William Foxwell Albright --

[Brianroy]

Avraham Biran on W.F. Albright:

"Albright had just been made Chairman of the Department of Oriental Studies...Albright was a towering figure.  He knew so much that it was our total despair.

He made us take courses which I think to this day are utterly impossible; you couldn't study all that and know it all.

He taught us cuneiform.  He taught us hieroglyphics.    There was a professor of Sanskrit at John Hopkins, a professor Dumont, and Dumont didn't have any students, so Albright said to us, 'You take Sanskrit.'

When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and the Jewish professors felt they were going to be expelled, Albright extended an invitation to Professor Emil Forrer, who was a great authority on Hittite.  So Forrer came to John Hopkins and we took Hittite.

It was ridiculous.  Albright knew all these languages -- he was amazing.  He was a genius, and we were just simple human beings. He was a fantastic teacher."

The recollections and testimony of Avraham Biran, in his own words.

From B.A.R. Sep/Oct 1999   Vol. 25, No. 5 , p. 36
"Biran at 90", interview with Hershel Shanks

[Admin1]

From what I've learned of Albright, I fully agree with Biran.

[archaeologist]

i will agree too  but i also know he was wrong on site discoveries many times, which helps us keep him in the proper perspective

[Brianroy]

John Hopkins magazine

APRIL 2000 issue   
Pioneers of Scholarship
· · · · · · · · · · · ·
"The Great Authenticator"By Dale Keiger


" A story about William Foxwell Albright:

There is a 4,000-year-old letter that, until about 10 years ago, virtually every expert on the Bronze Age regarded as a note from one Ishme-Dagan of Ekallatum, in ancient Mesopotamia, to his brother, Yasmakh-Adad.

Ishme-Dagan had recently succeeded his father as king of Mari, a city-state on the banks of the Euphrates, in what is now Syria. The note had helped historians date the reign of the great Hammurabi, king of neighboring Babylonia.

There was much evidence to authenticate the letter. But Albright (PhD '16) , chairman and leading light of the Hopkins "Oriental Seminary" in the first half of the 20th century, had his doubts. Ishme-Dagan's tone in the letter was all wrong, Albright said, insufficiently authoritarian for a new king.

 Also, when speaking of his accession to the throne, the letter's author used the verb erebum; Albright thought the verb should have been wasabum. His scholarly instincts told him that the letter had been misidentified, and he stuck with that position.

Around 1991, 19 years after Albright's death, experts reconsidered the letters and determined that, sure enough, the Hopkins scholar's hunch had been right. The letter was not written by Ishme-Dagan, but by Ishme-Addu, the ruler of another city-state.

The letter could not be used to date Hammurabi. Writing about Albright in Biblical Archaeologist, scholar Jack M. Sasson said, "One cannot but envy an intellect so experienced that it could just sense the unlikely."

William Albright published a great deal, more than 800 books, pamphlets, and articles. But he came to the public's attention mostly as an authenticator. In 1948, he confirmed the authenticity of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were a thousand years older than any previously known Hebrew texts. Interesting work for a man with bad eyes.

Born in Chile to Methodist missionaries, Albright said that he didn't play much with the other kids because he couldn't see well enough to hit a ball. Furthermore, he was a foreigner and a Methodist in a Catholic country. His refuge was his father's library, where he read extensively from an early age. His subjects of choice were history and theology, especially R. W. Rogers's History of Babylonia and Assyria. He came to Hopkins as a student in 1913 to work under Paul Haupt, one of the major "Orientalists" of that time, as scholars of the Near East were known. He earned his PhD and set to work in a career that would eventually encompass Semitic philology, archaeology, and ancient languages. After a decade of work in Jerusalem, Albright returned to Hopkins in 1929 and taught there for nearly 30 years. According to legend, as a teacher he would walk into the room, ask what was the class, then begin to teach accordingly. That may well be apocryphal, but it's a good story.

What is not apocryphal is Albright's radical reorientation of biblical studies. Prior to him, a scholar didn't critically appraise the Bible--it was simply Gospel. Albright never renounced the Christian interpretation of the text, but he did maintain that it could and ought to be studied in its historical context as a historical document. In 1940, he published his seminal work, From the Stone Age to Christianity: Monotheism and the Historical Process, firmly placing the Bible in its historical and geographic nexus.

In 1947, two boys were tending sheep near Qumran, by the Dead Sea. One of them, Muhammed ed-Dib, did what bored boys do the world over. He picked up a rock and threw it, at an opening in the cliff face. He heard something shatter. Later, the boys worked up the nerve to investigate what he'd broken, and found a trove of elongated jars. Inside the jars were scrolls.

A year later, Albright received an envelope postmarked Jerusalem. Inside was a pair of small photographs. He took up a magnifier and studied the images, which were of fragments of the scrolls found by the boys. He recognized a passage from the book of Isaiah, rendered in an archaic Hebrew script, and grew excited. In a letter to John C. Trever, who had sent the photos from the American School of Oriental Research, he said, "...I should prefer a date around 100 BC."

For an archaeologist in the 1940s, that date was a thunderbolt. Were Albright correct, that would make the scrolls and other materials recovered from the Qumran cave and other sites in the area a millennium older than any known biblical manuscript. As with the Mari letters, an impressive assemblage of other prominent scholars disagreed with Albright, and their arguments were persuasive. But a dozen years later, after careful examination of coins, pottery, and other artifacts from the site, after more finds that included documents with dates written on them, and after carbon-14 dating of linen recovered at one site, the verdict came down: Albright was right.

He had made the news earlier in 1948 for deciphering a set of mortuary slabs from the Sinai desert, inscribed sandstone discovered near ancient turquoise mines. He had examined 28 distinctive characters and, with characteristic boldness, declared them to be letters of an alphabet, all consonants. Furthermore, he said, several of them still existed, all but unchanged in form, in modern languages.

Were he alive now, Albright surely would be delighted by events last year in the Hopkins Department of Near Eastern Studies. In 1998, an Egyptologist from Yale named John Darnell (MA '86) discovered writing on a rock in a remote part of southern Egypt. When Darnell returned to the States, he brought photographs of the rock to Frederick Dobbs Allsopp, another alumnus (PhD '92) also now at Yale. Dobbs-Allsopp thought he was looking at an example of alphabetic writing much older than anything previously discovered. So he contacted Hopkins professor Kyle McCarter, an expert on ancient alphabets. Last November, McCarter concluded that the inscription pushes back the origins of the alphabet by at least two centuries, to the 1900s BCE.

McCarter's position at Hopkins? He holds the William Foxwell Albright Chair in Near Eastern Studies."

John Hopkins magazine  -- 
APRIL 2000 issue   
Pioneers of Scholarship
· · · · · · · · · · · ·
"The Great Authenticator"By Dale Keiger

[Admin1]

i will agree too  but i also know he was wrong on site discoveries many times, which helps us keep him in the proper perspective

Certainly agreed.  So much has been learned since him...but thanks is due him for starting it all off.

[archaeologist]

i am not diminishing the man's work or contribution i just want to keep it focused so he is not idolized and given god-like status.  i think his shadow will loom over the field forever but...he was still human.

[Brianroy]

I, too, do not wish to deify the man.

 For many years, B.A.R. had treated Albright like a pariah.  With the kindly words of Biran, I saw that mood and attitude realter itself.

The papers, notes, some unpublished material, etc.,  of Albright's estate were loaned out to the Harvard University Library...and accessible, under the right conditions and permissions.


It is my view that we have let ourselves fall away from first hand investigation, first hand knowledge of checking and interpreting documents - manuscripts - inscriptions - artifacts, and first hand checking of sources.

Albright was a pioneer in his field.  As the John Hopkins article says, one of Albright's gifts was that he could be a great "authenticator".   The level of his expertise, in spite of all these post-Albright computers and sharing of knowledge we have on levels light years fater than in Albright's time -- as far as I know, even wih these toys -- a like intellect as Albright has been unmatched in our own generation.   

It doesn't have to be that way.

Perhaps the greatest hindrance we have, is the molding of minds in the Universities to a liberal anti-G-D skepticism that drives young scholars in the making to doubt everything, and become raving (sometimes drunken)  lunatics bent on religiously quoting other flawed liberals -- as if they were  themselves the very dark reflection of someone they would call a wild-eyed  fanatic, who religiously quoted Paul,  Rashi,  Moses, or Jesus. 

In other words, now moreso than ever, the call is to attend University to "learn history"... but  to, de facto, walk into clasrooms of anti-priests stumping conversion to the anti-religion religion,  suppressing any view that allows Christianity any view of rationality and legitimacy.  You are basically told to  pay your 12-20k a year, sit down and shut up.   You are here to be brain-washed and indoctrinated...and you are not here "to learn", except that which we indoctrinate you with..."you are here to absorb."    What history you do absorb, will have to apply an  anti-G-D slant to it, or expect to be "failed" for attending the course.

In Albright's case, the love was in the learning...history as it was, not in some anti-this or anti-that G-Dless view of how they want to reshape world history by an Orwellian rewrite (which Orwell borrowed from H.G. Wells). 

Albright didn't tell his Jewish students to disavow their faith in G-D...but modern scholarship pressures for precisely that.  Modern scholarship will  even go further, and demand Jews disavow their very identity as Jews.  Deny there was an Exodus.  Deny Moses.  Deny David.

  Or if they are Christian: deny Jesus, and deny a cohesive coherent organized faith for centuries.    The third century, says one "Princeton" scholar..."had no organized Church" ... until some wild-eyed / wild-haired lunatic in the 240s A.D.  -- or words to this effect (as he states and promotes illiterately in  BAR's own book: Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism).

We need to get back to a love of history and research...not very poor anti-G-D or anti-Christian agendas hocked off as "a neo-truth", but really as if they were bad Vaudeville Acts.

Because, with each retelling, they are then promoted as if something that bettered with each retelling of that same very bad act / thesis they performed.   In this, we don't attack the person, but the bad hypothesis or bad thesis /  bad act they promote. 

 In regard to such an Orwellian/H.G. Wells rewrite of History, it is up to BAR to print retractions of that which they publish in their own books, offering self-criticism of bad theories well accepted, or to throw out the hook and say..."that's enough"..."we promoted a bad act, and own up to it."   Or something to that effect. 

Not only is Albright's brilliance missed...but his honesty, and willingness to accept the Bible as often a genuine historical record, validated time and again in archaeology.   The man was far from perfect...but his absence in the field of Biblical Scholarship is sorely missed.


Those are my personal opinions, observations, and feelings on the matter.   -- Brianroy
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Perhaps someone would like to do a thread on Yigael Yadin, or other prominent excavators? 

[archaeologist]

i agree with basically everything you said in that last post of yours, i just err on the side of caution.

does any one have a list of good albright books,  my profesors did not use any of his in their classes and i have yet to purchase any so if you would be so kind to recommend some i would appreciate it.

[archaeologist]

i hope this forum isn't like the others where i ask something and it gets ignored.  i do not have lots of time to read and need a short list of definitive books to make sure i read the right ones tobegin with.

[Brianroy]

The best place you will go to read his various works is where you will have to invest a bit of time...a University Library.   The best selection in one place is found at Harvard

Albright, William Foxwell. Collected Papers, 1916-1972.

and such works are simply not readily available the general public.   I am uncertain as to what is available through the Public Library System, where even that of Presidential Libraries and Universities of the public sector are made available for order.

As an out of date author, you may have to make a choice to gather what few books, etc., you can over the course of many years in various old bookstores.   

On-line, you will find some rare finds, but are still limited to a small selection:

Antiquarian books, used books, out of print books: Antiqbook

Be sure that purchases are English copies: not Polish, Spanish, German, Japanese, Hebrew, or any other language unless you can read them.


JBL = Journal of Biblical Literature
BASOR = Bulletin of the American Society of Oriental Research
JAOS = Journal of the American Oriental Society
HTR = Harvard Theological Review.
will all have articles written by Albright, and may or may not have his articles  as part of their back-order systems.  Purchase of these articles is not absolute, but the Harvard link shows in a means of tracking down such articles.  Expect to dole out a bit of cash as part of research and learning if you wish to go this route.  You invest as a collector and in yourself, should you choose to pursue the study.

But to offer a "short definitive list"  for someone who hasn't the time, is not practical.  The list of what is available for purchase is already short...and should you choose the search for Albright, the journey will be one requiring time...where a half day or more spent at a well-stocked private or public University would be but a brief moment, and the experience self explanatory, as you pull his works off the shelf, and see for yourself.  You may not be able to check certain works out, and find yourself writing pages and pages of notes...exercising patience and joy in the knowledge.  Or, maybe such details simply may have no appeal or interest until years from now, when you think back to what you thumbed through and are ready then.

We all have differing takes on what makes history interesting and exciting...and usually it is that preparatorial knowledge base which precedes the material, that helps us unlock what knowledge was closed to us otherwise. 

So I guess there are no longer any "right ones" but those you can get your hands on.   If you get "Stone Age to Christianity" or " Archaeology and the Religion of Israel" or  " The Biblical Period from Abraham to Ezra " or any of his works...you are building on a desire for the same kind of  knowledge after the title you are able to get.


And by the by...you aren't being ignored...I kinda figured that you'd eventually Google "William Foxwell Albright" and see for yourself. 

At any rate, I hope the info helps.

Peace.

[archaeologist]

SIGH!!!!

i asked for book titles not where to go look, i already know all that, i needed recommendations of whichbooks.

also it is amazing the amount of assuming that goes on.  i never mentioned i lived in north america, which i don't and getting books in english is very difficult which is another reason why i needed ashort list, shipping books is not cheap.

also, it is amazing how people do not read posts and ramble on about something that was not asked about nor mentioned.

[archaeologist]

i looked up albright at amazon and received pages upon pages of book titles credited to him.  again i ask does anyone have a short list of good books by him they could recommend?

[Brianroy]

http://www.case.edu/affil/GAIR/papers/96papers/Constructs/long/Blong.htm


Although written by those who are NOT Christian, and skeptical so as to equate any "Faith" with "myth", the above link is one of many intersesting  biopics on Albright.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



http://ancientneareast.tripod.com/PDF/BeitMirsim.pdf

One pdf. on the web that is available, is an article by W.F.  Albright on Tell Beit Mirsim. 

This site was addressed in later years in his book "From Stone Age to Christianity" by W.F. Albright.

You may wish to note that this Kirjath-sepher of 2200 B.C. ff. had heavy doors as did Lot, where a scribe living 1300 years later would have perhaps had curtains instead of heavy doors, and have been oblivious to falsify this minute detail in the history of Sodom and Lot's family etc. in Genesis. 

Hence, archaeology assists in the vindication of the Bible's own  Literary History as accurate and untainted, while also dismissing the ludicrous "late composition" claims.  Since this is a "Biblical" Archaeology Forum...such a view is appropriate and valid. 

In my last posting above, I list 3 of Albright's  books as recommended reading, still available:  "Stone Age to Christianity"
                 " Archaeology and the Religion of Israel"
                  "The Biblical Period from Abraham to Ezra "

Peace.

[turanclancath]

Thank you Brian .

Great informative links you posted about Albright.

Have a good day .

turanclancath:)

Publications of the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research

Albright Website and last item annual newsletters with much information

[turanclancath]

The topic about  Arcaelogists Scholars etc is very stimulating exellent bravo !!!!


After reading it i went to my library ( all floors in our house and looked in the bible/ancient archaelogy /holy land   shelves.

i discovered i have paperback translations in Dutch of  William Albright, Kathlyn Kenyon and Cyrus Gordon.

So this topic is a great stimulus for me to re read them again.


Now i,m reading books of Cyrus H Gordon it pleases me much and I think i stand with him( he is in the believing sector .)He is believing but very open minded and in the middle not to extreme.
And a great Scientist and Scholar.Everywere respected also by disagreaing Academics.

Of course some of his theorys ( Nuzi tablets for instance ) are outdated now .
But he was a great Biblical Scholar  so I can recommend his writings.
I will post a link about him .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_H._Gordon




weekend started here 5 pm  Friday its now  here in Holland so Le CHAIM
with my first but not last glass  of Red Wine

turanclancath( aka Don Turan )