Books & CD-ROMs in Brief

006

The Dead Sea Scrolls Revealed

CD-ROM for PC and Macintosh systems, $59.95

Produced by Pixel Multimedia and Aaron Witkin Associates, under license of the Israel Antiquities Authority. Distributed by Logos Research Systems, 2117 200th Avenue West, Oak Harbor, WA 98277

Exploring Ancient Cities

CD-ROM for PC and Macintosh systems, $49.95

Produced for Scientific American by Sumeria, 329 Bryant Street, Suite 3D, San Francisco, CA 94107

It’s hot. It’s sexy. It’s not all that good.

It is The Dead Sea Scrolls Revealed, the new CD-ROM that brings the latest whiz-bang computer technology to the oldest Biblical fragments. With the click of a mouse, viewers can zip between hours’ worth of narration, newspaper articles, drawings, photos, interviews with scholars, animation and video clips, all on the subject of the scrolls.

That CD-ROMs can deliver a plethora of information in various formats is beyond question. But more material does not always translate into more insight, and it can even be a drawback. I found myself disoriented the first several times I viewed The Dead Sea Scrolls Revealed. The opening screen contains six major topics for further exploration: The Discovery, Location, The Scrolls, Scroll Work, History and The Debates. Each of these, in turn, contains sub-topics within sub-topics: Clicking on Scroll Work, for example, leads you to a screen offering Modern Analysis and Ancient Script and Writing; the first contains the topics Deciphering, Opening and Reconstructing, and Dating and Paleography, while the second yields Ink and Inkwells, Parchment and Papyrus, The Scribe and Scribe’s Table. Confused? So was I at first, but you get the hang of it after a while—some sub-topics are little more than a photo or a brief article, so you soon learn to skip over them. Veteran cyber-surfers will no doubt be more adept at cruising around the program than I am.

One feature in particular highlights strengths and shortcomings of the Dead Sea Scrolls Revealed. A computer animation of the site of Qumran, near where the scrolls were found, takes viewers on an exhilarating fly-by of the site from various angles. But no mention is made of the many theories that vie with each other over the nature of Qumran: Was it a peaceful settlement of celibate Essenes who produced the scrolls at Qumran’s purported scriptorium or a military fortress unrelated to the scrolls secreted in nearby caves or a stopping place for traders or a sumptuous retreat for Jerusalem’s elite? Each of these theories have their proponents, but you wouldn’t know it from The Dead Sea Scrolls Revealed.

Many BAR readers will be especially interested in the section devoted to the debates over the nature of the scrolls. Who wrote them and when? What can we learn from them about early Christianity? The producers rely heavily here on two scholars in particular, Geza Vermes and Lawrence Schiffman (whose name is misspelled throughout). Vermes champions the long-held Essene theory of the origins of the scrolls, while Schiffman argues that the scrolls sect began either as Sadducees or an offshoot of the Sadducees. But the sorry history of scroll scholarship—how for decades the very scrolls that now flit across our computer screens could be seen only by a handful of researchers—is glossed over completely. Not surprising, considering that the program was assembled under the direction of the Israel Antiquities Authority, which until late 1991 strived mightily to maintain the monopoly over scroll access (as long as Israeli scholars were admitted into the charmed circle).

One of the program’s most entertaining moments involves Robert Eisenman, of California State University at Long Beach, who believes the latest scrolls were produced by the earliest Christians. Strolling through a festive Rockefeller Center in New York at Christmastime and surrounded by holiday displays and Salvation Army bell ringers, Eisenman says the scrolls have been misunderstood because their violent, apocalyptic message is at odds with the peaceful Yuletide scenes around him. A striking viewpoint, but The Dead Sea Scrolls Revealed gives no indication that Eisenman is a school of one when it comes to scroll origins.

Beyond its pyrotechnics, The Dead Sea Scrolls Revealed delivers only an introduction to the scrolls. Those interested in more in-depth treatment will have to consult old-fashioned books (of which, on this subject, there is no shortage). There is one further point to be made about this high-tech 008survey of the scrolls: In its fragmentary nature, its resistance to being apprehended all at once, The Dead Sea Scrolls Revealed reproduces in electronic form something of the nature of the scrolls themselves.

Another CD-ROM of note is Scientific American’s Exploring Ancient Cities. Featured are Pompeii, Teotihuacan, Crete and, of special interest to BAR readers, Petra (in modern Jordan). The CD-ROM is essentially a huge slide show accompanying articles on each city that have appeared in Scientific American. Surprisingly, all the articles are quite old—the most recent, on Crete, appeared ten years ago, while the one on Pompeii appeared in 1958! It may well be that not much new has been published in the study of Pompeii in the last 37 years, but surely there is enough to have prompted Scientific American to update its original article. Perhaps customers are still so taken by the novelty of CD-ROMs that they will forgive producers who fob off old material, especially when they are diverted by slide shows and the like. But manufacturers beware: The public will not stand for this kind of re-packaging for long.

One neat feature of Exploring Ancient Cities is its maps. For each city, viewers can call up a plan of a site and, at the press of a button, have labels appear over the plan; clicking on a label (a certain building, say) brings a photo of that feature onto the screen.

Both CD-ROMs under review work either on PC or Macintosh—a very useful feature that will no doubt help sales. But, if you have yet to join the multimedia computer revolution, neither of these programs is likely to make you plop down $2,000 for the hardware you need to run them. But they are no doubt among the first of many to come. Is the day coming when CD-ROM reviews outnumber book reviews?

Thunder in Gemini and Other Essays on the History, Language and Literature of Second Temple Palestine

Michael Owen Wise

Journal of the Study of the Pseudepigrapha Supplement Series 15 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1994) 265 pp., $37.50

Heated controversy enveloped Michael Wise after he published The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered (with Robert Eisenman) in 1992. The chief complaint of several leading scholars was that Wise had not sufficiently acknowledged their work, and Wise later apologized publicly at a December 1992 conference in New York.^a It is difficult to believe that Thunder in Gemini is by the same author, for here Wise painstakingly acknowledges his indebtedness to others wherever appropriate. Notably, in discussing a Qumran calendrical text that the scholarly community first learned about at a conference in Poland, Wise gives extensive acknowledgement to the handout that was provided; he is also careful to give credit to those who have presented papers at recent Society of Biblical Literature meetings.

But the material in this book is far from secondhand. Of the six detailed essays, the three most important are studies of calendrical texts found at Qumran. Here Wise is at his best, offering plausible solutions to such complex questions as why Taurus should replace Aries as the preeminent sign of the zodiac; why some calendrical texts place such importance on the phases of the moon, whereas we all thought it was the sun that mattered at Qumran; or why certain non-sectarian historical events are prominently marked. Wise looks closely at unfamiliar material, showing us how little we know about the Dead Sea Scrolls and the people who composed them and passed them on.

The three other essays are also enjoyable reading for the specialist. From a jar at Masada, Wise reconstructs the history of the involvement of some priestly families in the Jewish revolt (66–74 C.E.) and, perhaps with tongue in cheek, dates the jar’s inscription to within a week or two.

He also discusses the role of “Adam” in Qumran thought, arguing that the tricky phrase miqdasû adam (sanctuary of Adam or sanctuary of men) refers to an actual temple and not a community.

Wise asks questions about the copying of scrolls to demonstrate, with some overstatement, the futility of using linguistic criteria for dating texts—Aramaic texts in particular—since the interplay between spoken and written language in the transmission of a text can never be known with precision.

This is not a book for the beginner. There is Aramaic or Hebrew on almost every page. Wise, however, puts his questions with incisive precision and teases out delightful answers from what often seems unpromising material. This work is at the cutting edge of scrolls’ scholarship.

009

Return to Sodom and Gomorrah: Bible Stories from Archaeologists

Charles Pellegrino

(New York: Random House, 1994) 386 pp., $25

Return to Sodom and Gomorrah is the latest entry in a modern publishing genre—glib, multidisciplinary surveys aimed at popular audiences. Mashkan-shapir^b in Iraq is the Biblical Sodom, according to paleontologist Charles Pellegrino, and was destroyed by an oil fire. Reworking material from his book, Unearthing Atlantis, Pellegrino also claims that the volcanic explosion of the island of Thera (off Crete) destroyed the Minoan civilization, gave rise to the Atlantis myth, motivated the migrations of the Philistines, and accounts for such Exodus events as the pillar of fire and the drowning of pharaoh’s army. Throw in comparisons of the Babylonian and Biblical Flood stories, Creation and modern cosmology, and the Biblical Eve and Mitochondrial Eve (the hypothetical genetic forbear of modern humanity, traced to Africa, circa 200,000 years ago), and you have some idea of the content, if not the purpose, of this book.

Readers looking for scientific support for Bible stories will be disappointed. Pellegrino is an avowed agnostic who posits “coincidence” when he finds striking parallels between Biblical and scientific cosmologies. The title, Return to Sodom and Gomorrah, is merely a packaging ploy because this book is not about Biblical archaeology (the first 100 pages have almost nothing to do with the subject). Indeed, it is hard to say what this book is about. Pellegrino argues sporadically that competition and warfare among the closely packed tribes in the Near East account for their many civilizing innovations. He does not present this theory in a rigorous way, however, and the argument seems to collapse when applied to North America, where frequently warring tribes have left no comparable record of innovation.

Some serious omissions undermine Pellegrino’s scholarly pretensions. The first popular exposition equating Atlantis with the Minoan civilization and linking it to the Thera explosion was by Dr. A. G. Galanopoulos and Edward Bacon in their book Atlantis: The Truth Behind the Legend (Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), yet Pellegrino makes no mention of Galanopoulos. Hans Goedicke, the scholar who originated the theory linking the Thera explosion to Exodus events,^c is mentioned, but Pellegrino does not credit him with the theory.

Pellegrino also tries occasionally to use the Bible to serve his “politically correct” beliefs. To bolster his claim that incest was more acceptable in the ancient world than it is today, he refers to Lot and his daughters but ignores the implicit Biblical moral. The offspring of that union were the eponymous ancestors of the Moabites and Ammonites, enemies of the Israelites, showing that bad results come from shameful actions (Genesis 19:30–38).

Pellegrino’s principal subject is the consequences of the Thera explosion. Carbon-dating of that event to 1628 B.C. led Christos Doumas, the excavator of Akrotiri, to debunk Goedicke’s Exodus theory, which 010rested on an inscription from 150 years later.^d Pellegrino, however, sees the inscription as a confirmation. He eliminates the discrepancy by redating Egyptian chronology by 150 years and assigning the Exodus to the reign of Tuthmosis III. Near Eastern archaeologists, reluctant to make such radical revisions based on carbon dating, which could be wrong, reject this theory.

In an exposition filled with non-sequiturs, Pellegrino often takes up and drops subjects for no apparent reason. A mini-biography of archaeologist Benjamin Mazar’s early years, for example, begins and ends abruptly and bears no relation to the text that follows. Pellegrino’s scholarship-with-seltzer style also leads him to make potentially misleading, deadpan jokes. For example, he pretends that the jiffy—a recent term for the time it takes light to cross the diameter of a proton—gave rise to the phrase “in a jiffy,” which actually dates to the late 18th century.

This book is a self-indulgent, disjointed excursion through a wide range of topics. The chaotic presentation, rather than the scholarly deficiencies, makes Return to Sodom and Gomorrah painful to read.

An Introduction to Biblical Archaeology

Volkmar Fritz

(Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994) 223 pp., $37.50

Through the Ages in Palestinian Archaeology

Walter E. Rast

(Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992) 221 pp., $15.95 paperback

I am always on the lookout for new publications about Biblical archaeology, so I jumped at the opportunity to examine these two books. I was interested not only in new information, but also in comparing how the authors presented their data. My interest was further piqued because I know both of them personally and appreciate their expertise and contributions to archaeological research. One obvious difference between the two books reflects their different backgrounds. Volkmar Fritz, a German scholar, writes primarily for a continental audience; Walter Rast, of Valparaiso University, writes primarily for an American audience.

Fritz’s An Introduction to Biblical Archaeology, published in 1994, is a translation from the 1985 German version updated by the author. He lists an appropriate bibliography at the end of each chapter, which I believe is more reader-friendly than listing all references at the end, as Rast does. Fritz’s bibliography is also much more comprehensive than Rast’s, although only Rast provides an index. Rast’s book has 48 illustrations, including maps, charts and photographs, integrated into the text. Fritz has also integrated 42 figures into the text, but has clustered 16 photographs at the end of the book.

With smaller type and concise page layouts, Fritz’s book provides much more detailed information than Rast’s, although typographical errors occasionally distract the reader. Rast’s book is a much easier read—easier vocabulary, larger type and useful summary statements set off from the text at appropriate points.

Volkmar Fritz wants to introduce the reader to “Biblical archaeology.” He uses the term boldly, defining it as the archaeology of Palestine, both east and west of the Jordan River. Walt Rast has in mind exactly the same geographical area, and he, too, draws attention to Biblical connections. He emphasizes, however, that although the Biblical periods continue to be of special importance, Palestinian archaeology today covers a much broader time span.

In other words, although these two introductory texts overlap, they cover different archaeological periods. Fritz provides 70 pages of information about the land, the history of archaeological research, excavation methods and chronology. The rest of the book covers the Neolithic through the Roman periods, with one chapter devoted to Israel’s neighbors.

Rast covers archaeological methods, geographical and environmental matters, dating and chronology in the first 46 pages. He then begins with the Paleolithic period and, in the next ten chapters, moves from the Roman, Byzantine and Islamic periods to the present. His inclusion of the Islamic and Crusader periods is admirable. Rast discusses how archaeological evidence contributes to our understanding of conflicts in Palestine as well as periods of tolerance and cooperation. Knowing that Muslims, Christians and Jews have lived harmoniously in Palestine at various times in the past offers hope for the future.

Basic information about Biblical archaeology is available in both books, but there are enough differences between them to warrant acquiring and reading both. If you must choose, start with Rast’s Through the Ages. But don’t shortchange yourself by passing over Fritz’s more comprehensive Introduction.