Beginning with Israel’s prehistory, the manuscript had reached the period of the divided kingdom in the middle of the eighth century B.C. Why Professor Albright interrupted work on the project at this time, we do not know. It is clear, however, that he planned to resume and eventually complete it. As late as 1966 he spoke of completing his History of the Religion of Israel, although he realized that after an interval of seven years, it “would have to be completely rewritten in view of the many changes he had made in his own ideas as well as in the total approach.”²

Albright died in 1971 without making any substantial additions to the manuscript. After his death, his widow asked one of his most illustrious students, David Noel Freedman of the University of Michigan, to take care of Albright’s papers. Freedman arranged for Albright’s voluminous correspondence to go to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and for the unpublishable notes for future articles and books to go to Harvard University.

The lengthy manuscript on the history of the religion of Israel, however, was publishable. True, it would need an enormous amount of scholarly editing and revision, but the bulk of a book was there. Freedman negotiated with five or six publishers simultaneously to arrange for publication of the manuscript. Ultimately, a firm offer for the manuscript was made by Harper & Row of New York. As Freedman now recalls, the publisher was willing to pay an advance of $7,500. At this point Albright’s son David entered the picture. A trial lawyer who is a partner in a large Baltimore law firm, David was executor of his father’s estate. David demanded, again as Freedman recalls, $25,000 for the manuscript. The publisher raised its offer somewhat but not enough to satisfy David. Freedman believes even now that David Albright never had any intention of allowing the manuscript to be published.

This was the end of Freedman’s involvement with the manuscript but not the end of the efforts to obtain the release of the manuscript from David Albright.

Shortly after the young Albright rejected Harper & Row’s final offer, Freedman was relieved of his duties as a kind of informal and unofficial literary executor who served without pay. The break came in connection with a different project—Albright’s biography. At Albright’s funeral, Siegfried Horn, who wrote the review which follows, had suggested to Leona Running, who had served as Albright’s assistant, that she write a biography of the master, lest he be soon forgotten. Running was herself a trained scholar, as well as Albright’s devoted student and friend. The idea of a biography was taken to Freedman, who agreed to collaborate with Running on the project. Freedman arranged for Running to spend the summer at Albright’s apartment with Mrs. Albright, going through Albright’s voluminous correspondence.

When Running had gotten through the correspondence for the year 1955 and had finished a 200-page draft treating Albright’s first 28 years, David Albright again entered the picture. Running vividly remembers the call from David; it was a Thursday night late in the summer of 1971. Someone from the family would have to read and clear the material she had taken from the correspondence, he said. In short, he asserted the right to censor Running’s work. Shortly thereafter, another call came from David: His mother and he had decided to suspend the project. Running immediately left Baltimore—but with enough material from the correspondence, when combined with material made available from other cooperative family sources and scholars, to write the biography.

At Mrs. Albright’s request, Freedman tried to persuade Running to stop work on the biography. Running had done her homework, however. She argued with Freedman that she had both a legal right and a moral duty to complete the book. She had an obligation to history. Finally, Freedman confessed that although he felt an obligation to Mrs. Albright to make the opposite argument to Running, he secretly agreed with Running. Since Running would not be stopped, Freedman agreed to continue collaborating on the biography, which was published in 1975 (William Foxwell Albright—A Twentieth-Century Genius, Morgan Press). When David Albright learned of Freedman’s decision to continue work on the biography, Freedman too was cut off from any involvement in Albright’s affairs.

Thereafter, several other scholars and nonscholars made approaches to David Albright (Mrs. Albright died in 1979) in an effort to have the manuscript released for publication. Unfortunately, David could not be moved. Even efforts by his brother Paul failed. Often David simply failed to return phone calls or answer letters. While there was any hope that the manuscript might be published, silence was prudent so as to avoid any possibility of disturbing David Albright. But now all efforts have been exhausted. The manuscript will never be published, so there is no longer any reason for silence.

BAR managed to obtain a copy of the manuscript and asked Siegfried Horn to review it. His review follows.—Ed.

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Because this review is likely to be the only public report of the contents of the unpublished Albright manuscript, I readily agreed to review it for BAR readers.

Alas, I find that it is a disappointment. The old brilliance, the legendary encyclopedic knowledge, the abundance of details are all there—as far as it goes—but the world, and especially the world of archaeology, has changed enormously in 25 years. No book about Biblical archaeology written 25 years ago, and certainly not an incomplete one, could stand up today. This is true, unfortunately, even of a book written by the great Albright.

Some of Albright’s friends who read the manuscript shortly after his death thought that if he had completed it, it would have been one of his major contributions. Its being so outdated is no reflection on the master but is simply an indication of how far we have come.

The manuscript comprises 685 pages. It begins, strangely enough, with Chapter III, entitled “Prelude to the Patriarchal Age.” Perhaps in the first two chapters Albright planned to discuss the geological ages of the earth or to provide the reader with a brief history of the development of our present scientific understanding of mankind’s cultural and religious life. He may also have planned to discuss his own philosophy of history. However, all this is mere speculation.

The text material contains hand-inserted marks indicating at which spots the author wanted to add footnotes. The manuscript contains 771 footnotes, either in the margins of the text or on separate sheets, in various states of completeness. Only 344 of these seem to be complete, however. About 390 footnotes are missing altogether.

Professor Albright made handwritten corrections or annotations on 242 pages. As his students and assistant knew so well, Albright had the habit of putting notes or corrections on anything printed, typed or handwritten that came under his eyes, so it is doubtful that he ever reread any of the 443 pages that bear none of his handwritten remarks.

The extant manuscript proceeds chronologically, beginning with the pre-patriarchal age. Chapter III, the first one in the manuscript, begins with a discussion of the development of languages, artistic expression, and cultural and technical accomplishments from the earliest 066Stone Age to the beginning of the second millennium B.C.

Chapter IV, entitled “The Patriarchal Age,” deals in a somewhat cursory way with religious aspects of the patriarchal age. The author discusses the early divine names—Shaddai, El-Elyon and El-Olam—as well as whether the patriarchs were monotheists. However, the treatment is so brief that one gets the impression this is not all he intended to say on the subject.

Chapter V deals with the history, culture and religion of the non-Israelite peoples of Palestine in the Late Bronze Age (1550 B.C. to 1200 B.C.). In Chapters VI and VII, devoted to Moses and the Exodus, Albright defends his well-known views concerning the monotheistic faith of Moses and an early 13th-century date (about 1200 B.C.) for the Exodus.

Chapter VIII treats the Israelite occupation of western Palestine and the period of the Judges. Albright’s discussion of early Israel’s struggle with polytheism is one of the most penetrating in the manuscript.

Chapter IX deals with the age of Samuel and Saul and the beginning of the prophetic movement.

Chapter X, the last completed chapter in the manuscript, is devoted to the reigns of David and Solomon. He intended to cover the divided monarchies in Chapter XI, but this chapter breaks off in the middle of the eighth century B.C.

Thus the manuscript contains nothing on the two great monotheistic reform movements—under King Hezekiah in the late eighth century B.C. and under King Josiah in the late seventh century B.C. It also ends before the prophetic activities of Isaiah, Hosea and Amos in the eighth to seventh centuries B.C., of Jeremiah who prophesied both before and during the Babylonian exile, and of the great post-exilic prophets of the sixth century B.C., all of whom exerted such a powerful influence on Israel’s religious destiny. Nor does the manuscript assess the great wisdom literature like Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes.

At one point, we get a glimpse of what the finished work would have looked like. In the original manuscript, Albright discusses for five pages (ms pp. 321–325) Joshua’s renewal of Israel’s covenant at Shechem (Joshua 24). After this discussion, four separately numbered pages have been added, labeled “Revision and Condensation of pp. 321–325.” In its final form, the discussion consists of only 2½ pages of text but a full page of footnotes. The text was completely rewritten with some parts of the original shortened and other parts expanded. Had the book been completed, I suspect this would have happened to most of the rest of the manuscript, especially Chapter IV.

After reading the manuscript, I went through the books and articles Albright published during the 12 years after he laid the manuscript aside. This exercise demonstrated to me quite clearly that the unfinished manuscript reflects the state of Biblical studies and archaeology at the time it was written—the end of the 1950s. More important, I learned that Albright treated many of the subjects in more up-to-date discussions in his later works. This is clearly the good news.

In the manuscript we still find reference, for example, to the “copper smelters” discovered by Nelson Glueck at Tell el-Kheleifeh in 1938, a site identified by Glueck with Ezion-geber (ms p. 528). After Beno Rothenberg powerfully questioned Glueck’s interpretation of the archaeological evidence, Glueck radically revised his views in the 1960s and reinterpreted the “copper smelters” as storehouses.³ (See “Nelson Glueck and King Solomon—A Romance That Ended,” BAR 01:01.) However, there is no mention of this “storehouse” update in the manuscript.

In his manuscript Albright accepts Martin Noth’s view⁴ that the 12-tribe system of the pre-monarchic Israelites finds its parallel in the Greek institution called “amphictyony” (ms pp. 85ff.). In Greek history this term referred to a league of tribes organized around a temple.

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Each tribe had two votes in a synedrion which met twice a year. This body administered the temple, sought to prevent member tribes from attacking one another, attempted to unite the member tribes so they could protect themselves against outside enemies, and tried to regulate guilds and currencies within the league. Biblical scholars never widely accepted the alleged parallel between Israel’s tribal government and the amphictyonic Greek institution; by the late 1960s it was discarded by practically all who had expressed their opinions on the matter; there are simply more differences than similarities between the Israelite tribal system and the Greek amphictyonic leagues.⁵ (See “Was There an Israelite Amphictyony?” BAR 03:02, by Roland de Vaux.) Albright’s manuscript contains no discussion of the objections raised against this view and gives a one-sided and outdated picture of the subject.

After the discovery of a large cuneiform archive at Nuzi in Mesopotamia that dated from the middle of the second millennium B.C., E. A. Speiser and, later, Cyrus H. Gordon⁶ as well as others, recognized customs preserved in the Nuzi literature that seemed to parallel closely customs found in the patriarchal narratives. (See “The Patriarchs’ Wives as Sisters—Is the Anchor Bible Wrong?” BAR 01:03). Albright agreed with these views and used the same arguments to support the historicity of the patriarchal stories; he also used the Nuzi material to date the patriarchal age to the early second millennium B.C. (ms pp. 43, 48 and elsewhere). However, T. L. Thompson and John Van Seters⁷ have since then severely weakened this reasoning, although their arguments have not been generally accepted. (See “Abraham in History,” BAR 03:04, by Nahum M. Sarna.) Regardless of how unconvincing their arguments may be, however, they have nevertheless demonstrated that the Nuzi material cannot be used as the principal support for any early second millennium B.C. dating of the patriarchal age. Albright’s discussion makes no mention of this and is thus completely outdated.

In the 25 years since Albright laid aside this manuscript, countless archaeological discoveries have added a new dimension to our knowledge of Biblical times. Even many made while Albright was still alive are not referred to in this manuscript, although they were incorporated in his later works. Albright himself translated the Hebrew letter from King Josiah’s time discovered at Mesad Hashavyahu in 1960⁸ as well as three of the more than 100 Hebrew and Aramaic ostraca found at Arad.⁹ Yet he makes no mention of these finds in his manuscript.

Equally important discoveries since Albright’s death have revolutionized the field. For example, the Aramaic plaster inscriptions from Deir ’Alla were published in 1976¹⁰ (although discovered in 1967). These inscriptions mention the seer Balaam known from Numbers 22–24.

The Ammonite inscriptions discovered in the citadel of Amman and on Tell Siran and the Ammonite ostraca found at Heshbon¹¹ were published during Albright’s last years as well as after his death. Numerous seals and bullae inscribed with Biblical names have come to light in recent years.¹² And last, but not least is the discovery of religious Hebrew inscriptions on stone, plaster and pottery vessels found during the excavations at Kuntillet ’Ajrud in the Sinai desert.¹³ (See “Did Yahweh Have a Consort?” BAR 05:02, by Ze’ev Meshel.) These Sinai texts from a small pilgrim site have shed much welcome light on the Israelite religious concepts in the eighth century B.C. as well as on several pronouncements of the prophets of that time which the Bible has preserved. All this valuable inscriptional material was not available to Albright at the time he wrote this manuscript.

I have not even mentioned the most sensational recent discovery of written material—the thousands of cuneiform tablets from the late third millennium B.C. found at Ebla in northern Syria.¹⁴ Preliminary studies of these tablets have revealed that many were written in a west Semitic language, tentatively called Eblaite or Proto-Canaanite. These texts may provide the scholarly world with the earliest form of the Canaanite language from which Biblical Hebrew descended, although many claims as to their bearing on our understanding of the patriarchal period have been made prematurely, to say the least. Sadly, no scholar of Albright’s linguistic stature and with his interests and expertise in Biblical studies is able to appraise and analyze the Ebla texts as they apply to the Bible—even if they were available.

During the last 25 years, excavation of vast quantities of uninscribed material has also illuminated the history of Israel as well as its culture and religion. I think especially of the excavations of Aphek, Arad, Ashdod, Beer-Sheva, Deir el-Balah, Gezer, Jerusalem, Lachish and Shechem. Many other sites could be added to this list.

This new archaeological material has demonstrated that even a work by the undisputed master of Biblical archaeology is out of date in many ways after a quarter of a century.

In light of these facts, it is obvious that Albright’s unfinished manuscript could be brought up to date by no one today except the original author himself. No living scholar has Albright’s breadth of knowledge—linguistic, archaeological, historical and philosophical know-how combined with a deep knowledge and love of the Bible, as well as an uncanny memory.

I do not want to give the impression that Albright’s 068unfinished manuscript contains nothing of lasting value. Indeed, it is packed with many original interpretations of archaeological and inscriptional material which even after a quarter of a century have not lost any of their importance. Fortunately, however, almost all the gems are available in Albright’s later articles and books.

For example, many of his ideas about Moses and the great lawgiver’s life work, expressed in Chapters VI and VII of the manuscript, are incorporated in Albright’s article “Moses in Historical and Theological Perspective,” which was published posthumously in the G. Ernest Wright Festschrift.¹⁵ Similarly, Albright devoted part of Chapter IX of the manuscript to his views on Samuel and the role played by that unique prophet in the religious history of Israel; these ideas were developed and extended in a later lecture published in 1966.¹⁶

Many of Albright’s most original manuscript views about the development of Israel’s monotheistic faith are contained in a more thorough and polished form in his last major opus, Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan, published in 1968.¹⁷

If The History of the Religion of Israel had been completed and published when it was written a quarter of a century ago, it would have been a valuable contribution to the field of Biblical and archaeological studies. In 1984, it is not only an unfinished manuscript; it is an unfinished manuscript that contains many outdated views and interpretations. Hence it is no more than a historical document showing in its extant parts the state of Biblical studies in the late 1950s.

Moreover, since most of the views and ideas of the author expressed in this manuscript have been published in one form or another in subsequent articles and books which Albright himself wrote before his death, neither the scholarly world nor the layperson interested in Biblical studies and archaeology has lost a great deal. In its extant state Albright’s manuscript is no more than a torso without head or feet; it lacks not only its initial two chapters but also several important chapters at the end. The text material is only a first draft; it has not been reworked or edited and lacks a large number of footnotes. From the master’s hands, they would have been packed with valuable and thought-provoking insights. Fortunately, however, he left a vast corpus of published writing which, even without this unpublished manuscript, is a fitting legacy.

One of the greatest Biblical archaeologists of the 20th century, William Foxwell Albright, left an unfinished book manuscript when he died in 1971. But this is no secret to his friends, students and admirers. BAR readers were told of the manuscript’s existence nine years ago (see “Major Unpublished Book on the Religion of Israel,” BAR 01:02). In 1975 Albright’s biography appeared, providing additional information on the uncompleted book.1 According to Albright’s biographers, the manuscript, entitled The History of the Religion of Israel, was written between the autumn of 1958 and the summer of 1959, while Albright was a guest […]