006
Provocative Insights
Recent Archaeological Discoveries and Biblical Research
William G. Dever
(Seattle, WA: Univ. of Washington Press, 1990) 200 pp., $17.50
In this provocative and often insightful volume, originally the Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies at the University of Washington, William Dever gives us his latest (but still “preliminary” [p. x]) thoughts on the relationship between archaeological and Biblical evidence. The volume is amply illustrated and will prove to be a valuable addition to the semipopular literature on the topic.
The book’s central chapters describe in illuminating detail how the results of recent (and occasionally not so recent) excavations affect our understanding of three major issues and periods in the history of Israel. Dever’s firsthand knowledge of the material is everywhere apparent, and his presentation of important new data is characteristically lucid.
Chapter 2 discusses the early Iron Age (1200–1000 B.C.E.), the period of Israel’s emergence in Canaan, and conveniently correlates by means of tables the archaeological record and Biblical data. Dever argues forcefully for a version of the “peasant revolt” hypothesis first proposed by George Mendenhall in 1962 and elaborated by Norman Gottwald in his magnum opus The Tribes of Yahweh.1 This conclusion is certainly defensible, and, I think, partially correct, but it is overstated and takes insufficient account of alternate interpretations. Thus, Dever’s assertion that “recent archaeological discoveries … cannot any longer be construed as supporting nomadic infiltration, much less conquest models, as previous scholars had maintained” (p. 79) is one-sided; some of the evidence he adduces comes from the investigations of Israel Finkelstein, who reaches the opposite conclusion, that the Israelite settlers of the hill country came from a pastoral background.2
Chapter 3 is devoted to monumental art and architecture in the period of the United Monarchy, the reigns of David and Solomon, and is a generally careful and enlightening correlation of Biblical and excavated evidence, some of which has been uncovered by Dever himself.
Chapter 4 discusses in detail the contribution of archaeology to our understanding of the religion of ancient Israel. Dever correctly recognizes that the Biblical evidence is selective and skewed—his earlier metaphor for the Bible as a “curated artifact” is brilliantly apt—and that archaeological data enable us to construct a much more complex picture of Israelite cultic practice. Especially important here are such recent discoveries as Kuntillet Ajrud, the “Bull Site” near Dothan and the controversial ruins on Mount Ebal.
There is, however, throughout the volume and particularly in the introduction and conclusion, a subtext. It consists of Dever’s familiar polemic against “Biblical archaeology,” by which he seems to mean the tendentious use of excavated evidence to prove the truth of the Bible, especially by such scholars as William F. Albright and G. Ernest Wright some decades ago. I have a number of problems with this slant. It is unfair to criticize scholars of an earlier period for not having used current methods; their approach was that of their times. Furthermore, the recent shift in emphasis from issues of chronology and the study of the grand tradition, represented by classic texts and monumental remains, to the activities of ordinary people has occurred not only in Biblical archaeology, but in the archaeology of much of the rest of the ancient literate world as well, especially Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome. Some methods recently used in recovering this elusive perspective have been borrowed from those who investigate the remains of prehistoric and non-literate cultures; the data at their disposal are less abundant, and so every scrap has been saved and analyzed—something no excavator of a tell 008could do even if he or she wished. And this shift in emphasis has been part of a larger pattern. The study of history itself has changed in the last generation, and the development of the social sciences, especially anthropology and sociology, is a manifestation of the same phenomenon. Dever neglects this broader intellectual context; it is at least naive, if not tendentious, to describe changes in the archaeology of the Levant as due to the supposed demise of “Biblical theology.”
Change has occurred in Biblical studies as well, although at times Dever seems unaware of it. Few scholars today would argue for the unity of the Hexateuch, as he assumes on page 42, and fewer still would include Judges under that term. The “Court History of David” (2 Samuel 9–20; 1 Kings 1–2) can only superficially be described as a “reasonably reliable historical source” (p. 5); it is rather a carefully composed and highly literary document whose primary purpose seems to have been propagandistic. The incompleteness of the “God who acts” model as an explication of Biblical religion has long been apparent. According to Wright’s classic formulation of this model, the Bible is the “recital” of what God has done in history, for history is the arena of divine action.3 Even some who might be considered Albrightians have recognized that this formulation neglects many of the sapiential (wisdom literature), hymnic, cultic and legal traditions that the Bible preserves. (Curiously, having rejected the “mighty acts of God” concept as insufficient in the first chapter, Dever uses it in subsequent summaries of the Bible’s “central claim.”)
The application of new models to Biblical traditions, prompted in part by the discovery of new evidence, has been going on for a long time in Biblical studies, as is evident, for example, in the works of Mendenhall and Gottwald. Both are Biblical scholars, and neither is a professional archaeologist, yet both are cited with approval by Dever (and incidentally, both are also “Protestant churchman,” a biographical detail Dever fails to supply for them but often provides for those with whom he disagrees). Moreover, the attention to more general, rather than to exclusively elite, patterns is evident more than 32 years ago in such works as Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions by Roland de Vaux,4 a Biblical scholar and an archaeologist, who anticipated many of Dever’s remarks in his essay “On Right and Wrong Uses of Archaeology.”5 The maturing of “Biblical archaeology” as a discipline is therefore due to a variety of factors and individuals, of whom Professor Dever is one.
066
Definitive Work
The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters: Greek Papyri
Edited by Naphtali Lewis
Judean Desert Studies 2 (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society Hebrew University, Shrine of the Book, 1989) 176 pp. 40 plates, $60.00
“Dead Sea Scrolls” is often used broadly to include scrolls and fragments found in caves of seven areas along the northwest shore of the Dead Sea: Qumran, Masada, Murabba’at, Nahal Hever, Nahal Se’elim, Nahal Mishmar and Khirbet Mird. Though many of the texts from these sites have been published, close to 80 percent of the fragments of Qumran Cave 4 (discovered in 1952) still await publication.
As early as 1954, Bedouin discovered a cave in the Nahal Hever, a torrent-bed situated about 2.75 miles south of En-Gedi, from which they recovered a few documents. Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin led an expedition to that area in 1960–1961 and explored what has come to be called “the Cave of the Letters.” From it he recovered the archive of Babatha and other documents: 35 texts of various dates (from 93/94 to 132 A.D.), six written in Nabatean, three in Aramaic, 17 in Greek and nine in Greek with subscriptions and signatures in Aramaic or Nabatean or both. (Nabatean is a local dialect of Aramaic, used mainly by pre-Islamic Arabs in the area southeast of the Dead Sea.)
In this volume Naphtali Lewis, professor of classics at the City University of New York, publishes 37 Greek documents from the Cave of the Letters; and Jonas C. Greenfield, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, completes the publication of the Aramaic and Nabatean subscriptions of eight of these texts. Some of the Greek texts have a summary of the contents at the end written in Aramaic or Nabatean or both. Other texts from this cave, six in Nabatean and three in Aramaic, are to be published by Greenfield in a subsequent volume. Yadin himself died in 1984, but he had prepared most of the Aramaic and Nabatean texts for publication and was awaiting the work of H. J. Polotsky, to whom the Greek texts had been entrusted. Eventually, Polotsky asked to be released from this task, and the Greek texts were turned over to Lewis. Thus, after 29 years, the Greek texts are finally published definitively, though some of them had been made available earlier in partial or preliminary publications.
Babatha, daughter of Shim‘on, was a Jewish woman, an inhabitant of Maoza, a village on the southeast shore of the Dead Sea. Her life was short, and she was widowed with an orphan son in the year 124 A.D. Until she fled to the cave, she lived in her native village, where she belonged, by birth and marriage, to the affluent local Jewish society. Her first husband was from Maoza, her second from En-Gedi. When she married the latter, he was already married to another woman not divorced from him. This reveals that bigamy/polygamy was being practiced by some Jews of this period, even though the Damascus Document (4:21) and the Temple Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (57:17–18) prohibited it.
The documents in the archive belonged to Babatha and her family and deal with matters of property and lawsuits instituted by her or against her. One is a deed of donation whereby Babatha’s father gave all his property to her mother (no. 7); another is the marriage contract of Babatha’s second marriage (no. 10); and another is the marriage-deed of Shelamzion, Babatha’s stepdaughter (no. 18). One is a receipt dated August 132 A.D., the year of the beginning of the revolt of Bar Kokhba against the Romans (132–135 A.D.). Apparently Babatha and others took refuge from the fighting in the caves of this wadi, bringing with them their precious legal documents, some of which have now been recovered after all these years. They probably fled from their village in the province of Arabia into Judea, to a spot not far from En-Gedi, which was one of the strongholds of Bar Kokhba. More than 20 skeletons were discovered in the cave, one of which must have been Babatha herself.
Many of the documents are dated according to the reign of Roman consuls; they give the consular year, the regnal year (of the emperor) and the provincial year (of provincia Arabia, set up by the Romans in 106 A.D.).
Many of the legal documents in the Babatha archive have the signatures of witnesses in Greek, Aramaic or Nabatean a name, a patronym, “witness.” Thus in Greek, Kallaios Ioµanou martys (Kallaios, son of John, witness); or in Aramaic, Thoµmaµh bar Shim‘ôn, saµheµd.
Some of the texts are double documents, in other words, two copies of the same text written on the same sheet of papyrus, one above the other (the Roman diploma) The upper text (scriptura interior) was rolled over and tied with string in the presence of witnesses; the lower text (scriptura exterior) was normally the one consulted, but if the need for verification arose, the strings could be undone and the upper text compared to make sure that the lower text had not been tampered with.
The Greek in which the texts are written is the postclassical Koine, known from the Septuagint, the New Testament, inscriptions and papyri from Hellenistic and Roman Egypt or Dura-Europos. It was then used as the lingua franca for commerce and government throughout the Roman provinces, but it was not the mother tongue of the Jewish or Nabatean scribes who copied these texts. Semitisms and Aramaisms are detected in the Greek they write.
Together with the Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew texts from the Murabba’at caves, these texts reveal how many different languages were being used by Jews in the provinces of Judea and Arabia in the first and second centuries of the Christian era. The use of Greek by Jews of Palestine was important, and these texts from the Cave of the Letters now add their testimony to that of inscriptions and fragments previously known.
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