In Their Own Words

014

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 It is a quotation from an unpublished book manuscript by William Foxwell Albright, the acknowledged dean of an earlier generation of Biblical archaeologists.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Recently a copy of this 600-page unpublished and uncompleted book manuscript by Professor Albright resurfaced in BAR’s files, where it had rested for decades. BAR’s editor has no memory of where he got it. BAR decided to donate the manuscript to the Lanier Theological Library in Houston, Texas, where it would be preserved and available for scholarly study.

Before doing so, however, we extracted the following quotation for this issue commemorating BAR’s 40th anniversary:

Of all the tradition[s] of the Israelite people, one of the most tenacious is that of their subjection to state slavery for a long period of time before the Exodus. Modern scholars who cast doubt on the veracity of this tradition seem often to forget that history is often more extraordinary than imagination. It is no accident that made David Ben Gurion announce publicly in 1953 that he had changed his mind about the historicity of early Hebrew tradition since he himself had lived through events far more incredible than anything reported in the Israelite story of its national beginnings. When we recall that there was no modern nation of Israel at all a century ago and that the principal architects of the revival had wandered over southwestern Asia and most of Europe before settling down on the northern frontier of Jewry in the Middle Ages, the wanderings of the Patriarchs seem hopelessly rational by comparison. When one thinks of the fact that during nearly two millennia, the Rabbis and Tsaddiqim of Israel had been praying for a restoration of Israel in the land of their fathers and that this vision was converted into a program by Maskilim who were generally anti-religious in approach, we are not surprised that an essentially pagan people became the People of the Book. When our historical conscience is disturbed by the idea of the sudden transmutation of a mob of state slaves into an independent religious community wandering freely in the desert returning to their ancestral home, we need only think of the bitter persecutions which led to the last emigration of Jews from eastern Europe and to their influx into Palestine in the 19th century. The miracle of the Yam Suf [Reed or Red Sea] seems quite credible when compared to the victory of small groups of Jewish irregulars against the vastly superior forces of the European-trained Arab armies. Human history contains a vast number of well-attested sequences of fact which are likely to upset rational historians quite as much as the events of early Israelite history. If the ancestors of Israel spent any length of time as Semites in Egypt, they could have done so only as state slaves, since the Egyptians reacted violently against the domination of the prevailingly Semitic Hyksos (Genesis 43:32).

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 […]