Books in Brief
004
Biblical Israel: State and People
Benjamin Mazar, edited by Shmuel Ahituv
(Jerusalem: Magnes Press and Israel Exploration Society, 1992) 175 pp., $25.00
Professor Benjamin Mazar has established an extraordinary legacy as teacher, editor, author and academic statesman. Even now as he approaches the completion of his ninth decade, he continues to flourish, to teach, to study and to publish. Mazar is the beloved teacher of many, if not all, of two generations of Israeli historians, archaeologists and historical geographers. And his influence as a teacher extends beyond the circle of those who have formally been his students. Indeed, I count William F. Albright (my Doktorvater) and Mazar (with whom I have never taken a class) as the two teachers who have influenced me most.
This volume of Mazar’s collected essays, published to honor him on the occasion of his 85th birthday, joins an earlier volume of collected essays published in his honor on his 80th birthday.a Hebrew University’s Magnes Press has chooser an excellent way to honor a great man, offering a complement to the usual fashion of publishing collections of other people’s articles in festschrifts, of which Mazar has had several.
The essays in these two volumes stem from a period of some 40 years. Many have been published before only in Hebrew and are now available to a wider audience for the first time. They have been lightly updated to reflect changes of opinion on Mazar’s part or because vital new evidence has appeared. The editor has also added new bibliographic items when he thought it essential.
Professor Mazar holds a special place in the field of Bible and ancient Near Eastern studies. He has pursued studies in ancient history, especially the history of Israel and of Israelite religion in its ancient Near Eastern context, Assyriology, Semitic philology and epigraphy, the archaeology of Israel and her ancient neighbors, historical geography, and critical Biblical studies. In a recent autobiographical memoir, Mazar remarks that it was Albright who inspired him to devote himself to interdisciplinary research. And so he has. He stands with Albright as a representative of a threatened tradition of generalists, great figures who are able to use a phenomenal range of knowledge across disciplinary lines to create syntheses, to view from a broader perspective than others, to correct myopic and limited insights of technicians and specialists, to turn vast accumulations of facts into humanistic learning.
In both volumes, there are a number of synthetic historical studies, such as his several papers on the Philistines, the Arameans and the Canaanites. In Biblical Israel: State and People, we find as center-pieces his studies of Jerusalem through the ages: “David’s Reign in Hebron and the Conquest of Jerusalem,” “Jerusalem—‘Royal Sanctuary and Seat of Monarchy,’” “Jerusalem from Isaiah to Jeremiah” and “The Temple Mount from Zerubbabel to Herod.” Together with his 1975 volume, The Mountain of the Lord: Excavating in Jerusalem (Doubleday), these papers present us with the rich overflow of a lifetime of study of Jerusalem, of many years of excavation of the Temple’s outer precincts and indeed of a unique love affair with the Holy City.
Biblical Israel also includes his sober look at “Kingship in Ancient Israel,” a corrective to much unbridled speculation by scholars with less immersion in the history of Near Eastern forms of monarchy. Another paper surveys “The Oasis of En-gedi and Its History,” which grew out of his excavations from 1961 to 1965 at this unique and fascinating site on the Dead Sea. Several other papers are more narrowly focused but are gems of imaginative research and are among my favorite pieces from Professor Mazar’s pen: for example, “The Sanctuary of Arad and the Family of Hobab the Kenite” and “Carmel the Holy Mountain.”
I recommend both the new collection and the previous volume to any serious student of the history and archaeology of ancient Israel and to any serious student of the Bible. They provide a cross section of a lifetime of interdisciplinary research, and insight into the viewpoint and methods of one of the great teachers and scholars of our time. We hope that a third volume of collected essays will appear to celebrate his 90th birthday in 1996.
006
Hesban 1—Sedentarization and Nomadization: Food System Cycles at Hesban and Vicinity in Transjordan
Øystein S. LaBianca
(Berrien Springs. MI: Andrews Univ. Press 1990) 353 pp., $29.95
Hesban 5—Archaeological Survey of the Hesban Region: Catalogue of Sites and Characterization of Periods
Robert D. Ibach, Jr.
(Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews Univ Press, 1987) 299 pp., $29.95
These two books are part of the impressive series of final publications of the Tell Hesban regional project.1 Located about 12 miles (19 km) southwest of Amman, Jordan, on the northern edge of the Moabite plain, Tell Hesban is identified with Biblical Heshbon. In the Biblical tradition, Heshbon was possessed at various times by the Amorites, Israelites and Moabites (Numbers 21:26, 32:37; Isaiah 15:4, 16:8–9).
According to director Lawrence Geraty’s preface to LaBianca’s volume, the Tell Hesban project began as “a traditional effort to correlate archaeology and the Bible,” but it developed into “a genuinely multidisciplinary project,” which included the major excavation of Tell Hesban, an excavation at nearby Tell Jalul and a regional survey. The research project of Tell Hesban and its vicinity deserves high praise as the first regional project to be carried out in Jordan and as the first final publication of such a project in the entire Levant.
LaBianca’s Sedentarization and Nomadization provides the economic and demographic background to the region and its inhabitants. In order to reconstruct the subsistence strategies available to the people of the Hesban region, LaBianca gathered information from various sources, including data on the population of the region in recent generations, ethnoarchaeological information, faunal remains from the Hesban dig and settlement patterns as revealed by the archaeological survey of the region. The book’s main concept centers on the socioeconomic flexibility of the Near Eastern population, especially groups who live on the desert fringe. Such groups could shift from sedentary to pastoral modes of subsistence according to the changing economic, social and political conditions.2
LaBianca’s volume is an impressive, pioneering work and an excellent demonstration of what New Archaeology is all about. Its only shortcoming is that LaBianca, in order to reconstruct the subsistence patterns of antiquity, had to rely on the results of the Hesban survey, and these, as far as I can judge, are not detailed and accurate enough to allow a comprehensive study of the demographic, socioeconomic and political patterns of the past.
Robert Ibach’s volume in the Hesban series, the final publication of the survey in the region, is mostly a catalogue of sites, that is, a description of the remains at each site and a report on the pottery finds.
Two main goals stimulated the survey. The first was to shed light on the settlement patterns around Tell Hesban—the principal site of the region. LaBianca describes the second aim in the traditional jargon of “Biblical Archaeology”:
“The disappointing discovery that at Tell Hesban no traces of any pre-12th-century settlement could be found provided further incentive … to begin exploration of other sites in the vicinity of Tell Hesban. By means of the regional survey it was hoped that other sites might be identified where traces of the elusive Late Bronze Age occupants of this region [that might correlate with the Biblical references to Heshbon] might be found.”
Indeed, the survey finds at Tell Jalul stimulated the Hesban team to excavate that site, with the hope of solving the problem of the “elusive” Late Bronze Heshbon. In any case, this is not a genuine problem, since it is well established that much of the Biblical conquest narratives were written and compiled at a much later date and reflect Iron Age II (1000–586 B.C.E.) reality rather than Late Bronze actuality.
The survey attempted to record all antiquities within six miles (ten km) in each direction around Tell Hesban. Altogether 155 sites were recorded. Although the book does not provide a detailed description of the field methods used, it is clear that the surveyors neither conducted a full-coverage survey on foot nor employed random sampling techniques.
Three main shortcomings in the presentation of the data prevent Ibach’s report from providing the basis for a sophisticated, modern study of the settlement history of the region. First, the surveyors have not given the size of the sites; the general indications provided (that is, “very small,” “small,” “medium,” “large” and “major”) are meaningless. Second, although the number of sherds collected at each site is given, there is no breakdown into periods. Third, there are no pottery drawings; their future publication is promised together with the pottery from the dig.
Without these data it is impossible to 076estimate the built-up area of a given site in each period of its occupation. Information about the total occupied area in a given period is no less important, and probably more important, than the number of sites inhabited, because it is the only data that opens the way to population estimates and to reconstruction of the economic and political history of any region. Indeed, Ibach’s discussion of settlement patterns is minimal. This apparently was left to LaBianca’s volume, but the very fragmentary archaeological data makes LaBianca’s valuable study a theoretical contribution. With no way to compute the overall occupied area of each period, there are no means to estimate the agricultural output, the political hierarchy of the settlements and so forth.
Moreover, it is impossible to evaluate the pottery datings and readings suggested by the surveyors until the pottery drawings are published. Until then, scholars cannot examine the material in an objective way.
In any case, provided that the pottery readings were accurate, the only piece of information that can be extracted from the data Ibach presents is the number of sites occupied in each period. The peak periods in the Hesban region were the Byzantine (126 sites), Roman (93) and Iron II (63) periods. In the Late Bronze Age (6 sites) and Abbasid period (7 sites), there were severe settlement declines. There were an impressive number of Early Bronze sites (46) and a surprisingly low number of Middle Bronze (14) and Hellenistic sites (21).
We hope the future publications of the Hesban project will provide the missing information essential for a comprehensive historical analysis.
Biblical Israel: State and People
Benjamin Mazar, edited by Shmuel Ahituv
(Jerusalem: Magnes Press and Israel Exploration Society, 1992) 175 pp., $25.00
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