All of the quotations in this regular BAR feature are unusual, but this one is especially so. It is a quotation from an unpublished book manuscript by William Foxwell Albright, the acknowledged dean of an earlier generation of Biblical archaeologists. Albright died in 1971; in a 2008 memoir Thomas Levy and David Noel Freedman wrote that “most Levantine archaeologists, Biblical scholars and other Near Eastern researchers of the world of the Bible … still regard [Albright] as a genius … Albright’s establishment of a new scholarly paradigm—Biblical archaeology—continues to have … a revolutionary impact … on Levantine archaeology.”1 Recently […]
