Reviews

052

Life in Biblical Israel

Philip J. King and Lawrence E. Stager

(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001) 440 pp., $39.95.

It will be a year before the Biblical Archaeology Society announces the winners of its biennial Publication Awards, which will recognize the best books on archaeology and the Bible published in 2001 and 2002. But already, Life in Biblical Israel, by Philip J. King and Lawrence E. Stager, has established itself as a major contender.

There’s just so much to like about this book. It’s beautifully produced, printed on thick, glossy paper and lavishly illustrated with 228 plates (most of them color). It’s written by two of today’s foremost scholars of the Bible and archaeology—Philip J. King, professor emeritus of Biblical studies at Boston College (and the only person to serve as president of the American Schools of Oriental Research, the Society of Biblical Literature and the Catholic Biblical Association) and Lawrence E. Stager, the Dorot Professor of the Archaeology of Israel at Harvard University.

King and Stager do together what each of them has elsewhere proved he can do masterfully on his own:^a integrate the latest archaeological data with the most current Biblical scholarship to better illustrate the world of ancient Israel, especially the social organization and institutions of that world—its household structure, its agricultural economy, its cultural modes of expression and aspects of its religious traditions.

It’s worth noting how this sort of enterprise differs from the person-centered and event-centered “Biblical archaeology” of an earlier generation. That approach focused on such questions as: What can archaeology tell us about the Exodus, about the conquest, about Israel’s great heroes, David and Solomon? These are not King’s and Stager’s questions; instead they attempt to use archaeology and the Bible to understand what everyday Israel was like—what it was like in “the courts of kings,” to be sure, but also in “the courtyards of commoners.” They contend that understanding everyday Israel is just as crucial (and perhaps even more crucial) for our study of the Bible as is understanding ancient Israel’s great events and great men: “Agrarian life, kinship relations, domestic objects, the routines of the day and 053the year, and other such details of the mundane world play a far greater role on the pages of the Hebrew Bible than we might initially realize. They figure into stories, laws, historical accounts, songs, prophetic critiques, and wisdom sayings.”

For example, in their chapter on “The Israelite House and Household,” King and Stager describe what archaeology has told us about the architecture of ancient Israelite houses, including the fact that such houses were locked with a tumbler lock mounted on the inside of the door; to unlock the lock from the outside, you had to reach through a fist-sized hole in the door and insert the key. But the door can be locked from the outside without the key—which illuminates, King and Stager suggest, the story of Ehud’s assassination of the Moabite king Eglon (Judges 3). In their reading, Ehud reaches through the door to lock it from the outside as he flees from the private chamber where Eglon lies dead, so that Eglon’s servants have to go find the key to gain entry, giving Ehud valuable time to escape. Or, in the chapter entitled “The Means of Existence,” King and Stager present recently discovered examples of Phoenician ships in order to reconstruct how Solomon’s “ships of Tarshish” must have appeared (1 Kings 10:22). Similarly, in the chapter on “Religious Institutions,” Stager and King, like others before them, use archaeological remains of temples from north Syria, together with Biblical descriptions from 1 Kings, 1 Chronicles and Ezekiel, to deduce the design of Solomon’s Temple. They also use examples of ancient Near Eastern art to suggest what some of the Temple’s iconography—the cherubim, for example—would have looked like.

All this, and more, is presented in a highly readable style. Still, despite King’s and Stager’s stated intention to address both specialists and non-specialists, non-specialists may find it hard going at some points—especially in the introductory chapter, where the authors assume a basic familiarity with scholarly theories regarding the Bible’s composition (for example, that the Pentateuch is the product of four sources, commonly labeled J, E, P and D) and also a familiarity with some fairly obscure scholarly terminology (like “Mushite,” meaning pertaining to Moses). The introductory chapter is also a little confusing when setting out the book’s organizational structure; the authors introduce 17 major topics that they intend to address (for example, family, gender, traditions regarding death, traditions regarding food), and while the book does indeed address those topics, it is not organized around them, nor does it even take them up in the order in which the list is given. Traditions regarding food, for example, are discussed in chapter 2 and then again in chapters 3 and 6; all of these discussions occur before the discussion about death (also chapter 6), even though traditions about death are mentioned earlier than food traditions in King’s and Stager’s list.

Repetition is a problem elsewhere in the book as well: the various species of trees known and used by the ancient Israelites are catalogued both in a section in chapter 2 on “Building Materials” and again in a section in chapter 3 on “Other Flora”; dogs, likewise, are discussed, with basically the same points made, in both chapters 2 and 3. Even within individual chapters there can be some repetitive material: in chapter 3, for example, horses are discussed twice (in the sections on “Animal Husbandry” and on “Transport”), with the same points made each time.

Some readers might feel that too many of the illustrations are taken from the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, which Stager directs. (Although I must note that it was a lovely gesture for King and Stager to dedicate the book to Leon Levy and his wife Shelby White, who have done so much for the study of ancient Israelite archaeology over the years.) Also, readers who want to use the book as a guide for future study may find themselves frustrated by its footnotes, which often give only one citation for a topic, and not necessarily the most up-to-date one. Regarding the evidence for the worship of the goddess Asherah in ancient Israel, for example, King and Stager cite only a 1994 article by Judith M. Hadley and none of the many other sources on this topic—not even Hadley’s more recent and thorough The Cult of Asherah in Ancient Israel and Judah: Evidence for a Hebrew Goddess (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000).

These are all minor quibbles, however. Overall, the book is superb, overflowing with insights into the Biblical world. It succeeds in doing well what most of us can only aspire to: presenting the newest in scholarship using stunning graphics and accessible prose, thus making its crucial but complicated data a joy to digest.

Life in Biblical Israel

Philip J. King and Lawrence E. Stager

(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001) 440 pp., $39.95.