The Dean of Biblical Archeologists

THE LATE William Foxwell Albright, in his latter years often called the Dean of Biblical Archeologists, led a tremendously productive life. His lifetime bibliography includes about 1,100 items, from small notes and review articles to long, technical articles on ancient history, chronology, archeology, and linguistics, to major programmatic books, and volumes on his archeological excavations, as at Gibeah of Saul and Tell Beit Mirsim.

Born May 24, 1891, of Methodist missionary parents in Coquimbo, Chile, he early acquired two physical handicaps: very weak, myopic eyes, perhaps from a typhoid attack before the age of 3 (but after he had learned to read), and a crippled and almost useless left hand, from being caught in a pulley in farm machinery on his grand mother's Iowa farm while there with his parents on furlough at the age of 5.

Since he could not engage in active sports because of these handicaps, he turned inward and read voraciously in his father's library, which contained mainly books on history and theology. By the age of 11 William knew what he wanted as his career: he longed in tensely to go to Palestine and carry on archeological excavations. In the preceding year he had been able to purchase for $5 the two newly published volumes of History of Babylonia and Assyria, by Prof. R. W. Rogers, of Drew University. He feared, however, that by the time he reached Palestine, if he ever did, there would be nothing left to discover!

The Albright family's yearly income probably never reached more than $400; therefore, William had to work his way through college in Iowa after they returned to the United States. There followed a year's painful teaching experience as principal of the ten-grade school in Menno, then a Ger man-speaking town on the prairie of southeastern South Dakota. That spring William, who had already taught him self Biblical Hebrew and Assyrian (cuneiform), received a $500 scholar ship from Prof. Paul Haupt to attend the Oriental Seminary in Johns Hopkins University the academic year of 1913-1914.

Haupt had never before granted the scholarship to anyone not already a successful student in his department. But Albright sent along with his application a proof of a short article of his, in English, which soon appeared in a scholarly journal in Germany. In it he discussed the meaning of a difficult word in the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh Epic, on which Haupt was an authority. He had discovered that dallalu, as used in context, probably meant the night-flying creature, the bat. Haupt was impressed by the young fellow out in the hinterland who had already taught himself these two ancient languages, and he later took credit for having recognized Albright's outstanding potential from the first.

William's parents, in their home school in Chile, during his first 12 years gave him a solid foundation of learning, including history, geography, mathematics, and Latin; he learned German from a Danish sailor who lived with the family for a time.

Under Haupt, Albright became extremely higher critical. While studying at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, he freed himself from the rigid, fundamentalist opinions of his parents and began publishing articles in the Haupt style on mythology in the ancient cuneiform epics, comparing them with the Genesis stories. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1916, he became an instructor in the department at Hopkins and continued research and publishing until, at the end of 1919, he was able to use the Thayer Fellowship he had won by an arduous three-day written examination several years earlier. Thus he was able at last to see his dream of going to Palestine come true.

In Palestine

At first he was a Fellow in the American School of Oriental Research, then became acting director for a year. Ruth Norton, a new" graduate of Hopkins, with a Ph.D. in Sanskrit, and her mother came to Jerusalem, and Ruth and William were married at the end of August, 1921. He had just been appointed director of the school in Jerusalem.

Albright began by studying Modern Hebrew and Modern Arabic. Then he began making trips by foot or by horse back or train all over western Pales tine and into Transjordan, taking the few students of the school on annual autumn and spring trips, before and after the heavy winter rains. They studied topography, fixing the sites of many Biblical places that were unknown or uncertain, and developing facility in dating the occupation periods of the mounds or tells by pottery sherds they found on the tops and slopes. Sir Flinders Petrie had begun this method of dating sites by the changing styles of pottery, and Pere Vincent, of the French archeological school in Jerusalem, helped Albright learn the system until he surpassed his mentors in skill. His own excavations at Tell Beit Mirsim established pottery chronology for Palestine.

These first years in the Bible lands produced a great change in his thinking and led him to abandon his mythological studies. The Bible became real to him, a book of factual, historical, real, places and people. He joined Gustav Dalman, Albrecht Alt, and others in identifying Biblical sites and writing topographical as well as linguistic and other studies.

In THE MINISTRY of February, 1973, Siegfried Horn, in his article, "Quotations From Prof. W. F. Albright's Writings," presented a number of statements made by Albright in later years, giving evidence of the changes in his views of Biblical questions. His whole life was a quest for truth; because he was seeking truth and not merely trying to justify an ego position, he could change his views when evidence came from others or from his own work that necessitated modifications of already published opinions. Some less flexible scholars charged it against him as a weakness that he was "always changing his mind." But as one of his out standing students, Prof. Frank M. Cross, Jr., said, "Those who make such criticisms should note that his changes of mind regularly follow the introduction of new data or new arguments. Such changeableness is marvelous, a mark of genius." *

In 1929 the Albrights returned from Jerusalem to Johns Hopkins. There he became successor to Haupt as chair man of the Oriental Seminary (now the Department of Near Eastern Studies), and continued so until his retirement in 1958. From 1931 to 1968 he also edited the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, which had been started just as he arrived in Palestine and in which his fascinating, semi-popular accounts of his study tours and researches were published through the 1920's. Until 1935 he spent half of each year on further excavation work in Palestine, and later in Sinai and South Arabia.

In 1953, 1957, and 1969 he made increasingly triumphal return visits on which he was taken to see Israeli archeological excavations and delivered major addresses to huge audiences, often in good but now somewhat archaic Modern Hebrew.

"Mr. Dead Sea Scrolls"

Albright is perhaps best known as the first American scholar to recognize the authenticity and value of the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls. The way had been paved for that recognition by his studies in the middle 1930's and publication on the dating of the second century B.C. Nash Papyrus from Egypt. In his lectures to many church and school groups from 1948 on, he discussed the Dead Sea scrolls along with the discovery and decipherment of Ugaritic (bringing to light ancient Canaanite literature) and later the Nag Hammadi papyrus finds, as the most important discoveries bearing on Biblical studies.

With his landmark book, in 1940, From the Stone Age to Christianity, and then with Archaeology and the Religion of Israel, in 1942, and Archaeology of Palestine, in 1949, he began reaching a much wider audience than the scholarly circles he had influenced up until then. His books were translated into many languages.

As a teacher, Albright was most stimulating, always willing to help a hard-working student, poor though his background might have been, and pushing his students to begin publication on their own. His students treasure many amusing stories of their famous professor's eccentricities and foibles, naturally including absent-mindedness. He plunged them into the midst of on going studies in their field, driving them faster than they felt able to proceed---in the process losing the weaker ones, but producing outstanding scholars, many of whom now continue one or two facets of their beloved teacher's manifold interests.

In 1950 Albright confessed in a letter to a former student, Prof. David Noel Freedman (with whom he would in a few years become joint editor of the Anchor Bible series), that he felt a great sense of urgency to bring his ideas to a broader audience, for he thought that most religious schools and seminaries were teaching a terrible distortion of Protestantism and Christianity, which resulted in a decline of faith and morality.

A chapter Albright had written for a volume on the history of Judaism was enlarged and published separately as The Biblical Period From Abraham to Ezra (in 1963 appearing as an Anchor paperback). This sets forth his mature views on the subject, showing him as standing in the middle, neither with liberals as he had been at first before 1920, nor with fundamentalists. His writings and lifework helped turn Biblical studies away from Wellhausenism and extreme liberalism back to Biblical Christianity, demonstrating the historical reliability of the Bible.

Recognition of Accomplishments

During his 80 years Albright received many outstanding awards in recognition of his accomplishments: thirty honorary doctorates from colleges and universities in the United States and overseas, bronze and gold medals, several Festschriften, and a few large cash awards that helped finance his secretarial and research assistance, for which he himself always had to pay. In a letter from Sweden in 1952, during one of his foreign lecture tours, in which he was presented to the king and received an honorary doctor ate in Uppsala, he wrote to his close friend from Iowa college days, Samuel Wood Geiser, that through life he had collected a wide variety of friends, though himself not fitting into any one category. He remarked that he considered his life was largely formed by overcompensation for the physical handicaps that had come in his early years. Without them he thought he would, as most young men, have scattered his energies and thus not accomplished very much. His collection of academic honors meant to him mainly greater opportunities to bring forward his views and help bring Christianity back from extreme positions.

In 1964 his book History, Archaeology and Christian Humanism (McGraw-Hill) appeared, containing, contrary to his usual practice, some updated articles and addresses that reveal his philosophy, and a brief autobiographical sketch. His last book, Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan—the publication of his Jordan Lecture series in London in 1965---appeared in England and America simultaneously in 1968, presenting the ripened fruits of years of study. He left much unpublished, unfinished material.

Changed With New Evidence

In 1965 a doctoral candidate at New York University, Stanley Eugene Hardwick, received his degree with a dissertation entitled "Change and Constancy in William Foxwell Albright's Treatment of Early Old Testament His tory and Religion, 1918-1958." He sent a copy to Albright, who was quite be mused by it and surprised to find how much he really had changed his views over the years. In the abstract of the dissertation the author stated:

"William Foxwell Albright is internationally known as perhaps the fore most Orientalist of the twentieth century. In his voluminous writings he has devoted much attention to Old Testament traditions concerning the period of Israel's history from Hebrew beginnings to the institutions of the monarchy. The span of Albright's scholarly career has coincided with the great period of advancement in scientific archaeological activity in Palestine and adjacent lands. In the light of the newly-discovered data Albright has repeatedly modified his interpretation of Biblical traditions. . . .

"The principal general finding was that throughout his career Albright becomes increasingly conservative in his treatment of early Old Testament history and religion. The greatest number and most decisive changes toward a more conservative point of view come in about the first decade of his writing career (1918-1928). But each of the other three decades involved is also marked by significant alterations toward a more conservative interpretative position.

"This does not mean that Albright becomes increasingly conservative in his theological views (although this is at least true of the first part of his career). Nor does it mean that he returns to the kind of Biblical interpretation characteristic of Jewish or Christian orthodoxy. Even as of 1958 he stands between right-wing conservative scholars and so-called radical scholars.

"The relationship between Albright's development, as thus delineated, and the development of Old Testament studies is not merely incidental. Substantial reasons exist for believing that Albright's development and its reflection in his writings have been influential in bringing about a more conservative outlook on many questions in Old Testament scholarship."

The Albright Institute

One of the most gratifying recognitions came to Albright early in 1970 while Freedman was director of the school in Jerusalem. The American School of Oriental Research, the buildings of which the Albrights had constructed in the mid-1920's, was re named the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research.

In Who's Who Albright identified himself as an Orientalist. His death on September 19, 1971, deprived the world of scholarship and the world of religion of a giant, surely one of the greatest intellects and geniuses of the twentieth century. His boyhood ambition had been to be a scholar, and live in an attic. The fulfillment of the first part did not necessitate the actualization of the second, although he never lost the thrifty, frugal habits of his penurious early years. He rests from his labors, but his works indeed follow him, continuing to influence scholar ship and to bless the world.