by
Damien
F. Mackey
A famous name for his authentication of the Dead Sea
Scrolls,
[Albright] can be a most fascinating study. Although a
conventional scholar,
schooled in a system of chronology and archaeology that
disallows its exponents from being able to demonstrate the historicity of the
Bible – and imbued also with
the erroneous, pre-archaeological JEDP Documentary Theory
– professor Albright yet had the ability occasionally to burst
through the seams of that suffocating system and to produce some very
insightful new observations.
Introduction
The nation of ancient Egypt, which had been so biblically
prominent when Abram came to Canaan (c. 1900 BC), who was then forced to go to
Egypt to survive a famine, and which completely dominated the biblical
landscape during the long years of (Jacob) Joseph and Moses, will fade right
out of the Bible now, for centuries, after the devastating Plagues, with
Pharaoh Neferhotep’s seed destroyed, his army drowned (whether or not he
himself had also died), and the invasion of Egypt and long occupation thereof by
the Hyksos foreigners.
Joseph, but even more so Moses, had turned out to be
quite complicated studies, not because of a lack of evidential material (which certainly
used to be the case for me), but because of an excess of it, their long lives
spanning, as they did, conventional Egyptian kingdoms and dynasties.
Thus it has taken an extended time for us to extricate
ourselves from the land of Egypt, so as to follow the path of the MBI Israelites
as they trek towards the Promised Land.
Indeed, Moses would learn that it was easier to take the
Israelites out of the heart of Egypt than it was to take the hearts of Israel
out of Egypt.
Anyway, here are we now standing on dry, if rather rocky
and barren (moonscape) ground, ready to trace the Exodus Israelites
archaeologically, to the Holy Mountain, and through the desert into
Transjordania, and then across the River Jordan into the Promised Land.
There, the Israelites led by Joshua (Moses since having
departed) will wreak havoc upon many of the old Canaanite cities and dwellings –
a fact that ought to make the archaeology of it all very easy and obvious to
pinpoint.
And so it is.
Unfortunately, however, a terrible mis-dating of the
history and the archaeology of the Promised Land by the ‘experts’ has led to
conclusions that can be described only as diabolical, sowing complete and utter
confusion, and causing many people to doubt the historicity of the Old
Testament.
Our American archaeologist and the French Dominican had a
leading part to play in this.
Professor Foxwell Albright and
Fr. Louis-Hugues Vincent (OP)
William Foxwell Albright
A famous name for his authentication of the Dead Sea
Scrolls, he can be a most fascinating
study.
Although a conventional scholar, schooled in a system of
chronology and archaeology that disallows its exponents from being able to
demonstrate the historicity of the Bible – and imbued also with the erroneous,
pre-archaeological JEDP Documentary Theory – professor Albright yet had the
ability occasionally to burst through the seams of that suffocating
system and to produce some very insightful new observations.
This
may be explained partly as being due to his conservative Christian upbringing
(Evangelist Methodist), according to which he was taught to revere the Bible as
the Word of God.
And so
we get some inspiring statements by W.F. Albright, which will turn out to be
quite ironic given the damage that he also managed to do to biblical
archaeology.
One
outstanding example of W. F. Albright’s upsetting of the pattern of early
dynastic history was his groundbreaking view – relevant to Abram – that Egypt’s
first dynastic ruler, the famous Menes (traditionally thought to have been the
Pharaoh of Abram), was conquered by the mighty Akkadian king, Naram-Sin.
Why
this is so bold and striking for a conventional scholar is that, whereas
Naram-Sin
is
considered to have reigned in the 2200’s BC, the reign of Menes is regarded as
being the very beginning of Egyptian dynastic history, fixed at c. 3100 BC.
Yet
here was W.F. Albright insisting that the Mannu dannu, Menes ‘the Great’,
whom Naram-Sin claimed to have conquered, was the Menes typically dated nearly
a millennium earlier: Menes and Narâm-Sin | Semantic Scholar
“… In
a Babylonian chronicle … we read '(Naram-Sin) who went to Magan, and vanquished
(not 'captured') [Mannu, the mighty], king of Magan'.”
This was
most radical, indeed!
As an
event contemporaneous with Abram – Menes being his Pharaoh and Naram-Sin being
his northern contemporary, “Amraphel of Shinar” (Genesis 14:1) – the whole
package needs to be re-dated even lower, to c. 1900 BC.
Now, this
is only one example (albeit the most dramatic one) amongst several that I could
give of Foxwell Albright’s uncanny ability (the Fox) to think outside the box.
Anyway,
I had just completed an article listing the insights of W.F. Albright, more
recently revised as:
William Foxwell Albright a conventional fox with insight ‘outside the
box’
(2)
William Foxwell Albright a conventional fox with insight 'outside the box'
when a
fellow-Australian, an archaeologist, dampened my enthusiasm about him with this
e-mail. She wrote:
….
Hi Damien. I
am just coming up to the Balaam material in my thesis-writing, so this is
welcome. I have had my sympathy for Albright considerably reduced, however, to
find he was among those present at the secret meeting in Jerusalem in 1922 that
'fixed' the wrong dates to the archaeological eras ... Fr Pere Vincent's
initiative, but Albright was complicit. ….
The Australian archaeologist has since corrected the original
description, “secret meeting in Jerusalem”, by clarifying that it was
not actually “secret”.
Mathilde
Sigalas will recount how W. F. Albright came to be in Jerusalem in 1922, there
connecting with “a French scholar from the École biblique, Father Louis-Hugues
Vincent”: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-55540-5_10
Between Diplomacy
and Science: British Mandate Palestine and Its International Network of
Archaeological Organisations, 1918–1938
….
The collaboration was also effective in terms of
archaeological methodology at the beginning of the 1920s. The Presidents of the
BSAJ, John Garstang (1920–1926), and of ASOR, William F. Albright
(1920–1929/1933–1936), joined by a French scholar from the École biblique,
Father Louis-Hugues Vincent, reflected together on a new dating method to
classify antiquities. … This classification was designated as that of the
“Three Ages” … dating of the Bronze Age, Iron Age and Modern period was
modified to adapt to recent discoveries and ethnographic information on
Palestine. The three scholars submitted their method to the scientific
community during meetings of the POS. Adopted in 1922, the classification was
implemented in archaeological sites for antiquities registration and analysis.
The political context was also a reason for the policy, in an attempt to avoid
subjective interpretations in favour of a particular civilisation.
This classification is an example of the effects of
international collaboration within a foreign intellectual knowledge network,
which developed in Jerusalem at the beginning of the 1920s.
The three scholars were from “the three archaeological
Schools in Jerusalem” … and two were on the Board of Directors of the
Palestine Oriental Society in 1922, Albright as President and Garstang as
Director. The “New Chronological Classification of Palestinian Archaeology” was
published in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (no.
7. October 1922) and the Revue Biblique (vol. 32. 1923) of the
EBAF. This example demonstrates the openness of the scientific community based
in Palestine and the shared aim of anchoring Palestinian archaeology as a
scientific and formal discipline. ….
[End of quote]
Fr. Louis-Hugues Vincent (OP)
He and W. F. Albright were
apparently very close, with the latter dedicating an article as a eulogy (1961)
to the French Dominican, “In Memory of Louis Hugues Vincent”, after he had died
aged 88: In Memory of Louis Hugues Vincent
on JSTOR
“To
every generation and to every field there is given a man who is justly revered
by his contemporaries and disciples. Pére L. H. Vincent, O.P., was such a man.
In him were uniquely combined genius and industry, charm and humility,
enthusiasm and balance. But for his tremendous contributions as scholar and as
teacher, Palestinian archaeology could never have attained its present status
among fields of antiquarian research”.
According
to another article:
The connections to France - Graham
Addison's Author Website
Father or Pere
Vincent was a Dominican monk who had joined the order as a young man.
Vincent came to the Ecole Biblique et Archaeologique in Jerusalem in 1891 and
dedicated the rest of his long life to archaeological study in the Holy Land.
He was a widely respected scholar and expert. In an obituary, the monk was
described as combining ‘genius, industry, charm and humility, enthusiasm and
balance’ in his work as a scholar and teacher.
…
Vincent brought
his unrivalled knowledge of Jerusalem, gained over many decades, to his work.
Professor Kathleen Kenyon said Father Vincent’s work in remapping the tunnels
and shafts helped salvage a very unsatisfactory enterprise. She said Vincent
was small, charming and elegant, but anyone who ‘disagreed with him came in for
a terrific pounding, though always couched in the most polite terms.’ The plans
he produced of the tunnels formed the basis of all archaeological work in these
places for the next century. ….
[End of quote]
Herschel
Shanks (1987) will add a further touch of colour and bite:
The Jerusalem Wall That Shouldn’t Be There
- The BAS Library
“A Touch of Vehemence”—Père Vincent’s
Passionate Rejection of the Third Wall
Father Louis-Hugues Vincent (1872–1960),
head of Jerusalem’s famed École Biblique et Archéologique Française, with
somewhat unscholarly aggression rejected the “Third Wall” hypothesis.
In the words of Israeli archaeologist
Michael Avi Yonah … “The revered master [Vincent] unfortunately introduced
into the debate [about the wall] a touch of vehemence. … One may even suspect
that the force of his assertions in fact concealed a certain lack of confidence
in them. No stick was too bad to belabour his opponents. Newspapers and
weeklies which had nothing to do with the world of learning are quoted [by
Vincent] at length; his adversaries and their opinions are described in terms
which at the same time arouse our doubts about his scholarly impartiality and
our admiration for his extensive vocabulary. Even the descriptions of the
remains discovered, usually a tedious and dry-as-dust subject, are coloured by
the same fervid style. …
The line rejected by P[ère] Vincent is
nor a ‘normal’ wall—it becomes a Dracula-type ‘phantom rampart,’ a ‘moving
rampart.’”
The debate on the Third Wall, says
Avi-Yonah, “has suffered ever since” from the vehemence of Father Vincent’s
critique. ….
Consequences
Thanks
to the likes of Père Vincent and W.F. Albright, the Early Bronze III city of
Jerich0 that fell to Joshua and his Israelite forces (c. 1450 BC), has been
back-dated by a millennium (c. 2400-2300 BC), so that now historians and
archaeologists must consider it to be far too early to accord with the biblical
account.
Joshua
and his Conquest of Canaan are now to be viewed only as “a mirage”, a pious
story based on a real historical event that had occurred about a millennium
earlier.
A
Proto-Joshuan event, if you like – some have admitted this, whilst refusing to
accept a real historical Joshua.
So, in
this case, and unlike the millennium shift forwards with Menes and Naram-Sin,
W.F. Albright has shifted the dating backwards by a millennium, he and Père
Vincent, with the most disastrous consequences for the historicity of the
Bible.
