ReViews
062
The View from Nebo
Amy Dockser Marcus
(New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000) 1 map, 304 pp., $25.95 (hardback)
The Bible Is History
Ian Wilson
(Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1999) 173 color and 19 b&w illus., 13 maps, 256 pp., $29.95 (hardback)
I enjoyed reading these books, until I reached the end of each one. Both explore the relationship between archaeology and the Bible, focusing heavily on the “Biblical” periods in Palestine—that is, the Bronze and Iron Ages (c. 3000–586 B.C.E.). Both are intended for a popular audience and cover much of the same material in chronological order. Both books are well researched and incorporate the latest archaeological findings and debates, despite the fact that the authors are not academics trained in Biblical archaeology (Marcus was the Wall Street Journal’s Middle East correspondent from 1991 to 1998; Wilson—as the dust jacket informs us—“graduated in Modern History” from Oxford in 1963 and currently lives in Australia). But that is where the similarities between the two books end. Marcus’s perspective is reflected in the subtitle of her book, How Archaeology Is Rewriting the Bible and Reshaping the Middle East, whereas Wilson’s purpose is to demonstrate that The Bible Is History.
Marcus writes in a flowing, chatty, journalistic style. For example, on her opening page she describes crossing the Allenby Bridge to visit Mt. Nebo: “The waiting areas at both ends of the bridge are always crowded with people, youth with backpacks hiking their way through the Middle East, elderly women holding bags of fruit and vegetables on expansive laps or clutching a chicken in a sack, families laden with their shopping returning from visiting relatives in the West Bank.” Her survey of key events in ancient Israel’s history begins with Abraham’s odyssey and ends with the sect that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Marcus is served well by her ability to track down the latest archaeological findings, shedding light on lesser-known periods and peoples. I especially appreciated her chapters on the Exile, the Ammonites and the Edomites. In the case of the Babylonian Exile, she points out that “Judah was not empty after all. Most of the population remained behind, living in the same places they had lived before, except now under Babylonian rule.” Much of this chapter is devoted to Tell en-Nasbeh (Biblical Mizpah), where Jeffrey Zorn recently identified an entire Babylonian level that was unrecognized by William Frederic Badè in his 1926–1935 excavation.a Perhaps the chapters of greatest interest to BAR readers will be those devoted to the Iron Age and the emergence of Israel in Canaan, the establishment of the United Monarchy of David and Solomon, and the kingdom’s eventual division into the states of Israel and Judah. In these chapters too, Marcus does an excellent job of presenting the latest archaeological findings.
Only when I reached the last chapter (which deals with periods in which I specialize) did I realize the problem with this book. The advantage of journalistic writing is that the product is very readable. The drawback is that controversy is sometimes emphasized to make the “story” more gripping. In other words, this type of reporting sometimes presents alternative views to 064“traditional” scholarship as being more mainstream, more widely accepted, more credible than they really are. Although archaeological evidence can be interpreted in different ways, not all interpretations are equally valid. And unless one is a specialist in the particular field being addressed, it is nearly impossible to judge which interpretation has more validity.
It wasn’t until I reached the end of the book, which discusses the controversy surrounding the settlement at Qumran, that I picked up on this flaw in Marcus’s presentation. Marcus begins by describing the “traditional” interpretation of Qumran as a sectarian settlement inhabited by the same group of Jews who deposited the Dead Sea Scrolls in the nearby caves (an interpretation to which I subscribe). A number of scholars have recently suggested that instead of being a sectarian settlement, Qumran was a villa, a fortress or a commercial entrepot.b One of these is Yizhar Hirschfeld, who believes that Qumran was a fortified manor house. Although Hirschfeld’s interpretation has gained few adherents, he is the only archaeologist Marcus interviewed on this topic. She thus repeats many of the inaccurate or false claims made by Hirschfeld (for example, on p. 210, “among the pottery finds are examples of fine ware”). Furthermore, by interviewing only Hirschfeld (and more than six pages are devoted to him), Marcus not only gives readers the impression that his interpretation is just as valid as the “traditional” one, but also makes it seem even more valid (especially to the popular audience for whom this book is intended). This is hardly a balanced presentation!
At this point I realized that Marcus’s presentation in an earlier chapter of the so-called minimalist-maximalist debate about early Israel is similarly lopsided towards the minimalists. Whereas she devotes only one page to an interview with William G. Dever, “the most passionate critic of the Copenhagen School” (and no pages to the views of Amihai Mazar or Lawrence Stager), she has pages of interviews with Israel Finkelstein, as well as with Thomas Thompson and Philip Davies. Part of this is attributable to the fact that Finkelstein has what Marcus describes as “a salesman’s personality, charming, outgoing, and quick.” But it also reflects Marcus’s journalistic tendency to emphasize the new and the controversial. Though this approach might work well in the media, where scandal and controversy sell, it is not acceptable in academic scholarship. While the evidence Marcus puts forth is not necessarily incorrect (at least, not strictly speaking), the manner in which it is presented gives readers a false or misleading impression of at least some of these scholarly debates.
With Ian Wilson’s book, too, it was not until I reached the final chapter that I recognized the pitfalls this text might present to unwary readers. Wilson’s book is apparently intended to be an updated sequel to Werner Keller’s famous The Bible As History, which was published nearly half a century ago. In the introduction, Wilson claims that he does not seek to prove that the Bible is literally true but instead wishes to “use the latest findings to gain a greater insight into the peoples and happenings that lay behind the Bible’s pages and how its individual books came to be written and by whom.” Marcus’s book, with its small size and lack of illustrations, is clearly intended to read like a novel. Wilson’s volume, which is lavishly illustrated with high-quality color photographs, maps and diagrams, resembles a coffee table book.
Although Wilson pays lip service to the minimalists’ views, he focuses on providing his readers with a synthesis of the archaeological, epigraphic and textual evidence for the Biblical stories. For example, in the first of 20 chapters, entitled “Did the Bible Begin in Turkey?”, Wilson examines the evidence for the story of Noah’s Ark and the Flood, and suggests that Abraham and his family came from Urfa, in modern southeastern Turkey.
Wilson’s efforts to reconcile the Biblical accounts with the archaeological evidence (or lack thereof) yield some peculiar results. He believes that the Exodus from Egypt occurred in about 1500 B.C.E., during the reign of 066the pharaoh Ahmose, instead of around the time of Ramesses II in the 13th century B.C.E. In other words, he places the Exodus at about the same time as the expulsion of the Asiatic rulers known as the Hyksos from Egypt, suggesting that they were related events. Thus, for Wilson, the eruption of the volcanic Aegean island of Thera in about 1500 B.C.E. could have caused many of the Biblical plagues, as well as the parting of the “Reed Sea.” Wilson then attributes the destruction found at many Palestinian sites at the end of the Middle Bronze Age (2200–1550 B.C.E.) to the Israelites. These include Lachish, Tell Beit Mirsim and Jericho. (Based on Bryant Wood’s research, Wilson downdates the destruction level at Jericho to c. 1400.)c In this manner he attempts to circumvent the fact that Jericho was unfortified later—when the Israelites are believed by most scholars to have entered Canaan—as well as the fact that during the Late Bronze Age the fortifications of many Canaanite cities deteriorated.
However, Wilson’s interpretation creates a number of problems. First, many scholars now believe that the eruption of Thera occurred more than a century before the traditionally accepted date. Second, and more importantly, dating the Exodus to about 1500 B.C.E. and claiming that the Israelites entered Canaan and destroyed the Middle Bronze Age cities during the following century creates serious chronological discrepancies. For example, the Middle Bronze Age II level at Tell Beit Mirsim was destroyed in about 1540 B.C.E., that is (according to Wilson), before the Exodus occurred! The destruction of the Middle Bronze Age II level at Lachish was dated by the excavators to about 1500 B.C.E., but Wilson dates the destruction of Jericho (supposedly by the Israelites) to about 1400 B.C.E.! He accounts for these discrepancies by stating, “One inference from this is that a longer period would have elapsed between the Exodus from Egypt and the victory at Jericho than the Biblically prescribed forty years. This is no surprise, since Biblical chronological estimates are often more symbolic than reliable.”
Even if we accept Wilson’s interpretation and chronology, what did the Israelites do between the fall of Jericho c. 1400 B.C.E., and the late 13th to early 12th centuries B.C.E., when we have the earliest possible archaeological evidence for the Israelite settlement in Canaan (as well as the Merneptah Stele of c. 1207 B.C.E., with the earliest extra-Biblical reference to the people of Israel)? Wilson accounts for this gap by claiming that the process of Israelite settlement was, like that of the English in England, “so gradual as to be all but indefinable.” In other words, Wilson spreads the Israelite conquest and settlement over the course of two to three centuries—although there is no evidence for their presence during this period (unless one assumes that the Israelites were completely identical with and indistinguishable from the Canaanites!).
Wilson has other peculiar views, such as that the Dead Sea Scrolls and the site of Qumran were associated with Sadducees rather than Essenes (a modified version of a theory proposed by Lawrence Schiffman, whom he does not cite). Despite these problems, I enjoyed reading the volume because it is well written and beautifully illustrated—at least, until I reached the end. After two chapters focusing on the time of Jesus, Wilson presents his conclusions. Here his attempt to explain Jesus’ resurrection and transfiguration takes on a preaching, missionary tone that made me (as a Jew) uncomfortable: “You either recognise and accept these elements as belonging to the same fundamental truth … or you harden your heart.” Wilson then describes modern people who claim to have had near-death experiences, concluding with a startling, antiliberal invective: “For today’s trend-setters, the ‘Bible is bunk’ argument holds sway. Under their ‘progressive thinking,’ church attendances have been declining, Bible education is being replaced in our schools by ever-more-liberal sex education, and B.C. and A.D. are likely anytime to disappear from our calendars in favor of B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era).” (I had not realized that the use of B.C.E. and C.E. is a mark of “liberalism” and decadence!) Wilson then goes on to state that “the majority of people today continue to live out their lives oblivious” to Jesus’ message. These concluding words hardly sound like a “liberal-minded convert to Roman Catholicism,” as Wilson earlier describes himself.
My main criticism of this book is not about Wilson’s apparently fundamentalist (or at least antiliberal) views. Instead, it is that he presents the material in such a way that the popular audience for whom this volume is intended will easily accept it at face value. This is the same complaint that I have about Marcus’s book. On the other hand, if scholars fail to write books intended for a popular audience, how can we blame nonspecialists for filling the void?
The View from Nebo
Amy Dockser Marcus
(New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000) 1 map, 304 pp., $25.95 (hardback)
The Bible Is History
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Footnotes
See Dan Bahat, “Does the Holy Sepulchre Church Mark the Burial of Jesus?” BAR 12:03.
Magen Broshi, “Evidence of Earlier Christian Pilgrimage to the Holy Land Comes to Light in the Holy Sepulchre Church,” BAR 03:04.
The reading suggested by author John Wilkinson appears to me to be clearly wrong. He would read DDM.NOMIMUS. But the IV cannot be M. The letter I clearly follows the M. The letter following D cannot be D; on the contrary, it must be O. See Wilkinson, “The Inscription on the Jerusalem Ship Drawing,” PEQ 127 (1995).