Books in Brief

006

The Roads and Highways of Ancient Israel

David A. Dorsey

(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991) 318 pp., 15 maps, $39 95

Not even a remnant of a paved road between Iron Age towns (c. 1200–586 B.C.) in Israel is known, and no map of roads across the Fertile Crescent (including Israel) is attested before the Roman period. With such paucity of evidence, can the roadways of Iron Age Israel be reconstructed with any degree of confidence? With this volume in the ASOR Library of Biblical and Near Eastern Archaeology Series, David Dorsey answers, yes.

Dorsey offers a comprehensive investigation of the nature and physical characteristics of roads in Iron Age Israel and attempts to reconstruct the courses of some 245 roads and branches that most likely existed during the Old Testament era. This work also takes up such fruitful topics as the nature, frequency and scope of travel in ancient Israel; the construction, maintenance and naming of roads; typical road and city-gate widths; and the relation of road to city. Dorsey is careful to define his terms by giving a detailed etymological, semantic and syntactical analysis of the eight terms used in the Hebrew Bible for “road.” In addition, he includes a comprehensive bibliography and three indexes (a scripture index and separate indexes of named and numbered archaeological sites).

Dorsey uses four kinds of evidence in his investigation: (1) literary documentation from various periods (ranging from ancient and classical sources, such as Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian and Greek literature, through such early modern sources as the journal of Edward Robinson and the maps of the Palestine Exploration Fund, which delineate the course of roads within Israel about 100 years ago); (2) the courses of later roads (of which, for example, it is estimated that some 1,500 kilometers of major roads were built within the Roman province of Judea alone);¹ (3) the physical topography of the land (that is, the presumption that there exist within Israel certain largely unchanging physiographic and/or hydrologic factors that determined, except when temporarily contravened by geopolitics, that roads followed by caravans, migrants or armies remained relatively unaltered throughout extended periods of time); and (4) Iron Age settlement patterns that have been revealed by archaeological excavations and surveys.

Dorsey’s first three lines of evidence are rather traditional, and they could have been fleshed out in considerably greater detail. His fourth line of evidence, however, by exploiting fresh archaeological data, adds a new and significant dimension to the problem of locating ancient roads in Israel. In recent years, largely as a result of a number of intensive regional surveys that are being conducted in many parts of the country, a generally consistent geopolitical and demographic picture of Iron Age Israel is emerging.^a Not all of this new archaeological evidence has been published, and much of it does not relate directly to the Iron Age. Nevertheless, scholars commonly agree today that the Iron Age brought to Israel a great deal of expansion (including new international trading networks and markets) and widespread sedentarization (including technological, political and social infrastructures; domestic economies and the blossoming of towns and villages). Dorsey set out to gather the results of this research—from all published and unpublished sources, from named sites and numbered sites alike, from surveys and from excavations—and to plot all Iron Age sites on a series of maps with a scale of 1 to 50,000. Then he used this new evidence, augmented by his first three lines of evidence, to delineate the roads connecting these sites. One measure of the scope and significance of Dorsey’s investigation is that the American Schools of Oriental Research will soon publish a companion volume, which consists of his catalogue of all Iron Age sites.

My major problem with this book has to do with the 15 maps that bear all the visual weight of a sometimes technical, and always spatially oriented, discussion. Without the maps, much of the text would prove to be extremely difficult to grasp, except by some scholars already familiar with Israel’s landscape. Now, while I realize that the expense prohibits the publisher from reproducing the author’s 1:50,000 maps, yet not to have produced some kind of large comprehensive map, nor to have produced a series of 008large-scale maps, simply sells this quality volume short! Anyone intent on using this book for scholarly research will need to have access to maps with a scale on the order of 1 to 250,000 or 1 to 100,000.

Furthermore, the 15 maps themselves, although designed to be read with the text, are not always conducive to a clear understanding. Sometimes, for example, a map must be read in a north to south sequence, while the very next map must be read in a south to north sequence. Readers are also likely to be confused when different segments of the same road are variously designated on different maps (for example, the Great Trunk Road is labeled road I1 as far north as Megiddo, where it becomes B1 [see maps 1–2, 4]).

Since so much of this volume depends on modern archaeological surveys, it is understandable that its scope was confined to the area between Dan and Beer-Sheva, where the most work has been done; that the roads of a few regions within that area that are not yet well surveyed are given less complete articulation (such as in Galilee and the Judean wilderness); and that it excludes the modern Negev, the southern quadrant of Lebanon, and Transjordan (including the Golan Heights). It would have been helpful, however, to include at least one map that transcended those boundaries, one that would have enabled the reader more easily to grasp the relationship of roads discussed with the larger geopolitical picture. To cite but one example, scholars have long thought that the main transportation artery that linked Canaan with Mesopotamia, via the oasis of Damascus, crossed over the Jordan River just east of the city of Hazor (at the “Bridge of Jacob’s Daughters”) and transected the Golan by way of the modern town Kuneitra. Modern archaeological surveys, however, do not bear out this supposition (see pp. 101–102).² Now Dorsey offers some new archaeological evidence that may provide the basis for eventually charting a route between the Hula valley and Damascus (pp. 157–158), but unfortunately a map displaying all known Iron Age sites that may have aligned this road across the Golan, and showing its relationship to other roads converging on Damascus, was not included.

Overall, an impressive array of multidisciplinary scholarship underlies this excellent volume, and Dorsey’s approach to a variety of vexed geographical questions is balanced and commendably thorough. Any future researcher on this subject will have to take this work into account.

Escape to Conflict: A Biblical and Archaeological Approach to the Hebrew Exodus and Settlement in Canaan

George L. Kelm

(Fort Worth, TX: IAR Publications, 1991) 280 pp., $16.95

Are the Bible and the historical record reconcilable? Many scholars think they are and they have been engaged in a laudable task—to correlate the Biblical and archaeological evidence into a coherent synthesis. One such scholar is George Kelm, professor of archaeology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. But as Kelm and his like-minded colleagues recognize, because new archaeological discoveries are continuously being made and because the sources—Biblical and non-Biblical—are often fragmentary, the effort at synthesis is necessarily tentative and incomplete. Nowhere is that effort more difficult and controversial than for the period of the Exodus and of the Israelite conquest of Canaan. Not even the dates for these events are generally agreed upon!

After chapters discussing the geographical and historical background to these two events, Escape to Conflict addresses, in order, the events described in Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua and Judges, providing a sort of archaeological commentary on them. Kelm has read widely and is generally up-to-date in his discussion of the archaeological record. (One source gave me pause, however: this is the first time I have seen Immanuel Velikovsky’s Ages of Chaos seriously cited in a work of this sort!)

Kelm’s theological stance is resolutely conservative. In the book’s introduction he attacks scholars whose historical-critical approach is, for Kelm, uncritical, subjective and haphazard, principally (it seems to me) because they do not share his presuppositions. What makes this surprising is that as one reads further, one realizes that the evidence has led Kelm himself to a decidedly historical-critical position. He concludes that there were several stages to the Exodus and conquest. The “Moses-led exodus” was only the last in a series of migrations by Hebrews from Egypt to Canaan, a process lasting at least two centuries. Biblical writers, Kelm concedes, artificially combined these events into a single narrative, which the archaeological record now enables us to untangle. Kelm resolutely avoids conclusions dependent on any literary-critical analysis, which sees the Pentateuch as having been composed during different periods in Israel’s history.

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The overall impression is of intellectual schizophrenia: On the one hand, for Kelm Biblical tradition is a reliable historical source, even in its most improbable details, as in the dialogue between Moses and pharaoh at the beginning of the Book of Exodus, which Kelm implies is an accurate verbatim transcript. On the other hand, when the Biblical text is contradicted either by itself or by archaeological evidence, then Kelm says we are dealing with scribal collation—essentially a stratified tradition, though J, E, D and P,^b the familiar designations used in the historical-critical method to denote different literary strands of the Pentateuch, are not among Kelm’s dramatic personae.

Apparently privately published, Escape to Conflict has many inconsistencies and errors: Some page numbers in the index are wrong, place names are inconsistently spelled and there are numerous typographical slips.

This, then, is a flawed synthesis. Similar in scope but much better is Out of the Desert? Archaeology and the Exodus/Conquest Narratives (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1989), by William H. Stiebing, Jr.^c