ReViews

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The Holy Land: Oxford Archaeological Guides

Jerome Murphy-O’Connor

(Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998) 4th edition; 150 maps, photos, diagrams and plans; 475 pp., $18.95 (paperback)

Some guidebooks are best to read as you prepare for a trip. This is not one of them. Other guidebooks offer the most pleasure after your travels have ended, as you recall the places you have seen. This is not one of them either.

Instead, this is the kind of guidebook that you want to have in hand and open as you walk through the sites of the Holy Land. As a sort of paperback tour guide, it is a brilliant accomplishment, packed with authoritative information, entirely reliable, almost free of error—as good as a brilliant, learned and methodical mind can make it.

In this fourth edition of his now-famous guide, author Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, longtime professor at Jerusalem’s École Biblique et Archéologique Française, follows the outline of his original 1980 edition. A brief introduction on historical periods and use of the guide, plus some travel advice, is followed by a long section on Jerusalem (about a third of the book), arranged geographically, and short entries on 200 other sites in Israel, arranged alphabetically.

The shorter entries that make up the bulk of the book include information on what to see and how to see it. The two pages devoted to Hammat Tiberias, for example, list visiting hours at this site on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee; offer a brief history of the site, whose hot springs have attracted visitors for nearly two millennia; and provide a careful description of the fourth-century C.E. synagogue’s mosaic floor, including a comparison drawing of a detail from this floor and that of Beit Alpha.

At close to 500 pages, the latest edition is a third or more longer than the first—and well worth the extra size and weight. Still, even in this larger and thicker book, the art is in the compression. Individual entries are clear and concise, often brilliant, but sometimes the very act of compression can cause confusion. Describing the location of the Jerusalem Temple during the time of the Maccabees, Murphy-O’Connor writes: “If the great ashlars at the foot of the steps at the northwest corner of the present [Temple] platform are taken to mark the north-west corner of the Maccabean temple … ” A specialist who knows what Murphy-O’Connor is talking about will probably understand this shorthand, but it will be incomprehensible to most readers. Even with this book in hand, tourists will probably fail to find the ashlars (chiseled stones) he refers to.

The need for compression also leads the author to present some learned guesses of his own—and some remarkable conclusions—as accepted wisdom. I was astonished to learn that the Roman emperor Hadrian (117–137 A.D.) had built his Temple to Jupiter on top of Calvary—with chapels to Aphrodite as annexes to it.^a Everything else I’ve read locates the Temple of Jupiter on the Temple Mount. I was also surprised by his claim that the Chi Rho symbol may not necessarily have been Christian, by his reference to Emperor Justin II (I have always heard him called Justinian) and by his alternative reading of a Latin inscription on the wall of the chapel beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in Jerusalem. The standard reading of the inscription, which accompanies a simple graffito (drawing) of a ship, is “DOMINE IVIMUS,” which is usually translated as “Lord, we went,” and which has been described as the earliest physical evidence of Christian pilgrimage to the Holy City. A more recent, controversial interpretation suggests, however, that the inscription does not refer to God but should simply be translated “Master, we went.” But Murphy-O’Connor, without offering either of these alternative readings, simply states that the inscription may best be interpreted as “DD M NOMINUS,” or “the gift of Marcus Nominus.”

I hesitate to question Murphy-O’Connor. But I am sure that these conclusions will puzzle any interested traveler who consults more than one guidebook or reads the signs at the sites he visits. At the very least, the author should mention the accepted readings and locations and explain when his is a minority opinion. To fail to do so may not be wrong, but it is definitely confusing.

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Murphy-O’Connor does make an occasional mistake, but usually on matters of small importance: For example, there is no granite at all in Jerusalem, not even in the Coptic shrine in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; and there were five Maccabee brothers, not three. His record on tourist information is slightly worse: All males (not only religious Jews) have access to Wilson’s Arch; Abu Christo in Akko is a very good restaurant, not simply a café; the tombs of Akeldama are closed to the public (although they may have been open to Father Murphy-O’Connor); tickets to the Israel Museum are available on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath; and the British War Cemetery on Mt. Scopus is from the First World War, not the Second.

The author’s preference for the Arabic names of places may cause further confusion: Gibeon appears as Jib, Shechem as Tel Balata, the Gate of the Chain as Bab el-Sisila. The common Hebrew and Biblical names do not even appear in the index. Also unhelpful is the practice of listing all place-names that begin with Tel under T and those beginning with Khirbet (Arabic for “ruin”) under K.

Reading Murphy-O’Connor may not always be easy, but it is still the one book you must bring with you when you visit Israel. I plan to carry it with me. Every serious traveler should do the same.

Sacred Bounty Sacred Land: The Seven Species of the Land of Israel

edited by Joan Goodnick Westenholz

(Jerusalem: Bible Lands Museum, 1998) 220 pp., $48.00 (available through Eisenbrauns, P.O. Box 275, Winona Lake, IN 46590)

The sparkling splendor of this exhibit catalogue well matches the natural beauty of the “land flowing with milk and honey” and the grains and fruits that the volume celebrates. From the dazzling color photographs to the icons that adorn the margins of each page, meticulous care—indeed, devotion—marks the volume’s production values.

Sacred Bounty Sacred Land offers information-packed essays on the Biblical seven species—wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives and dates—and a concise consideration of the “tree of life” motif found in several ancient Near Eastern civilizations. Even if less than half of the exhibit items are reproduced here (a serious disappointment), the reader gratefully finds that each receives a full description—a testimony to Bible Lands Museum curator, author and editor Joan Goodnick Westenholz’s praiseworthy attention to detail.

The description of each entry judiciously supplies indispensable information, though the technical exactness sometimes requires trips to the dictionary (for example, “guilloche pattern”). The descriptions are preceded by dry but essential listings of each artifact’s composition, provenance, date, size, current location, publication facts and scholarly references. These add greatly to the catalogue’s usability, making it more than a mere coffee-table showpiece.

Though the provenance of the objects ranges from Italy to Iran, the focus falls squarely upon the territory that the text consistently calls the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael). In keeping with the exhibition’s intention “to investigate the development of Israel’s symbols,” the Land of Israel supplies half of the collection. Of these, just over half date to the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The Iron Age provides a further 22 percent, while only 11 percent date to the rich Byzantine period.

The volume’s geographic and chronological interests match its intention to display the sacred bounty of the sacred land—the artifacts produced when “Israel” constituted a political and social reality in the land. Thus the volume can speak of the “ancestral glory of biblical times” even though, from the archaeological and historical perspective, the Byzantine period doubtless set the high-water mark for agricultural “grandeur.”

The exhibit’s timing, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the State of Israel, reveals an ideological bent in the choice of artifacts, a bent also apparent in the essays. Westenholz asserts the uniqueness of the seven species to the Land of Israel and calls upon the non-Israelite artifacts (from Syria, Anatolia, Egypt and Transjordan) to highlight Israel’s symbolic culture so that its “uniqueness … can be truly understood.” But cereals, olives, figs, grapes, pomegranates and even oasis-loving dates also did well up the coast from Israel, in ancient Phoenicia (which may even get its name from the Greek word for date palm). The insistence on uniqueness places a culture outside the realm of comparative study and, therefore, outside the realm of archaeological analysis. Archaeology is not well equipped to study the unique. Biblical scholars, too, recognize that the paradigm of the uniqueness of Israel stifles the attempt to understand how that ancient society developed its culture during a centuries-long evolution. In Biblical studies as well as in archaeological interpretation, the heritage of the broader Near East is no longer the foil to Israel’s “uniqueness.” Even the small number of artifacts in the exhibit from outside of Israel demonstrates how deeply ancient Israel shared the ideas and iconography of its neighbors.

The types of objects in the exhibit are also revealing. Coins constitute 41 percent of the exhibit. No other artifact comes close to that number; seals take second place, at a distant 15 percent. The presence of fruits and grains on seals and coins alerts us to the social locus that prized their symbolic value: the urban world of commerce and governmental authority. If we ask which of the seven species garners the greatest share of iconographic attention, the exhibit provides no surprise. It is not the indispensable crops on which rested the region’s food system—wheat and barley, the grains that provided the bulk of the nutrition needed by the vast majority of the population. Wheat appears on only 6 percent of the objects and barley on 5 percent. Grapes rise to 20 percent, so that at least one member of the conspicuous Biblical triad of grain, wine and oil appears prominently. Above all, however, towers the date palm, claiming over one-third of the collection’s attention. While the Bible offers a mere dozen mentions of the date palm, it is the iconographic symbol of choice for the elite wielders of seals, wearers of jewelry and possessors of carved ivory.

This discrepancy between life-sustaining 059food and widely used symbol reveals a basic oversight in Sacred Bounty Sacred Land. The exhibit and catalogue neglect the sociological dimensions of the material culture and the ideological dimensions of the literature. The catalogue looks at both the Biblical text and the artifact without considering the role of social communication. The date palm became a prominent marker of ancient Israel’s elite not because of “its crucial role in the economy” or because of its “intensive cultivation,” but because it somehow communicated the elite’s idea of its own value and legitimacy.

The same holds true for the Biblical list of the seven species itself. It cannot be read literally as a record of the most important products of the land or as proof of the abundance of the land or as an indication of the challenges faced by the land’s cultivators. The list must be seen as the expression of an idea within a sociological context. Here is one telling indicator: Whoever composed the list (and the occurrence of these flora in a 20th century B.C.E. Egyptian report on Canaan suggests the list has a long history) neglected produce crucial to the everyday subsistence of common people—lentils, chickpeas and garden vegetables such as onions and leeks. Why these crops failed to become 060symbols we can only speculate.

Sacred Bounty Sacred Land’s meticulous information and splendid graphics make it an extremely valuable resource for approaching the cultural symbolism of the seven species. Readers must, however, bring their own critical acumen to bear on the ideas embodied by the artifacts in the exhibit and by this beautifully produced catalogue.

The Holy Land: Oxford Archaeological Guides

Jerome Murphy-O’Connor

(Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998) 4th edition; 150 maps, photos, diagrams and plans; 475 pp., $18.95 (paperback)