When 5,613 Scholars Get Together in One Place—The Annual Meeting, 1990

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A maturing generation of brilliant young scholars went far toward making the 1990 Annual Meeting^a a resounding success. Many of these young scholars are women.

For four days in November, 5,613 attendees listened to scholarly presentations in 550 program meetings, covering everything from “Eusebius on the Gnostics” (Birger Pearson) to “The Bronze Age Ancestry of the Iron Age I Four-Room House” (Suzanne Richard).

Everyone was there, including senior scholars. But the senior scholars were more often seen than heard. Some came just to socialize, reminisce and listen. Others huddled in committee rooms, still wielding power backstage, but seldom sallying forth to give a paper—or even to hear one. Among the prominent exceptions was not-quite-aging Bill Dever, a, if not the, perennial star of the show, simply by the force of his powerful and incisive intellect and his thought-provoking ideas—of which see the sidebar “Women’s Popular Religion, Suppressed in the Bible, Now Revealed by Archaeology.” But the senior scholars’ contribution to this meeting was felt more through their students than through their own current performance. They had much to be proud of.

A distinguished contingent of Israeli archaeologists also enriched the proceedings, as usual. It included 81-year-old Avraham Biran, former director of the Department of Antiquities, now the director of the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology of Hebrew Union College and, for the past 24 years, the director of excavations at Tel Dan. Biran looks 15 years younger and acts 30 years younger than he is. He delivered a lively paper on Tel Dan before and after the Neo-Assyrian conquest, at the end of the Iron Age.

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Unfortunately, no women were among the Israeli contingent who made the 7,000-mile trip to New Orleans. BAR hopes to remedy this situation by providing two scholarships to younger Israeli women to deliver papers at future Annual Meetings.

As usual, Arab archaeologists were notable by their absence. The sole exception I know of was Moawiyah Ibrahim, director of the Institute of Archaeology at Yarmouk University, Jordan, who reported on his excavation at Zeiraqoun. To encourage more Arabs, especially younger ones, to share their ideas and insights with the world community of scholars, BAR will also offer two scholarships to Arab scholars to come to the Annual Meeting to deliver papers.

Among the papers I enjoyed most was one by Beth Nakhai, one of Bill Dever’s students, who analyzed religious structures in Israel during the monarchy in order to understand ancient Israelite religion. In short, the bamot or high places, although often condemned in the Bible, were widely accepted as legitimate in Israelite society; even temple worship occurred at numerous sites outside Jerusalem.

Other stimulating papers were delivered by Judith Hadley, Diana Pickwith, Marsha White, Susan Ackerman, Tamara Eskenazi, Amy-Jill Levine, Ilona Rashkow and Mary Leith.

Mary Leith’s presentation analyzed 125 as-yet-unpublished bullae (seal impressions on lumps of clay used to seal documents) from the Wadi Daliyeh, north of Jericho. The bullae date to the fourth century B.C. They once sealed the still-unpublished Wadi Daliyeh papyri. Two bullae contain inscriptions and nearly half have recognizable pictorial material. Leith is working on this material for her doctoral dissertation, under Harvard’s Frank Cross. The Wadi Daliyeh papyri and bullae were discovered in 1962 by Ta-amireh Bedouin. The finds were assigned to Cross to publish. Nearly 30 years later, they have still not been published. Cross has the exclusive power to authorize his graduate students to work on the material, and if Ms. Leith is representative, the work that graduate students are doing with their mentor’s unpublished material is superb. But, still, something seems wrong with the system.

The same conditions prevail with respect to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Almost all of the new generation of American Dead Sea Scroll editors can trace their origins directly or indirectly to Frank Cross and John Strugnell at Harvard. The new crop are excellent scholars, superbly trained: Carol Newsom, Julie Duncan, Eileen Schuller, Sidnie White and Judith Sanderson. Harvard—really Frank Cross and John Strugnell—dominates the field in a way almost unique in archaeological annals because it controls the texts and can assign them to its students.

What these young scholars are doing far and away surpasses the earlier publication of Dead Sea Scroll texts. Some of the most exciting sessions at the Annual Meeting were devoted to Dead Sea Scroll texts, many of them still unpublished but available to Harvard students. New methods of analyzing Biblical texts, for example, indicate a wide variety of independent texts at Qumran. With few exceptions (such as 4QNum^b and 4QPaleoExodⁿ) the Biblical texts cannot be easily categorized as of pre-Masoretic, Septuagint or Samaritan traditions. The very existence of local text types is being questioned. It seems that at Qumran there was considerable tolerance for what Jim Sanders of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center in Claremont, California, calls pluriform texts. In the end, Qumran may give us a new understanding of what it meant to be an authoritative or canonical text at that time—a far more fluid understanding than we previously had.

The analysis of Biblical texts is, of course, becoming far more sophisticated, especially with the aid of computers. It is no longer sufficient to count similarities and dissimilarities. Now the differences are not simply counted, but evaluated according to numerous complicated criteria. Perhaps, in the end, we will find new text types. Or perhaps not. Only when everything is published will we be able to attempt to trace the development of the Biblical texts that have come down to us.

Yet, with all this progress, there is something demeaning about senior scholars having to ask Sidnie White, already a major Qumran scholar at age 31, if she would identify and spell certain Hebrew words in unpublished texts that she, through Cross and Strugnell, has access to. As this inquiry was taking place in one session, I looked over at the white-haired Ben-Zion Wacholder of Hebrew Union College, who was listening intently to absorb in his legendary capacious memory the facts young Sidnie White was generously divulging.

Turning to other subjects, I learned a new word from Andrew Hill at a talk on the statues of Artemis of Ephesus (the ones with the many egglike or breastlike appendages on the torso): polymastic. It means many-breasted. Unfortunately, it’s a difficult word to work into a conversation. (Besides it’s not even in my unabridged dictionary; but then neither is “protome” or “piriform.” Why not? And what do they mean?)

Another paper that set me thinking was a restudy of the excavation report of Tell en-Nasbeh (probably Biblical Mizpeh). The excavation was conducted between 1926 and 1935 by William Badè of the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. Badè died in 1936, but his students and colleagues published a final report in 1947. It received rave reviews. Albright said, “The standard of completeness of recording and of adequate drafting and photography set here can hardly be surpassed.” G. Ernest Wright wrote, “The excellence of the publication sets these volumes apart among basic sources for further work in the field of Palestinian archaeology.” Yet the Tell en-Nasbeh report has hardly been cited in the literature since then. Jeffrey Zorn, of the University of California (Berkeley), set out to find out why—and discovered that the final report was practically unusable. Nothing fits with anything else. This naturally made me wonder whether we can rely on the certitude of today’s “experts.”

The Jewish Theological Seminary’s 064Edward Greenstein told us ways to read a Bibical text more deeply For example:

“[Do not look] for what is present in the text but in its absences, in the silences of what is supressed and in the spaces between conflicting propositions It is the role of the reader not to read out what is there but to read in what is not; not to follow what is said but to speak up for the unsaid.”

Quoting Catherine Belsey’s Critical Practice:

“The object of the critic is to seek not the unity of the work, but the multiplicity and diversity of its possible meanings, its incompleteness, the omissions which it displays but cannot describe, and above all its contradictions. In its absences, and in the collisions between its divergent meanings, the text implicitly criticizes its own ideology; it contains within itself the critique of its own values.”

Greenstein calls these omissions from the text “informational gaps”:

“The informational gap is integral to the pattern of a text, like the silences between the tones in music or the space surrounding a sculpture The nature of the gap is determined by the text to which it belongs, just as musical silences are defined by the tones that envelop them. The gap constitutes meaning no less than musical silence shapes rhythm.”

The informational gaps can be used to interpret “with the grain” of the text or “against the grain” of the text. The latter 065he identifies as a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” It “presumes that an omission comprises an evasion, a repression, a sleight of hand. It seizes upon inconsistency as a sign of vulnerability, a chink in the armor of a presumptuous posture…[It] seeks to challenge or even to subvert the ideology” of the text.

In this sense all reading is political. But there are still two possibilities: The reading may “support the ideological order that is ascribed to the text, or it may oppose such an order by exposing and shaking its foundations.”

Midrash, rabbinical expansions of Biblical texts, usually go with the grain: “Midrash treats the laconic Biblical narrative as merely a fragmentary representation of a complete world; it reads the story as an outline for a larger history.”

Take, for example, the story of the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22, where Abraham almost sacrifices his son Isaac at the Lord’s command. Among the gaps in this story are Abraham’s silence in the face of this command and Sarah’s absence. Reading with the grain, “There would be no ground for Abraham to challenge the divine demand, because obeying the deity is precisely the point.” Reading against the grain, we might characterize the patriarch as a fanatic. Similarly with Sarah’s absence. The midrash reads Sarah into the spaces of the story, it finds her presence; others, especially feminist critics, are disturbed by her absence.

It is unfair to speakers and participants alike for the organizers not to recognize that some speakers and some topics attract larger audiences than others. In short, many of 066the rooms were too small for the audience, and the organizers should have known it. At least twice as many people were turned away as were able to attend Father Raymond Brown’s fascinating talk comparing Jesus’ different prayers in the Passion Narratives in each of the Gospels. The same goes for Bill Dever’s paper. It would be obvious to anyone who thought about it that Brown and Dever would draw far beyond the capacity of the rooms in which their papers were scheduled. Similarly, in the case of the session on “Sociology and the Jesus Movement,” a session that explored how the Jesus movement got started and that featured presentations by Richard Horsley and Burton Mack. People also had to be turned away from the sessions on Qumran.

Of course, not all sessions were equally good. One that was particularly disappointing was entitled “Toward a Consenus on the Emergence of Israel in Canaan.” The consensus of the title seemed to be that absolutely nothing could be said about the emergence of Israel in Canaan. What I have to say about this session must be qualified by the fact that the English of the first two speakers, Niels Peter Lemche of the University of Copenhagen and Gösta Ahlström of the University of Chicago, simply could not be understood, both became of their heavy accents and because of the poor public address system. It may be embarrassing to be so blunt, but it is time we faced this fact openly. It is surely no fault of the presenters, but if someone’s accent is such that the audience cannot understand their words, it would be far better to have their papers read by native English speakers or at least have a sensitive microphone that would carry their words properly. The convenor, Diana Edelman, jumped up innumerable times in the hope of placing Ahlström’s microphone in a position that would carry his words—but she was unsuccessful. The third presenter, a native English speaker, Robert B. Coote of San Francisco Theological Seminary, was unintelligible for other reasons.

Even Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University, who is usually more affirmative, suggested that we should no longer speak of “Israelites” when we’re talking about the settlers of the central hill-country of Canaan from 1200 to 1000 B.C., but should instead refer to the “central hill-country people.” Ahlström nodded his head in hearty agreement.

Keith Whitelam of the University of Stirling, in Scotland, took care of the Biblical evidence by dismissing it as having no significance from a historical viewpoint. Kenneth W. Schaar of Louisiana Tech University spoke about the domestic architecture of this period without discussing Israel or Israelites, even though the pillared, so-called four-room home is often associated with early Israelites. Douglas Esse of the University of Chicago spoke about the collar-rimmed jar, which was once thought to be an indication that the users were Israelites. Because collar-rimmed jars have also been found in areas adjacent—north, south, east and west—to the geographical areas thought to be occupied by premonarchic Israelites, these jars are incapable of telling us anything about the emergence of ancient Israel, Esse concluded.

In short, the entire session was almost completely negative. On the most sophisticated levels of scholarship, there is a widespread negative fad concerning what can be said about early Israel—the period before the monarchy. Instead of asking what we can say, a certain group of sophisticated scholars almost take glee from what can’t be said. Like the pet rock, this fad too will pass.

It is a fad that is in fact an overreaction to the more simplistic models that scholars once used to explain Israel’s emergence in Canaan at the end of the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 B.C.) and the beginning of Iron Age I (1200–1000 B.C.). The three competing models were: (1) the conquest model, according to which the Israelites, coming from outside, conquered the land, as described chiefly in the Book of Joshua; (2) the peaceful infiltration model, according to which the Israelites immigrated into the largely unoccupied central hill-country of Canaan; and (3) the peasant-revolt model, according to which the Canaanite urban underclass revolted and took to the hills. All these models, we now know, are inadequate. Things were much more complicated. Caution is in order. True, a four-room pillared house does not indicate Israelites and only Israelites; the same for the collar-rimmed jar. But still, they do have something to tell us about early Israelite culture, especially because most of them appear in “Israelite” areas.

Much current scholarship, as reflected in this session, goes too far when it suggests that nothing can be said about Israel before the monarchy. These negative historians would really like to conclude that Israel did not exist before the monarchy. Indeed they come very close to saying just this. Only one thing keeps them from being very explicit and unconditional about Israel’s non-existence before the monarchy. That one thing is not the Bible, which they can dispose of easily. The one thing is the famous Merneptah Stele—a hieroglyphic inscription from 1207 B.C. that mentions Israel. But for the chance existence of the Merneptah Stele, you may be sure that current scholarship would confidently assert that the Bible presents a wholly fictional account, a national history of a people who had no existence before the creation of the nationstate of Israel in the tenth century B.C.

If only these scholars could send someone to the Cairo Museum to blow up the Merneptah Stele, all their problems in connection with early Israel would be solved. Because they cannot do this, they tend to ignore the Merneptah Stele. No one on the panel addressed it.

The Merneptah Stele just happened to be preserved—completely fortuitously. Thousands of other inscriptions, earlier and later, probably mentioned Israel, but they did not survive.

The Merneptah Stele is particularly troublesome to these scholars became it is not just a chance reference to Israelites in an unimportant commercial document. On the contrary, this reference to Israel is by the most important and powerful person in the world at the time, the pharaoh of Egypt. Israel was sufficiently well known that the pharaoh himself knew of it. But more than this, Israel was of such importance that the pharaoh considered his victory in battle over Israel a major achievement of his reign. It is as if the president of the United States claimed that achieving a victory over the Israelites was one of the most significant accomplishments of his administration.

Instead of attempting to find plausible explanations of Israel’s emergence—of which there is very extensive evidence—the negative fad leads these scholars to conclude that little, if anything, can be said about early Israel. They then go on to ask other, admittedly worthwhile questions of this evidence.

The scholars should remember that the people who crowded the room to hear them, and who for the most part were disappointed, wanted to learn what plausibly can be said about the premonarchical history of Israel. Not about the people of the central hill-country, mind you, but about the Israelites. The settlement of the central hill-country of Canaan in Iron Age I is of special interest because these settlements are thought to be Israelite. People want to know what happened here and what it meant to be Israelite. If these people were not Israelites, they have as much interest to us as Early Bronze Age IV people. That does not mean we are uninterested, but it does mean considerably less interest than if they were Israelites. In short, we want to know what all this evidence—and there is a great deal of it—can plausibly tell us about early Israel. Caution is certainly in order, but isn’t there something affirmative to say, even within the limits imposed by caution?

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Turning to a more celebratory occasion: The American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) observed its 90th birthday at this year’s Annual Meeting with an entire evening mostly devoted to too-long talks from the heads of each of ASOR’s schools. I sometimes felt that I was listening to a vice-president read the annual report at a stockholders’ meeting of General Motors. There’s something wrong when Larry Stager gets just 15 minutes to describe his exciting excavations at Ashkelon, but an hour and a half is devoted to a general description of the activities at ASOR’s schools in Nicosia, Amman and Jerusalem.

The remarks of ASOR president Eric Meyers were more pointed. Meyers, who will soon take on additional duties as the director of the Annenberg Research Institute in Philadelphia, has the administration of ASOR humming along in a way it hasn’t done since Philip King’s administration. Yet Meyers candidly identified some of ASOR’s problems: The politics of the Middle East has always affected ASOR’s work, and that is certainly no less true today. Clearly ASOR’s Baghdad Committee has little to do. Like the United States, ASOR too is attempting, as Meyers put it, “to build bridges with the Syrian authorities.” As Meyers described the sirenic—or Circean?—call of Syrian sites:

“No area in the Middle East holds greater promise for archaeologists than Syria. No culture was host to more civilizations than Syria. No country in the Middle East today has more tells and sites comparable in size to Syria. Syria from an archaeological perspective is literally what the far west was to Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries: It is a vast territory of incomparable wealth, possessing physical resources and archaeological sites of tremendous promise. Moreover, there are extensive written remains in Syria.”

Meyers also spoke of the problem of archaeological publication. “ASOR,” he said, “has prescinded [withdrawn] from its historic role” in presenting archaeological data to the scientific community. “ASOR will have to face this issue if it is to survive, and ASOR scholars will have to learn a more universal language of discourse to communicate with others.”

Philip King, former president of ASOR, also emphasized the importance of publishing the results of excavations.

“Directors of excavations have a moral obligation to complete the work they have begun. Digging is only the initial step in a long, tedious process leading eventually to final, scientific publication. A popular volume does not suffice. Until all the information extracted from a site has been first interpreted and then presented to the world, the moral obligation has not been satisfied. To enable directors of excavations to do this would be the greatest contribution that ASOR could make to the future.”

In an apparent reference to the scandal resulting from the secreting of Dead Sea Scroll texts, Meyers also spoke of the need to provide scholarly access to inscriptional materials “prior to publication.”

In addition, Meyers called for an ASOR effort to reach “a broad and intelligent reading public, embracing scholars and teachers in ancillary fields such as history, Western civilization, language and literature, and lay people.” He even mentioned the possibility of ASOR entering the video field.

If anyone can solve ASOR’s problems, Meyers can.

Next year’s Annual Meeting will be held in Kansas City, Missouri, from November 23 to November 26, 1991. Kansas City can’t boast of the Vieux Carré or the superb cuisine offered by New Orleans, but there is no better way to keep up with what’s happening in Biblical scholarship than by attending the Annual Meeting. Besides, as Rogers and Hammerstein have assured us, “Everything’s up to date in Kansas City.” Can you remember the next few lines?

A maturing generation of brilliant young scholars went far toward making the 1990 Annual Meetinga a resounding success. Many of these young scholars are women.