13 - New Horizons in Biblical Research

New Horizons in Biblical Research.

A book by this title was published W. F. Albright, one of the foremost biblical archaeologists, and contains a series of popular accounts related to new findings in the realm of biblical archaeology (In the introduction by the English publishers of the book we read: “William Albright is one of the most outstanding biblical archaeologists, a world-renowned scholar, whose works are read and studied wherever the history of the Holy Land is studied. He is the author of more than 800 articles and books and has received more than 20 scholarly awards. His knowledge of languages, both modern and ancient, the solidity and variety of his scholarly credential, make him an impor­tant participant in the study of the Bible and all its aspects. He was the first among scholars with a theoretical knowledge of the Aramaic language to recognize the value of the Dead Sea scrolls, and pointed out their importance in resolving a number of disputed Biblical questions.). The information presented by this author is valuable for us in that in its principal tenets it runs in opposition to the theory of rationalistic crit­icism. Also important is the fact that the author writes as a representative of “free science,” and in keeping with this does not overstep the bound­aries of the method of scientific realism, i.e., of the method that perhaps does not deny the divine inspiration of Scripture, but leaves it aside, so as not to violate methodological principle. In the above-mentioned book, in the account “Archaeology and the Tradition of Israel,” the author firmly states his view of the book of Gen­esis on the basis of written materials of antiquity, newly discovered at excavations at four sites outside of Palestine: namely, two in Mesopotamia and two in Syria. “Mari” (today Tell-El-Harim), situated half-way up the Euphrates, was excavated in 1933 by M. Andre Parrot. There the remains of a palace were found, dating from the period between 1730 and 1695 B.C., i.e., the period of the post-deluvian Patriarchs of the Bible. Many thousands of cuneiform tablets were found there, written by the king and those close to him, and also by the rulers of neighboring provinces, most of which were settled by north-western Semites who spoke a language almost identical to the biblical language of the time of the Patriarchs - in terms of vocabu­lary, expressions, syntax and personal names. Thus, a great amount of material is available which casts light on the life of the ancestors of Israel in the first half of the second millennium B.C. Biblical archaeology, as our author stresses, is not limited to excavations in Palestine, but is broadened by archaeological discoveries in lands far removed from Palestine. Another site, even farther to the East, is Nuzi, where those who carry on the search, mostly Americans, have found the remains of estates and the citadel of an ancient city. There in the ruins many thousands of tablets with cuneiform writing were preserved, illustrating customs so similar to those found in Genesis that one can speak of them as being identical. All of the obscure passages in Genesis which have not yet been explained in the Hebrew text as it has come down to us, began to disclose their mean­ing from 1925 on, with the help of the studies of the tablets from Nuzi. The location Alalakh in northern Syria was excavated by the late Leonard Woolley in the course of scientific expeditions. Now the name of this site is not Semitic and it belongs, apparently, to one of the ancient lan­guages which was neither Semitic nor Indo-European, whose type has yet to be determined. However, cuneiform tablets of great value were found there which describe the theory and practice of laws among the Canaan-ites and their neighbors in the seventeenth, sixteenth and fifteenth cen­turies B.C. More important than these sites in northern Syria, however, is Port Ugarit, now Ras Shamra. There, from 1929 to the present day, work is being carried out by Claude Schaeffer, and it has yielded rich material of various sorts: art objects, architectural works, and special inscriptions in a half-dozen languages, as well as much writing, predominantly in Babylon­ian cuneiform script and in the local Canaanite alphabet. Things were found here that were not dreamed of before 1931: more than a thousand whole and fragmented tablets inscribed in the ancient cuneiform alphabet of twenty-seven letters (plus three others not comparable to any of the ancient linear alphabets), representing the ancient northwestern Semitic dialect, i.e., essentially the pre-Phoenician Canaanite language which was very close to the most ancient poetic forms of the Bible, not to mention grammar and vocabulary. Of course, all of this material is fully accessible only to a few persons who are quite knowledgeable in the field of history, archaeology, philolo­gy and linguistics, in their historical perspective. The comparative study of ancient languages according to ancient sources provides us with an opportunity to understand the most ancient traditions of the Jews. It shows that a clear line has to be drawn between Hebrew cosmogony and popular traditions in Genesis on one hand, and the same sort of material from Canaan, Phoenicia, and Egypt on the other. Comparison reveals that religious traditions here and there had nothing or very little in common, though at the same time both traditions undoubtedly arose from a certain single Mesopotamian tradition of great antiquity. In particular, the story of the Flood according to Genesis has its parallel in the Sumerian-Akkadian histories of Mesopotamia. The author of the above-mentioned survey gives his personal opinion on the contents of the book of Genesis as follows. The first eleven chapters of the book are political in character, enveloped by a religious spirit; the next part presents history, but history which has been preserved in the form of oral traditions. As for the first chapter of Genesis, the author confesses that he is awed by the fact that it is in several respects a great improvement over everything that was said about the origin of the world in written form prior to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The author of the survey gives as examples a series of obscure passages of the Bible that have been clarified as a result of excavations. Thus, in Genesis 15:2 we encounter a certain Eliezer of Damascus, about whom Abraham complains he will be forced to leave him his whole estate at death, not having a son as his heir (this was before the birth of Ishmael and Isaac). We now know, writes Professor Albright, that according to the ancient practice of the Patriarchs, property was not supposed to leave the family, but a legal “loophole” was devised. If someone was forced to mort­gage his property to a creditor because of a bad harvest or for any other reason, he had to adopt his creditor, and the latter became the heir to his property. Such circumstances obviously arose in this case: Eliezer, a rich merchant from Damascus, who, like other merchants of Damascus, lent money to the surrounding landholders and cattle breeders, became a great creditor of Abraham, and could have become his direct heir through adoption. Another story, related in Genesis 21:1-34, describes the occasion when Rachel, the daughter of Laban and the wife of Jacob, before leaving the house of her father, stole the images of his household deities, the “teraphim,” and succeeded in hiding them despite the search conducted by her father. In the texts of Nuzi there is a law that when doubt arises as to the rights of inheritance, for example, if there is no formal will, posses­sion of idols of the household deities is considered to be the primary evi­dence to the right of inheritance. Hitherto it was not clear what purpose this theft served, and why this trivial event was included in the history, but the scribal copyists preserved this story, keeping in mind that it must have had some real significance. The meaning of Rachel’s actions is now explained. There are a number of other examples where mysterious pas­sages in Genesis are made clear thanks to the findings at Nuzi and other sites. Because of this, almost all learned biblicists now acknowledge that the book of Genesis constitutes a written narrative of factual events which were preserved by the Hebrew people in the form of oral traditions. Fur­thermore, the religious, educational, and literary value of the narratives of the Bible is much greater than if the wars of those days, the migrations of tribal groups, etc., had been described there. If, as we said, the legal customs of the book of Genesis present an authentic reflection of the laws of society at that time, if the social and juridical practices described in the book of Genesis correspond exactly to those of the age of the Patriarchs and not to the post-Mosaic period, then it follows, writes Professor Albright, that we have no right a priori to rele­gate the patriarchal chronicles to a later date. One cannot call them the result of retrospective points of view which were current during the time of the Prophets, but should consider them to be actual oral traditions, only slightly modified with the passage of time as regards the removal of mythical elements from the traditions, the emphasizing of certain points, which were held to be significant, etc.; but on the whole, one should see their value as an authentic chronicle of the distant past. The attempts of certain critics of the biblical text to transfer the time of the life of Abraham and the time of the Exodus of the Jews out of Egypt to later centuries are unjustified, writes the author. Keeping to the point of view of a scholar who obviously accepts bibli­cal material as one of the phenomena of human culture, namely religious culture, Professor Albright does not deny the possibility of any sort of additions or deletions made in the course of the centuries of the Bible’s history, just as he does not express himself opposed to the designation of such phenomena by the signs Υ, Ε, P, etc. But he does definitively state that “attempts to break up the text of the Bible into small pieces, some­times dividing up the text into individual verses or lines ascribed to three different sources [as rationalistic criticism does] are quite futile - empty, groundless; persons holding to the principles of higher criticism are com­pletely mistaken in their assumptions. “From this,” he writes, “it does not necessarily follow that the hypothesis of the documents is false in princi­ple, but it must be treated with much greater critical caution than has hitherto been done” (pp. 14-15). What place does Moses occupy in history? Comparing the cultic, rit­ual, and civil prescriptions in the Pentateuch with both earlier and later developments, one can fix the final prescriptions of the Pentateuch close to the period between the fourteenth and eleventh centuries B.C. In the same way we have ground for stating that the religion of the Pentateuch stands between the patriarchal religion on one hand and the religion of the epoch of the Kingdoms on the other, and that it can be called monotheis­tic in the broad sense of the word. As for details, and mainly those of the construction of the Tabernacle as described in the Pentateuch, the author thinks that its appearance was perfected gradually, and parallel to this, a series of corresponding additions could have been inserted into the text comparable, for example, to the way in which the original American Con­stitution of 1789 was amended, “though it lost neither its original unity, nor the wholeness of its character.” Let us leave these opinions of the author as his personal ones. Professor Albright is decidedly opposed to the application of the understanding of “myth” to the narratives of the Bible. To him, in fact, belongs the introduction of the term “demythologization” in its proper understanding into the language of modern exegesis. He writes: In Genesis and in several poetic images of the Bible there are a number of passages where a clearly mythological element was demythologized. For example, in Canaanite mythology there is a huge creature called ‘tanin,’ which is rendered in the Autho­rized Bible by the word ‘whale.’ cTanin’ was a prehistoric mon­ster which existed even before the gods, and was destroyed by the great god Baal, or his sister Anat, or by another Canaanite deity. But in Genesis it says that on the fifth day of Creation God created Taninim gedolim,’ the first gigantic creations out of chaos [in the Slavonic and in the Authorized version: “great whales"]. They were not the predecessors of the gods, they were creations of God: this is the process of demythologization at first hand. It is also impossible to consider correct the proposi­tion, for example, that ‘tekhom’ - ‘the great deep’ - in the first chapter of Genesis is a monster such as ‘tekhmatu’ was in early Canaanite mythology. Such allusions to Canaanite mythology also show little indication of belief in the reality of the original bearers of these names, just as our use of the word ‘cereal’ scarcely expresses our faith in the goddess Ceres. The Bible uses a number of names of ancient gods and goddesses as ordinary names: the name Astarte took on the meaning of shepherd; Shumen, the god of health, became cto your health’; one divinity lent its name to the oak tree, another to the tur­pentine tree; yet another to wine. All of these are examples of demythologization.

(W.F. Albright, “The Ancient Israelite Mind,’ from a survey in New Horizons in Biblical Research). In actuality, in essence, it is quite clear that the task of Moses consist­ed in rejecting pagan mythical legends of gods and goddesses, and con­firming a monotheistic world view among his own people, as the one intentionally called to preserve and preach faith in the One God, the Omniscient Creator.