Archaeological Views: The Western Cultural Tradition Is at Risk
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After more than 50 years of involvement in archaeology in Israel, I’ve been reflecting lately on the “mixed blessings” of our discipline at the moment. We Americans, and our Israeli colleagues in particular, have come a long way in so many regards: vastly improved field methods; a genuine multi-disciplinary approach; more sophisticated theory and more appropriate questions in research; a quantum leap forward in publication; and an incredible database that’s probably ten times what it was when I was a graduate student 45 years ago (in the Upper Paleolithic era.)
The Israelis can boast four well-endowed and equipped graduate institutions in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Beersheba and Haifa; an updated “Israel Antiquities Authority” (IAA), with a new state-of-the-art storage and archival facility at Beth Shemesh; dozens of regional museums, many of them jewels; and a number of flourishing journals and publication series. In particular, the Israeli “school” has trained and placed a new generation of younger archaeologists who are superb, years ahead of their venerable teachers.
Archaeology in Jordan—the “other half” of the Holy Land—understandably lags somewhat behind. But remarkable progress has been made there as well; moreover, the pace is quickening. And American fieldwork in Jordan is as prominent as it is in Israel.
As for us Americans, we have survived the generation-long crisis over “Biblical archaeology,” and we have now moved beyond it to our own style of professionalism, in the process placing our own new generation of outstanding younger archaeologists (many of them, I’m proud to say, my students). Furthermore, we have the thriving in-country research institutes of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) in Jerusalem, Amman and Nicosia.
Finally, the public in Israel, Europe and especially America has been turned on to archaeology in Israel and Jordan as never before, in part due to BAR’s influence.
So what’s wrong?—readers may ask—We’re doing great! In many ways, we are. But there’s a downside to this success story. For one thing, the worsening economic and political situations in Israel and Jordan have made archaeology a much lower priority, starving universities and the IAA. As large, long-running American excavations in Israel have come to an end (Tel Miqne, Ashkelon), few new field projects have taken their place. Most American universities, mesmerized by science and technology (and now modern Middle Eastern studies), simply do not value what we do. Furthermore, they are increasingly unwilling to insure and send students to Israel and Jordan as volunteers on digs. So we have a surplus of bright, well-trained, ambitious, superb young American archaeologists and amateurs who lack good jobs or field opportunities. Does American archaeology, after 150 years of exploration and discovery, have much of a future in the Middle East—or at home? We can only hope so.
In terms of results where “Biblical” archaeology is concerned (by no means all that we Syro-Palestinian or “Levantine” archaeologists do), we also confront mixed blessings. Until about a generation ago, we all spoke confidently about William F. Albright’s “archaeological revolution.” It would assuredly enhance our understanding and appreciation of the Bible and its timeless message—absolutely essential, we thought, to our cherished Western cultural tradition.
But today there is a deepening “historiographical crisis” in both archaeology and Biblical studies in Israel, Europe and America—a creeping skepticism and a loss of confidence in our ability to confirm anything. The Hebrew Bible is only a “social construct,” a figment of the tortured imagination of later Judaism in an identity crisis of the Hellenistic era (the fiction naively adopted, of course, by Christians). The result, says Baruch Halpern, is to “erase Israel from history.” And it is not only the European Biblical “revisionists”—the most extreme of the minimalists—who appear to be the culprits, but also many Israeli and American archaeologists. Lay people may not have noticed, but nearly all of us archaeologists have become “minimalists” of a sort.
Meanwhile, the Western cultural tradition is under sustained attack, not only in the West itself—that is, in Europe, with the rise of virulent anti-American and anti-Israel polemics—but more menacingly by the pan-Islamic jihadists throughout the Middle East and beyond. The Bible and the “Christian West,” as formerly conceived, are fighting for their lives. Not only has modern archaeology not helped to confirm the tradition, it appears to some to be part of the process that has undermined it. This will be unwelcome news to BAR’s readers, but it’s a not-so-well kept secret among professional archaeologists.
Where does the failure of the “archaeological revolution” leave us? It leaves us, I’m convinced, 076trying to occupy the beleaguered middle ground, neither extreme skeptics or naÏve credulists. We cannot turn the clock back to the time when archaeology allegedly “proved the Bible.” We must allow archaeology as it is practiced today to challenge, as well as to confirm, the Bible’s stories. Some things described there really did happen, but others did not. The Biblical narratives about Abraham, Moses, Joshua and Solomon probably do reflect some historical memories of actual people and places, but the “larger-than-life” portraits of the Bible are unrealistic and are, in fact, contradicted by the archaeological evidence. Some of Israel’s ancestors probably did come out of Egyptian slavery, but there was no military conquest of Canaan, and most early Israelites were displaced Canaanites. Monotheism may have been the ideal of Biblical writers, but many, if not most, Israelites throughout the Monarchy were polytheists. In any case, it’s up to us to decide individually what any of the supposed events described in the Bible mean. Archaeology can’t decide these questions; it only helps sharpen their focus.
After more than 50 years of involvement in archaeology in Israel, I’ve been reflecting lately on the “mixed blessings” of our discipline at the moment. We Americans, and our Israeli colleagues in particular, have come a long way in so many regards: vastly improved field methods; a genuine multi-disciplinary approach; more sophisticated theory and more appropriate questions in research; a quantum leap forward in publication; and an incredible database that’s probably ten times what it was when I was a graduate student 45 years ago (in the Upper Paleolithic era.) The Israelis can boast four well-endowed and equipped graduate […]
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