Books in Brief

010

Digging for God and Country: Exploration, Archeology and the Secret Struggle for the Holy Land, 1799–1917

Neil Asher Silberman

(Alfred A. Knopf: N.Y., 1982) 256 pp., 16 pp. photos, $16.95

BAR readers may recall Neil Silberman as author of a fascinating account of Montague Parker’s bizarre expedition to Jerusalem in 1909–11 (see “In Search of Solomon’s Treasures,” BAR 06:04). Parker was a British adventurer who came to Jerusalem convinced that a secret tunnel would lead him to a royal treasure hoard hidden in a cave beneath the Temple Mount. Two years of probing the ancient water systems and other cavities beneath Jerusalem failed, however, to uncover any such tunnel. By April of 1911, Parker, growing desperate, finally bribed officials to allow his team to investigate inside the sacred precinct of the Moslem Haram esh-Sharif on the site of the Temple Mount itself. The team worked secretly and at night. But it was the worst of times to take such a risk. Thousands of fervent pilgrims were in Jerusalem because the Jewish Passover, Christian Easter and Moslem Feast of Nebi Mussa coincided that year. An attendant surprised Parker and his men at midnight in, of all places, the sacred cavern beneath the Dome of the Rock. They actually were attempting to pry up the stone paving which covered (according to tradition) the “Well of Souls,” a shaft leading to the underworld and the place of the dead. Parker and his pirates barely escaped with their lives in the rioting sparked by their act of desecration.

The Parker expedition story is just one of a baker’s dozen of interesting episodes of 19th and early 20th-century exploration—and exploitation—of the Holy Land recounted in this volume.

Here, for instance, is the story of John Louis Burckhardt, one of the first Western explorers of Palestine. In 1812, the Swiss Burckhardt naively attempted to disguise himself as an Arab, in spite of his blue eyes and blond hair.

Silberman recounts in detail the discovery—and destruction—of the Moabite Stone in 1868–69. The black basalt stele was the most important single artifact to have come to light in Palestine. It contained the first extensive inscription in the Biblical language dealing with Biblical events and datable from its contents to the ninth century B.C. Ironically, the natural excitement this discovery generated helped to seal its tragic fate. The stone was smashed by the Bedouin tribesmen who had found it, partly in rage at the prospect of losing the stone without any recompense, partly to rid their tribe of the evil curse of misfortune they felt the stone had brought upon their tribe, and partly in search of the treasure they thought the stone must have held because so many foreigners were vying for its possession.

The story of Moses Shapira is also here. Just ten years after the Moabite stone was discovered, Shapira claimed that fragments of a parchment scroll he obtained were from Deuteronomy and were written in characters almost identical to those on the Moabite Stone (see “The Shapira Affair,” BAR 05:04). The fragments almost brought the Jerusalem antiquities dealer a fortune of a million pounds sterling from the British Museum, but when they were declared to be forgeries, they led him instead to disgrace, financial ruin and suicide.

We may never know whether or not the fragments were genuine. Silberman notes one ironic fact—several of the features of Shapira’s “Moabite Deuteronomy” that had led Western scholars of the time to discredit the scroll turned up some seventy years later as characteristics of the scrolls found at Qumran, just across the Dead Sea from the cave where Shapira’s scroll had supposedly been found. Perhaps Moses Shapira was an unprincipled fraud. Or perhaps he had the tragic misfortune of making too incredible a discovery too early in time.

Even more interesting than the anecdotes of discovery and intrigue is the author’s description of some of the forces at work in the larger world beyond 19th-century Palestine. These forces created the peculiar atmosphere out of which these episodes emerged.

Foremost among these forces were the changing winds of imperial fortune among the Western great powers, Russia and the aging Ottoman Empire. Silberman begins his book with the military campaign that brought Napoleon to Palestine in 1799 and ends with General Edmund Allenby’s arrival in Jerusalem in 1917.

How often have we read of the discovery by one of Napoleon’s officers in Egypt of the Rosetta Stone, the famed tri-lingual inscription which eventually allowed scholars to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. How seldom, however, have we seen mention of why Napoleon was in Egypt in the first place and why he included research scholars and antiquarians in his entourage. Silberman points out that Napoleon saw himself as a new Alexander, bringing the light of civilization to the lands he conquered, while acquiring for France tokens of the ancient cultures whose reflected glories would enhance his own.

Silberman describes how Napoleon was drawn to Egypt in 1798 and from there to Palestine in 1799 by the desire to disrupt Britain’s conduit to its eastern colonies and by his conviction that the Ottoman sultan’s grip on his East Mediterranean provinces could be broken. The British, pursuing their own self-interest, sent a major expeditionary force under Lord Nelson to dislodge the French. Napoleon’s hopes finally foundered before the walls of Akko, secured by an Anglo-Ottoman force. Napoleon withdrew his battered army in defeat as a British contingent made a symbolic march to Jerusalem, bringing a Christian flag to the Holy City for the first time since the Crusades.

Over the next century, patriotic pride and continued international rivalries inspired many of the enterprises undertaken by Westerners in Palestine.

Consider, for instance, the earliest intentional excavation of an artifact in the Holy Land. The excavator, Lady Hester Stanhope (William Pitt’s niece and a colorful character in her own right), ended up, ironically, deliberately destroying her own discovery. In 1815, she was searching for gold treasure described in an old manuscript as having been buried at Ashkelon. When no treasure was found, but only an old statue with its head already knocked off, Lady Stanhope decided to avoid the ill will Lord Elgin had created when he carted off the Parthenon friezes to England several years before. She ordered her workmen to break up the statue and throw its fragments into the sea!

Patriotism was often mixed with piety, of course, in the exploits of these 19th-century crusaders. Silberman describes the particular brand of New England Congregationalist piety that influenced Edward Robinson’s journey to the Holy Land in 1838 and colored his observations as he undertook the first systematic Biblical geography. And it was British piety, in part, that spawned the Palestine Exploration Fund and brought Charles Wilson and Charles Warren to Jerusalem in the 1860’s.

Finally, Silberman shows how over the 012subsequent decades the modern discipline of archaeology developed in Palestine by fits and starts led by men whose commitment to scientific method carried them beyond their zeal for God and for country.

This volume makes entertaining reading. It also provides a valuable addition to resource libraries with its focus on the historical forces behind the dramatic episodes of exploration and archaeology in 19th-century Palestine.

Reader’s Digest Atlas of the Bible. An Illustrated Guide to the Holy Land.

Edited by Joseph L. Gardner

Reader’s Digest Association, Inc.: Pleasantville, New York, 1981. 256 pp., $16.98

The Atlas of the Bible is a storehouse of information about the history and geography of ancient Israel. Written for the general reader rather than the Biblical specialist, the book is what its subtitle suggests: an illustrated guide to the holy land. Maps are there, but so are two- and three-page narrative accounts of the Biblical story, period by period. There are also illustrations, charts, drawings, and photos of material phenomena mentioned in the Bible—weapons, flora, fauna, costumes, coins, etc.—and summaries that tell the history of the Biblical text and related archaeological discoveries.

One of the volume’s most useful features, one that sets it apart from other Biblical atlases, is the 32-page, 900-entry “Gazetteer of the Biblical World,” bound in the back. Names of villages, cities, and towns mentioned in the Revised Standard Version or prominent elsewhere in Jewish history and early Christianity are listed alphabetically. A brief discussion of each is given, including its location, if known, and the Biblical references to the place-name.

Although edited and produced by the Reader’s Digest staff, the book owes a great deal to the efforts of the late Harry Thomas Frank, who was chairman of Religion at Oberlin College, a member of BAR’s Editorial Advisory Board, and Principal Adviser and Editorial Consultant for the atlas. Frank drew upon the combined wisdom of an outstanding board of consultants comprised of ranking U.S. scholars of the Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish and New Testament studies.

In spite of the solid scholarship behind the book and the ecumenical character of the board, the final product has a definite literal and Christian bias. The narrative portions take the Biblical story at face value and only occasionally engage historical criticism. Literal readings are usually accepted even where modern scholarship has demonstrated that Biblical writers exaggerated or modified actual events. And developments within Judaism just prior to and during the early Common Era are largely ignored. Jesus’ birth and Christianity’s spread are recorded and traced in maps, illustrations, and texts, but nary a word is said about the course(s) taken by Judaism during the same period.

These deficiencies must be attributed to the restrictive editorial vision and policy of the publishers and not to the breadth of interest and scholarship of Tom Frank and his consultants. Frank’s and the board’s credentials are beyond dispute. Editorial decisions during the final stages of production eliminated materials on Jewish history.

But most people buy an atlas for its maps. The maps in this atlas are based on the reliefs compiled by the Survey of Israel, executed by a commercial cartographic firm. Events such as the Exodus and the spread of Christianity are illustrated by partial-page maps of the Mediterranean basin. These lack detail but give the reader a feel for the expanse covered by the events.

The largest map, a four-page spread that serves as a master plan for Biblical sites, reaches from Tyre and Dan on the north to Ezion-geber on the south, and from the Mediterranean and Kadesh-Barnea on the west to the Transjordan plateau on the east. Portions of the plates are reproduced throughout the book in order to trace the Biblical story through history.

The area shown restricts the reader unnecessarily. Important sites such as Damascus and Rabbath-ammon fall outside the map’s scope. While reliefs and locations are accurately cited with sufficient detail for the lay reader, climate, vegetation, and land use are not indicated at all.

In sum, the atlas has been designed as a companion to the Bible to be used by the non-specialist as a reference and a guide. The handsome volume serves these purposes well. But individuals who need detailed maps of the Near East or information about places not named in the Bible will have to supplement it with other sources.

The Philistines and Their Material Culture

Trude Dothan

(Yale University Press: New Haven and London, and Israel Exploration Society: Jerusalem, 1982) xxii + 310 pp., maps, plates, figures, and tables, $45.00

This handsome volume is the long-awaited revision and translation of Trude Dothan’s Hebrew work of the same title published in 1967. The intervening fifteen years have added a significant amount of new material, some of it excavated by Professor Dothan herself at Deir el-Balah southwest of Gaza.

Despite its attractive format, this is not a “coffee-table” book; it is a detailed and meticulous survey of what we know of the Philistines—the Biblical designation for one of the group of “Sea Peoples”—with focus on the stratigraphy of sites, the typology of ceramic and other artifacts, chronology, and broader cultural connections. The work begins with a review of literary and pictorial evidence from Egypt and the Bible and a summary of the scholarly discussion of Philistine origins. The next four chapters are the heart of the study Chapter Two is a summary catalogue of some 41 sites where Philistine remains have been found, with a detailed treatment of stratigraphic and chronological problems for most. Chapter Three offers a typological and stylistic analysis of five main groups of Philistine pottery, lavishly illustrated by black and white photographs and drawings; this ceramic corpus was all locally made but reflects a variety of cultural influences—Mycenaean, Cypriot, Egyptian, and Canaanite—important evidence for the eclectic character of Philistine culture. Chapters Four and Five present ceramic cultic vessels and figurines, and burial practices, especially the famous clay coffins with human heads and arms modeled on their lids. The final section is a brief summary of chronology, in which Dothan argues that the culture identifiable as Philistine emerges in Canaan about 1190 B.C. and lasts until the mid-tenth century, when the processes of cultural assimilation were completed and Philistine political control was curtailed by David’s conquests.

As the foregoing outline and the title of Dothan’s book make clear, her focus is, quite properly, on the emergence and development of Philistine culture based on the available surviving material remains. This culture was not an Aegean veneer on an already existing Canaanite culture; rather, it was a new phenomenon which came into existence only once the Philistines (and, as Dothan hints, presumably other groups of Sea Peoples) had 014established themselves in Canaan. Native and non-native elements were fused into a new repertoire which enjoyed a relatively brief flowering until the momentum of assimilation eliminated its distinctive traits. Analogies to this process are numerous; let me cite but two. The emergence of Etruscan culture in west-central Italy at approximately the same period parallels the Philistine story closely: A group of foreign origin gained political control over a region but at the same time also assimilated pre-existing native Italic traditions; although effective Etruscan control lasted longer than that of the Philistines, the stages of development are similar and, coincidentally, the written evidence is sparse and almost entirely secondary. (Neither Etruscan writing nor the few examples of what appears to he Philistine writing have been satisfactorily deciphered.) A more familiar and better documented analogy is the Norman conquest of England; here too the new arrivals eventually blended into the indigenous culture, leaving only a few traces (as in modern English vocabulary, for example). It should be noted in passing that modern English owes at least two words to the Philistine cities: “gauze” is derived from Gaza, and “scallions” from Ashkelon.

As I have implied, this volume is primarily for scholars, who will find in it an expert summary of the evidence together with judicious conclusions; it represents the highest “state of the art,” which means that because of the incomplete nature of the data, large and small questions have yet to he fully answered. (Among the latter: Why do the birds in one characteristic Philistine decorative motif generally look back over their shoulders? And how do we know that the strainer-spouted vessels were used for beer?)

It is also important to note that while most of the Philistines’ distinctive cultural features ceased to exist, some continued. Non-Semitic personal names continue to occur in such sources as the Assyrian annals, and Nehemiah 13:24 implies that even in the Persian period the inhabitants of Ashdod used a different language or at least a distinctive dialect. Nor did the political importance of the Philistines vanish; their rulers, now identified as kings rather than as seranim, were factors to be reckoned with throughout much of the first millennium; they are mentioned, often by name, in Biblical, Assyrian, Neo Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian, and Greek sources. Their continued domination of an important segment of the coast was partially responsible for the designation Palestine, not just for their territory but also for Judea as well. This designation was used as early as Herodotus. It was used regularly (and by design) by the Romans after the Second Jewish Revolt.

In conclusion, Dothan’s book is an invaluable resource which will serve as an indispensable basis for future analyses and syntheses. It would he rash to assign it a lifespan given the continuing flood of new evidence; it is indeed fortunate that contributing to these new data will be the excavations at Tel Miqneh (Khirbet Muqanna), provisionally identified as Ekron, one of the five Philistine capital cities. This new, long-term project is a joint effort of the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, represented by Dr. Seymour Gitin, its director, and the Hebrew University, represented by Professor Trude Dothan, who is, as this volume makes clear, the foremost scholar of the material culture of the Philistines.

Digging for God and Country: Exploration, Archeology and the Secret Struggle for the Holy Land, 1799–1917

Neil Asher Silberman

(Alfred A. Knopf: N.Y., 1982) 256 pp., 16 pp. photos, $16.95