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Cynical observers claim that when a discipline falls to questioning its name, it is already moribund. I would argue, however, that periodic (and even painful) reassessment is a sign of robust health. And nothing is a better clue to our identity than the name we choose to give ourselves.

I shall therefore air here what many professional archaeologists are now thinking, although unwilling to state publicly. Recent trends in both archaeology and Biblical studies, not to mention the worsening political situation in the Middle East, compel us to find an altogether new terminology to define our discipline. The time has come to abandon the term “Palestinian” archaeology.

Because of archaeology’s rediscovery of the long-lost “World of the Bible” beginning in the mid-19th century, “Biblical archaeology” was the almost exclusive designation of the field, especially in America.¹ William F. Albright, the venerable father of the discipline, however, used the term “Biblical archaeology” alternately with “Syro-Palestinian archaeology.”² The first of his many state-of-the-art surveys (in 1933) was entitled The Archaeology of Palestine and the Bible.³ Similarly, his classic (and only synthetic) work, in 1949, was entitled The Archaeology of Palestine (the title remained in subsequent revisions). In another early survey,⁴ he called a chapter “The Present State of Syro-Palestinian Archaeology” (my italics).

Oddly, this Nestor of “Biblical archaeology” rarely used that term to describe the discipline. His only use of it, for the discipline overall, that I have found was in a very early article in the Journal of Biblical Literature in 1924. In his last contribution before he died in 1971, to a 1969 handbook (New Directions in Biblical Archaeology), his chapter was entitled simply “The Impact of Archaeology on Biblical Research.” To be sure, Albright did characterize the discipline further by saying,

I shall use the term “biblical archaeology” here to refer to all Bible lands—from India to Spain, and from southern Russia to South Arabia—and to the whole history of those lands from about 10,000 B.C., or even earlier, to the present time.⁵

What is most remarkable about this rare, astonishing “definition” is that it does not really define (that is, specify), but includes everything in its purview, most 058of which obviously has nothing to do with the Bible.

It was really Albright’s protegé, G. Ernest Wright, who fostered “Biblical archaeology” as a name for our discipline.⁶ Wright’s first state-of-the-art treatment in a 1947 handbook (The Study of the Bible Today and Tomorrow) was entitled “The Present State of Biblical Archaeology,” the term he adopted ten years later in his own handbook, Biblical Archaeology.⁷

Although actual definitions of the field are rare in Wright’s publications, in the 1947 book he did declare:

To me, at least, biblical archaeology is a special “armchair” variety of general archaeology, which studies the discoveries of the excavators and gleans from them every fact that throws a direct, indirect, or even diffused light upon the Bible. It must be intelligently concerned with stratigraphy and typology, upon which the method of modern archaeology rests; but its chief concern is not with strata or pots or methodology. Its central and absorbing interest is the understanding and exposition of the Scriptures.⁸

But if Albright’s definition of the field was too inclusive, Wright’s was too exclusive—indeed it undermined the notion of archaeology as a professional discipline altogether, not to mention excluding most of the history and peoples of ancient Palestine. After all, the “Biblical period,” even extended to encompass the so-called New Testament era, consists at most of about 1,200 years, confined mostly to the tiny area of Palestine west of the Jordan.⁹

As a rambunctious young archaeologist in Jerusalem in the early 1970s, I thought about producing my own handbook—but as a team project. I recently rediscovered the file of invitation letters, in which I had actually gotten some 20 American, Israeli, and even possibly Jordanian archaeologists to agree to cooperate (imagine that today). But the project fell apart when we couldn’t even agree on a title!¹⁰

In 1972, I published what I thought was an innocuous little piece in an obscure magazine, Christian News from Israel, entitled “‘Biblical Archaeology’—or ‘The Archaeology of Syria-Palestine?’” My wife, Norma, warned me about twitting the Establishment, but as usual I ignored her. I recall saying, “But nobody will ever see this.” They did, of course. And Ernest Wright—my revered teacher and mentor—promptly wrote me the sort of anguished letter that a father would write to a prodigal son. In it, he said that I “must get right with Albright,” that if I persisted I would destroy our discipline.

That was my first shot across the bow of the Establishment. It was prompted by a reluctant but growing recognition that traditional-style “Biblical archaeology” was full of contradictions, hopelessly compromised by Biblical biases, and in any case rapidly becoming obsolete when compared to developments in the larger world of the ascendant “New Archaeology” of the 1970s. Thus from the beginning, the controversy has been about much more than simply a name.

Beginning more than 30 years ago, my own agenda—for better or worse, always right “upfront”—has been simply to “secularize” our branch of archaeology. In other words, (1) to eliminate the longstanding biases resulting from theological, political, and cultural presuppositions; (2) to create an autonomous, professional discipline that could take a respectable place within the mainstream of Near Eastern archaeology; and above all (3) to foster a dialogue between this newly-independent branch of archaeology and Biblical studies, not a monologue as previously, in the belief that each discipline needed and could benefit from the other.

But what to suggest as a name for our version of the “New Archaeology”? The designation “Biblical” archaeology was now unacceptable. It was an embarrassment for the new vision, a “throwback” to an earlier era. Therefore, in the 1970s, I advocated reviving Albright’s own preferred term, “Syro-Palestinian archaeology.” I am flattered to have been credited with introducing this term, but it was really Albright’s.

Yet I am now forced to concede that the term “Syro-Palestinian archaeology” should be abandoned, because recent events have made it obsolete. Terminology must be accurate as well as pragmatic; and at the moment “Palestinian” is neither.

I stress that the misgivings I have are not a matter of “political correctness,” for I abhor that. My aim is simply to be helpful, and to do so by giving expression to what I know are the misgivings shared by almost all of my colleagues.

To put the matter in a larger context, consider the terminology preferred by the so-called “national schools” in the Middle East. They now admittedly dominate the field, and they will do so even more in future.

The Israeli “school”¹¹ has matured dramatically since it was founded in the 1950s by Yigael Yadin and a circle of his pioneering young protegés (Ruth Amiran, Amnon Ben-Tor, Yigal Shiloh, Trude and Moshe Dothan, Ephraim Stern, David Ussishkin and others; Yohanan Aharoni took a somewhat different approach, as did Eliezer Oren). Now there is a second, very impressive generation in their early and late 50s (Israel Finkelstein, Amihai Mazar and others). And a third generation, even more promising in my judgment, is rising to prominence (Shlomo Bunimovitz, Avraham Faust, Yosef Garfinkel, Raphael Greenberg, Raz Kletter, David Ilan, Aren Maeir, Ilan Sharon and others, including prehistorians and archaeologists working in the period of “Late Antiquity,” the early centuries of the common era).

Despite that proliferation of talent, and the “coming of age” of the national school, Israeli archaeologists have remained pragmatic, rather than theoretically inclined. Thus they have been reluctant to define “Israeli archaeology.” For the most part, they take the 059same attitude as Albright: It is what they do—and that is sufficient. One can find only a few brief critical reflections on “Israeli archaeology” by Israeli scholars. In 1987 Ephraim Stern argued that “the relationship between biblical and Palestinian archaeology…seems to me to be a purely American controversy…Most of us closely following the dispute in American journals find it to a great extent to be sterile and unintelligible. For us, Palestinian and biblical archaeology are synonymous terms which it would be unthinkable to separate.”¹² Stern concluded that “our ties with the Bible are direct and emotional.”¹³ These remarks of an old friend and colleague are, I believe, somewhat naive; and furthermore they do little to build up the needed theoretical foundations of our discipline.

In 1988, Amihai Mazar gave a brief but comprehensive overview of Israeli fieldwork and publication, yet he concluded that “the New Archaeology which emanated from American anthropological research has remained alien to traditional thinking in Israeli archaeology.”¹⁴ Noting that I had attacked the term “Biblical archaeology,” Mazar argued that “in Israel it is not used officially.” Yet at the same time, Mazar conceded that the term “fits more precisely the nature of the (Israeli) activity of the field.” As for my term “Syro-Palestinian archaeology,” Mazar thinks that it “does not necessarily contradict the term Biblical Archaeology.”¹⁵

The only Israeli to address the issue of terminology recently is Israel Finkelstein, whose piece entitled “Bible Archaeology or Archaeology of Palestine in the Iron Age? A Rejoinder” was intended largely to discredit opponents of his “low chronology” by associating them with old-fashioned “Biblical archaeology.”¹⁶

In practice, however, Israeli archaeologists have consistently used the term “Biblical archaeology” in their popular presentations in English. In Hebrew they say “the archaeology of Eretz-Israel” (i.e., “the Land of Israel”). To complicate matters even more, in their scientific publications Israelis use the term “Palestinian archaeology”—even now, despite the unsavory reputation that the term has acquired recently. A perusal of Israeli articles over the past 30 years in the Israel Exploration Journal, the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research and elsewhere will document the matter-of-fact use of the term “Palestinian archaeology” by Israelis. Even now, under duress of the Palestinian intifada, there has been no published dissent among Israelis.

Archaeology in Jordan has flourished spectacularly in the past 20 years or so, and with it a vigorous “Jordanian” national school has emerged. Though not as large or as old as the “Israeli school,” it is very impressive in its own way. Its practitioners have been even more reluctant than Israelis to specify this school’s distinctive character. Recent handbooks such as those published in 1987 and 1988 do not have an entry on Jordanian archaeology. And no Jordanian has yet produced syntheses comparable to those on Israeli archaeology.

Jordanian archaeologists have, understandably, always rejected “Biblical archaeology” or the “archaeology of the Holy Land.” Since several Jordanian archaeologists are of West Bank origin or sympathetic with the Palestinian cause, one would expect them to welcome the term “Palestinian archaeology.” But they do not. As they have told me, they label what they do, when required, as “the archaeology of Bilad esh-Sham,” meaning something like “the archaeology of the district of Syria,” or one might even say “Greater Syria.” And this despite a history of rather poor relations with modern Syria.

The obituary of traditional “Biblical archaeology” was written in the 1970s, and by the 1980s few mourned its passing. If the term “Biblical archaeology” continued to appear, it was usually in quotes and referred specifically to the dialogue between archaeology and Biblical studies, as I myself used it now and then.

By the 1980s I thought that the matter of terminology, once so controversial, had been settled, and to my surprise quite amicably. Now we could get on with the dialogue between the two disciplines, which was part of my original rationale for favoring the term “Syro-Palestinian archaeology.”

Two developments in both archaeology and Biblical studies in the 1980s and 1990s, however, prevented the dialogue that I had thought would justify the term.

The first was probably inevitable, although many of us lamented it: over-specialization, as archaeology became more professionalized, more sophisticated theoretically, and finally less wedded to texts and more anthropologically oriented. Few Biblicists could understand the proliferation of this academic literature, and some archaeologists even despaired. The second development came in the 1990s, when Biblical studies entered the historiographical crisis that we now sometimes call the “minimalist-maximalist” controversy. The extreme “revisionist” historians—or nihilists, as I have called them^a—reject the Hebrew Bible as late, pious propaganda, devoid of any reliable information about an actual historical “Israel” in the Iron Age of Palestine (c. 1200–600 B.C.). As Baruch Halpern charged, the assault of the Copenhagen and Sheffield schools is intended “to erase ancient Israel from history.”

One might think that the “revisionists,” having jettisoned the Hebrew Bible as a source for history-writing, would turn to our only source of external, presumably “neutral” data—namely archaeology. After all, archaeology is now a “primary,” rapidly expanding source, both complementary to and corrective with regard to 060textual sources. To my astonishment, the “revisionists” have blithely ignored the archaeological data, or else completely distorted it when they do occasionally cite it. What is more dismaying, the “revisionists” have repeatedly caricatured archaeology and vilified individual archaeologists. As part of their strategy to discredit archaeology, they have attempted to resurrect the long-dead “Biblical archaeology” as their whipping-boy. This can easily be seen in Keith Whitelam’s The Invention of Ancient Israel: the Silencing of Palestinian History (1996); in Niels Peter Lemche’s The Israelites in History and Tradition (1998); and especially in Thomas L. Thompson’s virulent attack, The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel (1999).

Meanwhile, many mainstream Biblical scholars in America, Europe and Israel seem to have lost interest in history altogether. They favor “post-modernist” and “New Literary” criticism, eco-feminism, Third World liberation theology, and other faddish approaches that stress the Bible as literature and simply beg the question of history. If history has become irrelevant, then archaeology can be dismissed as merely playing in the dirt.

Yet archaeologists are at fault as well. Many have become excellent technicians, but they have failed to engage the larger intellectual issues—especially the challenge of integrating texts and artifacts in writing the real “revisionist” histories of ancient Israel that we need. Despite its flaws, Finkelstein and Silberman’s The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (2001) moves in the right direction.^b17 I hope that the same can be said of my own book published the same year.^c

“Biblical archaeology,” as a professional designation, was passé long ago, and the attempts of amateurs like the “revisionists” to resuscitate it for their own ideological purpose cannot be countenanced. The term should be used, if at all, as a popular “shorthand,” not the name of the larger discipline.

“Archaeology of the Holy Land” was always a Western cultural conceit, and in the present political climate in the Middle East it is unthinkable. Whose “Holy Land”? The same is true of “archaeology of the Land of the Bible,” especially when “Land” (Hebrew ‘eretz, as in ‘eretz-yisrael) becomes the Land as an ideological construct.¹⁸

“Syro-Palestinian” and “Palestinian” archaeology were terms that were appropriate 30 years ago. These terms were more accurate in describing what the newer archaeology was actually doing. They also fit the “neutral” stance of the discipline, as well as the broad, ecumenical vision of the discipline. But these terms have been hopelessly compromised by the fragmentation of Near Eastern archaeology, and particularly by the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The burning questions for us today are: How is a “past” created? How does our reconstruction of the past shape us? And, above all, who owns the past? But our field is not a science. There can never be a “unified field” view for our discipline.

To keep archaeology in the region neutral, we need at the very least a new “neutral” terminology, one that dissociates us entirely from the political conflict. In future, “Palestinian” archaeology can define only what the real Palestinians do, for better or worse.¹⁹

In my mind, there is only one way to break out of the current impasse: Devise an altogether new terminology. Already some younger archaeologists, among them my own students, are introducing new terms like “the archaeology of the Southern Levant.” But that is quite vague: What does “Levant” mean, and where is it? The term derives from the French lever, “to rise,” meaning the Orient, or “lands of the rising sun.” That would presumably denote the lands around the eastern Mediterranean shores—modern Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. But what about Turkey, or Egypt? Is Cyprus part of the Levant? And aren’t we leaving out Jordan? For me, this term is at once too broad and too restrictive. Furthermore, “Levant” is so…well, so “Levantine,” with all the unfortunate Western and negative connotations of that term.

The only way I see to cut the Gordion Knot is simply to adopt the current modern names of the various political entities in the region, however much we acknowledge their arbitrariness. Thus in future we should simply speak of “the archaeology of Israel”; of the “West Bank” (perhaps in time, “Palestine”); of “Jordan”; and of “Syria” (“Lebanon,” too, if conditions return to normal).

These are simply proper nouns, and they are thus accurate, useful, and non-judgmental. To be sure, there is a semantic difficulty when we use them as adjectives, especially for foreign archaeologists. For instance, I can hardly identify myself as an “Israeli archaeologist,” simply because I work in Israel.

When asked who we are and what we do, we may say something like “I am a Near Eastern archaeologist, specializing in X, Y, and Z.” If a non-specialist is interested only in the Biblical period, we can comfortably use language such as “the archaeology of Palestine in the Iron Age,” as I suggested some time ago; or simply “archaeology and the Bible.” For the later periods, perhaps, we can speak of “the archaeology of early Judaism and Christianity.”

The terminology that I am advocating here is admittedly rather prosaic, but that’s better than being explosive these days. And it can help us all to get on with the real business of archaeology in the Middle East.

Cynical observers claim that when a discipline falls to questioning its name, it is already moribund. I would argue, however, that periodic (and even painful) reassessment is a sign of robust health. And nothing is a better clue to our identity than the name we choose to give ourselves. I shall therefore air here what many professional archaeologists are now thinking, although unwilling to state publicly. Recent trends in both archaeology and Biblical studies, not to mention the worsening political situation in the Middle East, compel us to find an altogether new terminology to define our discipline. The […]