The Schweich Lectures of the British Academy are perhaps the most distinguished lecture series in the world relating to archaeology and the Bible. Usually consisting of three lectures followed by their publication in book form, lecturers have included some of the greatest names in Bible scholarship as well as in the archaeology of the ancient Near East.
The series was inaugurated in 1908 with the Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Oxford, Canon S.R. Driver. His book of three lectures is titled Modern Research as Illustrating the Bible. Subsequent lecturers have included an array of scholarly stars such as R.A.S. Macalister on the Philistines, A.E. Cowley on the Hittites, Moses Gaster on the Samaritans, E.L. Sukenik on ancient synagogues, Claude F.A. Schaeffer on Ras Shamra-Ugarit, Paul Kahle on the Cairo Genizah, Roland de Vaux on archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Kathleen Kenyon on Amorites and Canaanites. More recent lecturers have included Yigael Yadin on his excavations at Hazor, Abraham Malamat on Mari, Othmar Keel on scarabs and seals, P.R.S. Moorey on figurine idols and Lawrence Stager on his excavations at Ashkelon.
Originally the lectures were delivered annually, but economic pressures subsequently reduced that to every other year and finally to every three years.
To celebrate their centenary, the British Academy asked archaeologist and Bible scholar Graham Davies of the University of Cambridge to deliver a lecture now published in somewhat expanded form as The Schweich Lectures and Biblical Archaeology.1
The original title of the lecture, however, was “Archaeology and the Bible: A Broken Link?” in which Davies traces the history of the lectures from a confident expression of how archaeology confirms the Biblical narrative to doubts, to pursuit of archaeology for its own sake without relationship to the Bible, to the Biblical minimalists who have often been addressed in BAR, to the reconnection of archaeology as illuminating the Biblical text.
Davies’s conclusion:
“To isolate the Biblical text from the world in which it emerged is to make it into something which it is not and to forgo many essential clues to its interpretation. Both texts and material culture from the ancient world have much to contribute to a sympathetic reading and a thorough evaluation of the Biblical texts. The Schweich Lectures of the past century provide plentiful illustration of this … [and] justify a continuing interaction between archaeology and Biblical studies.”
The Schweich Lectures of the British Academy are perhaps the most distinguished lecture series in the world relating to archaeology and the Bible. Usually consisting of three lectures followed by their publication in book form, lecturers have included some of the greatest names in Bible scholarship as well as in the archaeology of the ancient Near East. The series was inaugurated in 1908 with the Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Oxford, Canon S.R. Driver. His book of three lectures is titled Modern Research as Illustrating the Bible. Subsequent lecturers have included an array of scholarly stars […]
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