The Welcome Mat Is Out … Until You’re Asked to Leave!

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I wasn’t really kicked out. I was just asked to leave—very politely. Still, it was a little embarrassing. I was at a joint meeting of CAP—ASOR’s^a Committee on Archaeological Policy—and AMC—its Ancient Manuscript Committee, having just come from a separate meeting of the Ancient Manuscript Committee, chaired by Notre Dame’s James VanderKam. The AMC had been considering a policy statement on freer access for all scholars to manuscript discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls (now happily available to all scholars) in an effort to avoid a repetition of the situation that once prevailed with the scrolls. Before the AMC meeting I told Jim that I didn’t want to embarrass his committee or myself by coming if the meeting was closed. Since I cannot imagine a more open person than James VanderKam, I was not surprised when he told me his committee meetings were open, as they had been last year when I attended. I had also attended last year’s meeting of ASOR’s trustees after checking with 048ASOR president Eric Meyers that it too was an open meeting. At that time, ASOR voted not to accept the proposed resolution on access submitted by VanderKam’s committee, but to study the matter further in coordination with the Committee on Archaeological Policy.

At this year’s Annual Meeting^b in San Francisco, VanderKam’s AMC committee, at a meeting I attended, hammered out a new proposal. Then, chatting amiably, we all went as a group to the joint AMC-CAP meeting in a larger room on another floor of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel. I borrowed some writing paper from Tom Schaub of Indiana University of Pennsylvania as we settled down at the table for the meeting of the two committees. I did not notice the buzzing at one end of the table. Then CAP chairman Walter Rast of Valparaiso University came over to me and asked me to leave. The committee was aware of my concerns, he said, and intended to address them. He would tell me about the meeting the next day. I explained to ASOR trustee Joy Ungerleider-Mayerson, sitting next to me, that I had been asked to leave. I picked up my coat and hat and slunk out.

The next day was the ASOR trustees meeting. I wondered whether I should attend. Hesitantly, I entered the room, not knowing what to expect. Charles Harris, chairman of the board, began the meeting by welcoming everyone, adding “The work of ASOR is open to the public; we have nothing to hide.”

It was a relief not only to me, but also to the many others who had heard that I had been permitted to attend last year’s trustees meeting and had decided that they too would attend this year’s meeting.

Harris candidly acknowledged that “ASOR has gone through a painful [financial] transition,” but, he added, this year ASOR operated in the black. All its overseas institutes—in Jerusalem, Amman and Nicosia—were financially independent and the entire operation was now proceeding on a “sound financial base.” President Eric Meyers of Duke University also frankly admitted that the economies imposed during the past year had been “painful.” But the bottom had been reached and things were now beginning to improve. In a private discussion later, Harris good naturedly referred to my occasional criticisms of ASOR. I reminded him that last year I had called the ASOR leadership “able.”^c “Well,” he said with his customary good humor, “This year call it very able.”

Harris raised an interesting issue at the trustees meeting: Individual members of ASOR have no voice whatever in the governance of the organization. Individual members do not even vote for members of the board of trustees; only the 110 corporate members of ASOR have a vote. Obviously, this is unacceptable in the 1990s—and has been for a long time. How soon ASOR will change this remains to be seen. Not a great deal of enthusiasm was expressed for the idea at this meeting, and no action was taken on Harris’ proposal that the issue be addressed. Clearly ASOR needs more participatory democracy. It has long been perceived as run by a relatively small clique of insiders. This too needs to change. Leadership in ASOR is almost generational; only the older generation is in control. More young people and women scholars should be brought into leadership—or at least subleadership—positions. They need to feel welcome.

The proposed resolution on freer access to written as well as nonwritten archaeological remains (left) was supported by both the Ancient Manuscript Committee and the Committee on Archaeological Policy. Harris called the proposal “an extraordinarily important statement.” After minor modifications, it passed with only a single dissenting vote.

The nay vote was cast by Jerry Cooper of the Johns Hopkins University, who felt that the proposal was merely a response to last year’s resolution on freer access passed by the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), rather than an affirmative statement by ASOR on the subject.

The ASOR statement is clearly a more guarded statement than SBL’s clarion call, but, still, it makes the point. That is the important thing. These resolutions are not statutes that create law. They will not be parsed for their precise application. They are policy statements. And they make the point that American academic institutions deplore what happened with the Dead Sea Scrolls and they do not want that to happen again. They have cast their vote for free access.

ASOR, because it does field work in many countries, understandably was concerned that its resolution on freer access not appear presumptuous to the antiquities authorities of these countries. It also felt the need to address issues of preservation and safety.

Some archaeologists worried that a policy statement on freer access might detract from their exclusive right to publish the finds that they excavate. This is a less legitimate concern. The 049fact is that archaeologists have a dreadful record when it comes to publication. Few excavations publish final reports—and even then only many years (sometimes decades) after the excavation has ended. No nationality, whether American, Israeli, British or any other, is immune to this disease. Failure to publish is the dirty secret of the archaeological profession. No one would deny this.

I hopefully predict that the profession itself will soon begin to face this problem and will find ways to establish standards and to assure adequate and prompt publication. Archaeologists should not worry that a broad statement on access will lead to other scholars coming to their digs, looking over their shoulders and demanding to see unpublished finds. But it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if this happened. Archaeologists often need a prod to publish. It’s much more fun to dig than to write a report. What we need to do is to find ways to help archaeologists meet what they recognize is their obligation.

Currently, one of the most effective prods is Amir Drori, director of the Israel Antiquities Authority. When issuing a permit to excavate, he sometimes makes it conditional—even for some senior archaeologists on progress in completing delinquent reports on other excavations. Bravo Amir!

Since I was so critical of the facilities at last year’s Annual Meeting in Kansas City, it behooves me to give San Francisco high marks. The convention hotel, the Hilton, occupied an entire city block downtown. Efficient stations throughout the hotel were set up for quick breakfasts and lunches. The three attached buildings managed to contain what was surely one of the most successful Annual Meetings in recent memory.

If there was anything to criticize, it was the very success that attracted over 6,500 registrants—the largest ever. The crowds were sometimes overwhelming. Yet it was also inspiring to walk down the halls and see meeting room after meeting room full of people intently listening to scholarly presentations.

As usual, topics ranged from such things as “Family Gods in Mesopotamia, Syria and Israel” and “Zephaniah’s Oracle Against the Nations and an Israelite Cultural Myth” to “Abraham’s Sacrifice of Isaac in Early Christian Iconography” and “Prostitutes and Penitents in the Early Christian Church.”

The archaeological presentations sponsored by ASOR were pretty much sidelined by SBL and the American Academy of Religion (AAR), as was ASOR itself. The ASOR papers were listed by themselves in a separate six-page section of the 308-page program. ASOR speakers were not even listed in the index of participants. Unlike SBL and AAR, ASOR’s business meetings were not announced in the program, as if these were of no interest to the participants in the Annual Meeting. Many of the ASOR sessions were held not at the Hilton but at nearby hotels. Several ASOR presentations in the six-page program were jointly sponsored with AAR and SBL. These tended to be the most interesting. Few of the other sessions had any Biblical connection. Fewer still were synthetic treatments of broader subjects. The ASOR program still needs improvement if it is to satisfy its fringe as well as its core constituency.

This was the first time that I can remember that Bill Dever of the University of Arizona, one of this country’s leading Biblical archaeologists (although he decries that designation), didn’t give a paper at the Annual Meeting. His eloquence and insight were missed. He attended the meeting, however, and he and I had dinner together. He told me about the paper he didn’t give and promised to give me a copy when he finished polishing it—so that I could criticize it and him!

Several SBL sessions were devoted to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Most were very technical and threw around terms like 4Q299 and 4Q521 with an abandon and facility that only the saturated scholar could comprehend (this excluded most, though not all, of the audience). It reminded me of the convention of comics who were so familiar with the jokes that they simply referred to them by number. At each mention of a number at the comic’s convention, the audience chuckled. On one occasion, when the speaker mentioned 521 the audience politely smiled, but one of the comics in the audience roared. He explained that he had found it particularly funny because he had never heard it before.

The dramatic highlight of this year’s 050Annual Meeting occurred in one of the Dead Sea Scroll sessions where Professor Lawrence Schiffman of New York University addressed himself to a new book by Professor Robert Eisenman of California State University, Long Beach, and Professor Michael Wise of the University of Chicago that, Schiffman charged, purports to contain 50 previously unpublished texts (The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered, Element, 1992). This, said Schiffman, is a “fraudulent” claim (see “Blood on the Floor at New York Dead Sea Scroll Conference,” in this issue, for further developments in this matter). In addition, Schiffman said, the authors’ assertion that they have deciphered the material themselves is “preposterous and manifestly dishonest.” Schiffman referred to Eisenman’s “ridiculous theory of Jamesian Christianity” and characterized it as “accepted nowhere but in the gullible popular media.” Schiffman concluded by “warn[ing] the public to beware of the ludicrous interpretations found in this volume.”

Eisenman had earlier presented a paper on “Messianism at Qumran” that was unfortunately marred, as were many other papers, by extremely poor presentation. He, like many others, read his paper. When it became obvious that he could not read the entire paper in the allotted time, he began not only cutting, but reading very fast, as if there were some magic in getting the words sounded out regardless of whether anyone could comprehend them. This is a not uncommon problem, especially with first-time presenters. The problem is compounded when the speaker has a small voice that does not carry (not a problem for Eisenman).

As a partial corrective, I propose that the organizers of the Annual Meeting hire a corps of professional readers. Whenever a scholar insists on literally reading a paper, the text would be given to one of the processional readers to read aloud. The scholar who wrote the paper could stand behind or to the side of the professional reader so that the scholar’s contribution could be recognized and acknowledged. The scholar would also be available to answer questions after the professional reader finished. This way the audience would at least understand what was being read. For other suggestions on how to make a presentation at the Annual Meeting, see the sidebar ‘How to Present a Paper at the Annual Meeting.”

Two papers at the Annual Meeting received substantial financial assistance from our own Biblical Archaeology Society, publisher of BAR (and Bible Review). One, already mentioned, was the Mitchell Dahood Memorial Competition lecture. This year’s competition was won by Karel van der Toorn of the University of Leiden; his paper was entitled “Family Gods in Mesopotamia, Syria and Israel.” The other paper was by Rachel Barkay, who received a BAS scholarship to attend the meeting under our program of subsidizing women Israeli scholars (as well as Arab nationals from Arab countries and, beginning this year, pre-Ph.D. candidates from Israel). Dr. Barkay’s talk was entitled “Deities and Mythology of Nysa-Scythopolis (Beth-Shean) in the Roman Period—Numismatic Aspects.” Both of these papers may end up as articles in BAR, reworked of course for our less scholarly audience. They were both intriguing papers and we were pleased to have had a hand in bringing them to an international audience.

Next year’s meeting will be in our hometown, Washington, D.C., November 20–23, 1993. Please come see us. We’re planning something special.

I wasn’t really kicked out. I was just asked to leave—very politely. Still, it was a little embarrassing. I was at a joint meeting of CAP—ASOR’sa Committee on Archaeological Policy—and AMC—its Ancient Manuscript Committee, having just come from a separate meeting of the Ancient Manuscript Committee, chaired by Notre Dame’s James VanderKam. The AMC had been considering a policy statement on freer access for all scholars to manuscript discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls (now happily available to all scholars) in an effort to avoid a repetition of the situation that once prevailed with the scrolls. Before the AMC […]