ReViews

060

Archaeology, History, and Society in Galilee: The Social Context of Jesus and the Rabbis

Richard A. Horsley

(Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1996) xiii + 240 pp., $20 (paper)

Nurtured in Galilee—a hotbed of political independence in northern Israel—Jesus was a small-town revolutionary, the “prophetic leader of a movement of Israelite renewal based in villages,” according to Richard Horsley.

In his latest book, Horsley, a New Testament scholar at the University of Massachusetts, attempts to reconcile his portrait of Galilee life with the discoveries of archaeologists who, in the past 20 years, have begun to focus on the material culture of Galilee, excavating at villages such as Khirbet Shema’, Gush Halav and Jotapata, as well as the cities of Sepphoris and Tiberias.

Archaeology, History, and Society in Galilee is a much shorter and more readable treatment of Horsley’s 1995 work, Galilee: History, Politics, People (by the same publisher). In both books, Horsley explores the character of Galilee from the eighth-century B.C.E. Assyrian conquest to the time of Jesus.

Horsley’s greatest strength as a scholar is his ability to translate difficult concepts into social theory and models. In so doing, however, he is overly critical of colleagues in Jewish studies, New Testament studies and archaeology who fail to work from a similar theoretical perspective. The main problem with his book, is that Horsley has forced the evidence into his own flawed interpretive scheme.

Horsley’s traces the roots of his independent Galilee to the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom of Israel in the eighth century B.C.E. After this conquest, Horsley writes, many Israelites, instead of going into exile or moving to the southern kingdom of Judah, simply escaped and led more or less independent lives in Galilee, in the north. Here they preserved the unique religious traditions of the tribe of Ephraim, which resisted having any king rule over them, and of the prophets Elijah and Elisha, who opposed the oppressive rule of King Ahab. For centuries, these Israelites in the north were isolated from mainstream culture. Even in later periods of Persian and Hellenistic control (fifth to second centuries B.C.E.), the area remained relatively independent, as it was administered at a distance from Megiddo.

According to Horsley, the population of Galilee throughout the entire Second Temple Period was composed of gentiles and northern Israelites. It is easy to see how such a group would differ radically from contemporaneous Jews in Judah, where the Temple and its traditions dominated, the priesthood had great control over everyday life, and the scribal class exercised strong influence. Such regional differences “compounded the class differences between the village communities and ruling groups, both high-priestly families and Herodian kings,” Horsley suggests. In the Roman period, the situation was aggravated, as Palestine was overtaxed and overcontrolled by Rome and, through the client king Herod Antipas, by the cities of Sepphoris and Tiberias; in Galilee, these circumstances led to wholesale opposition to the high priesthood and the Jerusalem Temple establishment, as well as to Antipas. Contrary to the popular view of Jesus as a cosmopolitan Jew, well versed in Hellenistic philosophies (especially Cynic philosophy, according to New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan), Horsley’s Jesus is a “prophetic leader” from an independent Galilean village-based Jewish community with its roots in a unique form of Israelite religion.

But in so creating this history of Galilee, Horsley rejects the recent archaeological evidence from the systematic survey of lower Galilee by Zvi Gal, of the Israel Antiquities Authority. This survey indicates that following the Assyrian conquest, northern Israelites abandoned much of the region of Galilee, to return only much later, during the Hellenistic era. Thus, the hundreds of years of isolation 062necessary to make Galilee the place Horsley says it was—and Jesus the man Horsley claims he was—never occurred.

Horsley has imposed an equally difficult-to-accept model on first-century C.E. rabbinic Judaism. Just as Horsley is not an archaeologist and can claim no firsthand knowledge of the data he discusses, he is also not a rabbinic scholar, or even conversant with the literature of the rabbis, except in a secondary context. In his examination of the synagogues of the cities, towns and villages of Galilee, what he sees as absent before 70 C.E. (namely, any evidence of nascent classical Judaism), he superimposes on the region after 70 C.E. by suggesting that it was either imposed by the rabbis much later or adopted from pagan forms of architecture or worship. Horsley’s idiosyncratic view of Galilean Jewry’s unique and independent character must be strongly rejected.

New Testament and rabbinic scholars must read the archaeological literature and engage in a dialogue with archaeologists. Horsley has begun this important process, and for this we are all in his debt. Further, Horsley writes in a vivid and compelling style, and his extensive notes make this semipopular book useful for college, seminary or even graduate study.

I caution readers, however, against taking his work as authoritative. I agree with Horsley “that much rethinking and fresh analysis remains to be done before we can adequately understand Jesus and the rabbis in historical context.” I do not believe, however, that Horsley’s work on Galilee brings us any closer to the true context of either Jesus or the rabbis in Galilee.

Planting and Reaping Albright: Politics, Ideology, and Interpreting the Bible

Burke O. Long

(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997) 162 pp., $32.50 (hardcover)

During his long career as a Biblical scholar, William F. Albright earned the unofficial title of Dean of Biblical Archaeology. Since he essentially founded this discipline and was its most important and prolific promoter, the title is well deserved.

But Biblical archaeology as Albright conceived it has since dissolved into a plethora of specialized disciplines, including archaeology, history, epigraphy, linguistics and the history of religions. Each of these areas has its distinctive methods and questions to pursue, and rarely do they connect straightforwardly. To really do Biblical archaeology requires that one be a polymath (a specialist in many areas) and, at the same time, a generalist with the gift of 063synthesis. Perhaps Albright’s school can no longer exist because no single person can specialize in all of these fields (it would be impossible even to attend all the major scholarly conferences covering these fields!).

Nonetheless, Albright remains a towering, even mythical, figure in Biblical studies today, in no small part because he institutionalized his vision of Biblical studies in many American universities. Students of Albright, and students of Albright’s students, make up a large segment of the Biblical scholars in the United States (myself included). What is behind the influence, even the myth, of Albright?

Some would say that Albright’s influence stems from his superb scholarship. His view that an adequate understanding of the Bible requires a thorough knowledge of its historical context (including the languages and cultures of the ancient Near East) has empirical and scientific appeal. I think he was right, though he may have overemphasized some aspects of history and culture to the detriment of others (such as the study of literature or ideology).

Others would attribute Albright’s influence to his ability to blend scholarship with Christian apologetics, as in his attempts to rehabilitate Moses as the founder of monotheism and to rediscover the historical patriarchs. Albright believed that the empirical study of the Bible was entirely consistent with, and indeed justified, a generally conservative (though not literalist or fundamentalist) Christian belief. In this, as in many other of his commitments, Albright was a child of his (and our) time.

Albright was a complex man, as great scholars often are, and his general, synthetic works show the complex strains of his conflicting allegiances. The title of his most famous work bears witness to this friction: From the Stone Age to Christianity: Monotheism and the Historical Process (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1957). On the one hand, this works offers an astonishing amount of accurate historical detail relating to the cultural history of humanity in the Near East—from the dawn of the species to the first century C.E. On the other hand, it is clearly a Christian interpretation of history, culminating as it does in a chapter on “Jesus the Christ” and ending with a call for a renewal of faith “in the God of the Agony at Gethsemane.” To the extent that such a combination of history and Christian apologetics is possible, the book succeeds. To the degree that such a combination is impossible, it fails. To my mind, the book works best where the undertone of Christian apologetics is absent, as in his treatment of Near Eastern culture and history during the Bronze Age (c. 3000–1200 B.C.E.).

In Planting and Reaping Albright, Burke Long, professor at Bowdoin College, has peppered his engaging narrative with quotes from Albright’s vast correspondence with his students, his colleagues, even his mother. It is fascinating to see the human frailties of a man who was both a superb scholar and a dedicated Christian, and the tangled web that these commitments weave.

In recent years it has become fashionable to regard knowledge as an ideological construct, motivated by struggles for political power and cultural dominance. This position generally goes by the name of postmodernism. Postmodernists tend to think that reason and scholarship, as practiced since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, are elaborate masks for power struggles between competing groups and individuals, techniques for oppression and marginalization. Knowledge, as Claus von Clausewitz once said of war, is politics by other means. From a postmodernist perspective, then, asks Long, how does one interpret Albright and his legacy in Biblical scholarship?

Long shows what a postmodern Albright looks like. As one might predict, he doesn’t look so good. Albright founded “a patriarchally ordered culture of generational and ideological solidarity.” (In other words, he inspired an intensely loyal group of students, as brilliant professors sometimes do.) He and some of his students “yoked their activities to Christian theological purpose,” leading to inevitable social conflicts with others of different perspectives. While these generalizations bear some truth, there are many exceptions. As Long notes, Albright was a great friend of Israel and of Jewish scholars. And Long recognizes that some of Albright’s intellectual heirs “eschew[ed] Albright’s overlay of Christian apologetics.” So the man and his school were not monolithic.

The chief weakness of this book lies in the bias of its postmodernist theory. As Long puts it, “Scholarly knowledge adds up to socially constructed facts and meaning, energized by ideological purpose and serving to support or oppose formations of social power.” From this perspective, Albright’s contributions to scholarship are themselves a form of political hegemony, a Nietzschean will to power. Albright and his clan mistakenly believed that “one could lay hold of objective facts about the past on the basis of a rigorous application of rational principles of discovery and evaluation of evidence.” In the postmodernist view, there is no real difference between “rational principles of discovery and evaluation” and political machinations. This position is patently absurd. There is considerable value in showing that rational discourse is never wholly disinterested, that people have complex motivations, as Long certainly does. But to collapse reason with political manipulation, to say that there are no important or interesting differences between the two, is naive and misleading.

064

In fact, Long tangles himself up with this problem in the final pages of the book, where he addresses the question of whether his book makes any difference in how Biblical scholars should proceed. He has to admit that since he has put aside “the paradigm of modernist scientific rationalism,” his perspective is no more valid than any other. He writes, “I am implicated as [Albright and his students] seemed to be, in competing struggles to make sense of what is given.” In these competing struggles, no one is right or wrong, only politically dominant or oppressed. But Long’s careful scholarship in researching, evaluating and presenting the evidence seems to me to subvert this theory. There is a difference between good scholarship and bad scholarship, irrespective of one’s political and ideological commitments. I would argue that Long’s book is a product of careful, thoughtful scholarship and is not just political propaganda. There may be propaganda in it, as there is in From Stone Age to Christianity, but any reasonably intelligent reader can tell the difference, at least in gross terms.

Is Albright’s work reducible to a mass of ideology “serving to support or oppose formations of social power?” Hardly. Albright’s political or ideological commitments are irrelevant to scholars who still consult his work on The Vocalization of the Egyptian Syllabic Orthography (American Oriental Society, 1934) or The Proto-Sinaitic Inscriptions and Their Decipherment (Harvard Univ. Press, 1966). Some scholarly works are valid or invalid for reasons unrelated to their author’s ideological biases. Can we ever wholly transcend our biases? I suppose not. But good scholarship is characterized by the attempt to do so. Scholarship is intertwined with personal motives, as Long amply shows; but it takes knowledge as its goal, however distant or unattainable it may be.

Bethsaida: A City by the North Shore of the Sea of Galilee

ed. Rami Arav and Richard Freund

(Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson Univ. Press, 1995) 338 pp., $30 (cloth), $15 (paper)

The fishing village of Bethsaida played a critical role in the development of early Christianity. Mentioned in all four gospels, this town on the shore of the Sea of Galilee was home to at least three disciples—Peter, Andrew and Philip—and the location of several of Jesus’ “deeds of power” (Matthew 11:21), including curing the blind man (Mark 8:22–26) and feeding the multitude (Luke 9:10–17).

Until the last decade, however, scholars were uncertain of the precise location of this crucial early Christian site.

The 19th-century explorer Edward Robinson speculated that a large mound just north of the Sea of Galilee and east of the Jordan River, known as et-Tell (simply meaning “the mound”), should be identified as biblical Bethsaida. But the German archaeologist Gottlieb Schumacher countered that et-Tell could not have been a fishing village because it lies more than a mile from the shore of the Sea of Galilee. He proposed a much smaller site right on the shore, El-Araj, as Bethsaida.

Recent excavations directed by Rami Arav of Haifa University have silenced the debate. Despite its distance from the shore, Et-Tell is now officially labeled “Bethsaida” on state maps of Israel.

In Bethsaida: A City by the North Shore of the Sea of Galilee, Arav and the team of archaeologists, geologists and Bible scholars working with him present the initial findings of their research, which began ten years ago with exploratory probes at El-Araj and et-Tell.

At El-Araj, they report, none of the uncovered remains predate the Byzantine period. At et-Tell, however, they discovered not only the biblical village and Roman city but settlements dating to the Early Bronze Age and a well-fortified Iron Age city with a massive temple and palace. Bethsaida, they discovered, is much older than previously known from the Bible (the name “Bethsaida” appears only in the New Testament) and other ancient texts.^a

This volume (which the authors promise is merely the first of four preliminary reports on the site) offers technical descriptions of the major finds from the seven occupational levels uncovered thus far, a select catalogue of the pottery and coins, and articles on individual finds. It also contains several essays that explore how the city being uncovered today relates to the city described in the Bible, in rabbinic literature and in the writings of Josephus.

The question of Bethsaida’s proximity to the Galilee is resolved in an essay by geologist John Shroder (of the University of Nebraska) and geographer Moshe Inbar (of Haifa University), who relate that the unstable shoreline of the Sea of Galilee was once more than a mile closer to Bethsaida. Careful examination of the muddy soil just southwest of the tell, they report, indicates that in ancient times there was a quiet body of water here, suitable for an anchorage. Indeed, the archaeologists have found part of a wall here that they identify as a dock—further proof that this was a fishing village. And in the town they have uncovered a Hellenistic-early Roman period house containing fishing gear—including lead net weights and a long crooked needle suitable for repairing nets.

In about 30 C.E., Herod the Great’s youngest son, Philip, rebuilt the city, renaming it Julias, after Emperor Augustus’s wife. Two coins minted by Philip have been excavated at the site. In an engaging chapter, Fred Strickert of Wartburg College explores how Philip used coins to commemorate the founding of Julias and to assert his independence from Pilate and other Roman procurators.

In 66 C.E., Julias (Bethsaida), like neighboring Gamla, became involved in the First Jewish Revolt against Rome, reports John Greene of Michigan State University. While leading forces that clashed with the Romans just outside the town, the Jewish military leader—and later historian—Josephus suffered a serious wrist injury. By 67 C.E., the Romans had taken the city, which was eventually abandoned.

Although lay readers may find themselves skipping some of this volume’s charts of pottery fragments, they will discover much that fulfills the authors’ goal of uncovering “some of the story of daily life, of insignificant things of the times when great spiritual ideas were shaped.”