William F. Albright

William Foxwell Albright (May 24, 1891– September 19, 1971) was an American archaeologist, biblical scholar, philologist, and expert on ceramics. He is considered "one of the twentieth century's most influential American biblical scholars", having become known to the public in 1948 for his role in the authentication of the Dead Sea Scrolls. His scholarly reputation arose as a leading theorist and practitioner of biblical archaeology.

William F. Albright
Albright in 1957
Born	(1891-05-24)May 24, 1891 Coquimbo, Chile
Died	September 19, 1971(1971-09-19) (aged 80) Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.
Nationality	American
Academic background
Education	Upper Iowa University Johns Hopkins University
Thesis	The Assyrian Deluge Epic (1916)
Doctoral advisor	Paul Haupt
Influences	Louis-Hugues Vincent
Academic work
Discipline	Archaeology biblical studies
Sub-discipline	Biblical archaeology
School or tradition	Biblical archaeology
Doctoral students	Francis Andersen Avraham Biran John Bright Raymond E. Brown Frank Moore Cross Mitchell Dahood Joseph Fitzmyer David Noel Freedman William L. Moran Abraham Sachs Merrill Unger G. Ernest Wright
Notable students	Harry Orlinsky
Influenced	Ruth Amiran Nelson Glueck Nancy Lapp Jacob M. Myers

Albright was a leading theorist and practitioner of biblical archaeology, and is regarded as the founder of the biblical archaeology movement. He served as the W. W. Spence Professor of Semitic Languages at Johns Hopkins University from 1930 to 1958 and was the Director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem for several terms between 1922 and 1936. Albright made significant contributions to the fields of Near Eastern studies, biblical archaeology, and ceramic typology, and his work has had a lasting impact on the understanding of ancient Near Eastern history and the historicity of the Bible.

Biography

Albright was born on May 24, 1891, in Coquimbo, Chile, the eldest of six children of the American Evangelical Methodist missionaries Wilbur Finley Albright and Cornish-American Zephine Viola Foxwell. Albright was an alumnus of Upper Iowa University. He married Ruth Norton (1892–1979) in 1921 and had four sons. He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1916 and accepted a professorship there in 1927. Albright was W. W. Spence Professor of Semitic Languages from 1930 until his retirement in 1958. He was the Director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem from 1922–1929, and 1933–1936, and did important archaeological work at sites in Palestine such as Gibeah (Tell el-Fûl, 1922) and Tell Beit Mirsim (1926, 1928, 1930, and 1932).

Tumulus 2 (Jerusalem), excavated by Albright in 1923. His excavation trench is still visible at the top of the structure.

Albright became known to the public in 1948 for his role in the authentication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but made his scholarly reputation as the leading theorist and practitioner of biblical archaeology, "that branch of archaeology that sheds light upon 'the social and political structure, the religious concepts and practices and other human activities and relationships that are found in the Bible or pertain to peoples mentioned in the Bible." Albright was not, however, a biblical literalist; in his Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan, for example, he argued that Yahwism and ancient Caananite religion had a reciprocal relationship, in which "both gained much in the exchange which set in about the tenth century and continued until the fifth century B.C".

Although primarily a biblical archaeologist, Albright was a polymath who made contributions in almost every field of Near Eastern studies: an example of his range is a 1953 paper, "New Light from Egypt on the Chronology and History of Israel and Judah", in which he established that Egyptian pharaoh Shoshenq I—the Biblical Shishaq—came to power somewhere between 945 and 940 BC.

A prolific author, his works in addition to Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan, include The Archaeology of Palestine: From the Stone Age to Christianity, and The Biblical Period from Abraham to Ezra. He also edited the Anchor Bible volumes on Jeremiah, Matthew, and Revelation.

Throughout his life Albright was honored with awards, honorary doctorates, and medals, and was proclaimed "Yakir Yerushalayim" (Worthy Citizen of Jerusalem)—the first time that title had been awarded to a non-Jew. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1929. He was elected a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1955 and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1956. After his death on September 19, 1971, his legacy continued through the many scholars inspired by his work, who specialized in the fields pioneered by Albright. The American School of Oriental Research, Jerusalem, was renamed the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, in honor of Albright's archeological achievements.

Historical research and hypotheses

From the 1930s until his death, he was the dean of biblical archaeologists and the acknowledged founder of the biblical archaeology movement. Coming from his background in German biblical criticism of the historicity of the biblical accounts, Albright, through his seminal work in archaeology (and his development of the standard pottery typology for Palestine and the Holy Land) concluded that the biblical accounts of Israelite history were, contrary to the dominant German biblical criticism of the day, largely accurate. This area remains widely contested among scholars. Albright's student George Ernest Wright inherited his leadership of the biblical archaeology movement, contributing definitive work at Shechem and Gezer. Albright inspired, trained and worked with the first generation of world-class Israeli archaeologists, who have carried on his work, and maintained his perspective.

Other students such as Joseph Fitzmyer, Frank Moore Cross, Raymond E. Brown, and David Noel Freedman, became international leaders in the study of the Bible and the ancient Near East, including Northwest Semitic epigraphy and paleography. John Bright, Cyrus H. McCormick Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Interpretation at Union Seminary in Richmond (PhD, Johns Hopkins, 1940), went on to become "the first distinguished American historian of the Old Testament" and "arguably the most influential scholar of the Albright school", owing to his "distinctly American commonsense flavor, similar to that of W[illiam] James". Thus Albright and his students influenced a broad swath of American higher education from the 1940s through the 1970s, after which revisionist scholars such as T. L. Thompson, John Van Seters, Niels Peter Lemche, and Philip R. Davies developed and advanced a minimalist critique of Albright's view that archaeology supports the broad outlines of the history of Israel as presented in the Bible. Like other academic polymaths (Edmund Husserl in phenomenology and Max Weber in the fields of sociology and the sociology of religion), Albright created and advanced the discipline of biblical archaeology, which is now taught at universities worldwide and has exponents across national, cultural, and religious lines.

Influence and legacy

Albright's publication in the Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 1932, of his excavations of Tell Beit Mirsim, and descriptions of the Bronze Age and Iron Age layers at the site in 1938 and 1943, marked a major contribution to the dating of sites based on ceramic typologies, which is still in use. "With this work, Albright made Israeli archaeology into a science, instead of what it had formerly been: a digging in which the details are more or less well-described in an indifferent chronological framework which is as general as possible and often wildly wrong".

As editor of the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research from 1931 to 1968, Albright influenced biblical scholarship and Palestinian archaeology. Albright advocated "biblical archaeology" in which the archaeologist's task, according to fellow biblical archaeologist William G. Dever, is "to illuminate, to understand, and, in their greatest excesses, to 'prove' the Bible." Here, Albright's American Methodist upbringing was clearly apparent. He insisted, for example, that "as a whole, the picture in Genesis is historical, and there is no reason to doubt the general accuracy of the biographical details" (i.e., of figures such as Abraham). Similarly he claimed that archaeology had proved the essential historicity of the Book of Exodus, and the conquest of Canaan as described in the Book of Joshua and the Book of Judges.

In the years since his death, Albright's methods and conclusions have been increasingly questioned. In 1993, William G. Dever wrote that:

[Albright's] central theses have all been overturned, partly by further advances in Biblical criticism, but mostly by the continuing archaeological research of younger Americans and Israelis to whom he himself gave encouragement and momentum... The irony is that, in the long run, it will have been the newer 'secular' archaeology that contributed the most to Biblical studies, not 'Biblical archaeology.'

Biblical scholar Thomas L. Thompson wrote that by 2002 the methods of "biblical archaeology" had also become outmoded:

[Wright and Albright's] historical interpretation can make no claim to be objective, proceeding as it does from a methodology which distorts its data by selectivity which is hardly representative, which ignores the enormous lack of data for the history of the early second millennium, and which wilfully establishes hypotheses on the basis of unexamined biblical texts, to be proven by such (for this period) meaningless mathematical criteria as the "balance of probability" ...

Publications

• The Archaeology of Palestine: From the Stone Age to Christianity (1940/rev.1960)
• From the Stone Age to Christianity: Monotheism and the Historical Process, Johns Hopkins Press, 1946
• Views of the Biblical World. Jerusalem: International Publishing Company J-m Ltd, 1959.
• Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan: An Historical Analysis of Two Contrasting Faiths (1968)
• Matthew (with C. S. Mann) in the Anchor Bible series (1971) ISBN 9780385086585
• The Biblical Period from Abraham to Ezra
• Albright, William F. (1923). "Interesting finds in tumuli near Jerusalem". Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. 10 (April): 1–3. doi:10.2307/1354763. JSTOR 1354763. S2CID 163409706.
• Albright, William F. (1953). "New Light from Egypt on the Chronology and History of Israel and Judah". Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. 130 (130): 4–11. doi:10.2307/3219011. JSTOR 3219011. S2CID 163812912.

See also

• Biblical archaeology
• List of artifacts in biblical archaeology
• Views of the Biblical World

References

Bibliography

• Albright, W. F. (1932). "The Fourth Joint Campaign of Excavation at Tell Beit Mirsim". Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (47): 3–17. doi:10.2307/1354857. ISSN 2161-8062. JSTOR 1354857. S2CID 163635123.
•  ———  (1961). "In Memory of Louis Hugues Vincent". Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. 164 (164): 1–4. doi:10.1086/BASOR1355747. ISSN 2161-8062. JSTOR 1355747. S2CID 167012806.
• Dever, William G. (1993). "What Remains of the House that Albright Built?". The Biblical Archaeologist. 56 (1): 25–35. doi:10.2307/3210358. ISSN 0006-0895. JSTOR 3210358. S2CID 166003641.
• Hayes, John H., ed. (1999). "Bright, John". Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation. Vol. 1. Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press.
• Heim, Ralph D. (1973). "Jacob Martin Myers" (PDF). In Bream, Howard N.; Heim, Ralph D.; Moore, Carey A. (eds.). A Light Unto My Path: Old Testament Studies in Honor of Jacob M. Myers. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. pp. xi–xiii. ISBN 978-0-87722-026-8.
• Levy, Thomas E.; Freedman, David Noel (2009). "William Foxwell Albright". Biographical Memoirs. Vol. 91. Washington: National Academy of Sciences. pp. 2–29. ISBN 978-0-309-14560-2. Retrieved June 2, 2020 – via The Bible and Interpretation.
• Lieberman, Stephen J. (1991). "Review of A Scientific Humanist: Studies in Memory of Abraham Sachs, Edited by Erle Leichty, Maria deJ. Ellis, and Pamela Gerardi". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 111 (1): 148–150. doi:10.2307/603771. ISSN 0003-0279. JSTOR 603771.
• Long, Burke O. (1997). Planting and Reaping Albright: Politics, Ideology, and Interpreting the Bible. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 978-0-271-01576-7.
• Meyers, Eric M., ed. (1997). The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East. Vol. 1. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acref/9780195065121.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-506512-1.
• Prag, Kay (1973). "Nelson Glueck (1900–1971): An Appreciation". Levant. 5: vii–ix. doi:10.1179/lev.1973.5.1.v. ISSN 1756-3801.
• Rowse, A. L. (1969). The Cousin Jacks: The Cornish in America. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
• Running, Leona G. (2007). "Albright, William Foxwell (1891–1971)". In McKim, Donald K. (ed.). Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press. pp. 103–107. ISBN 978-0-8308-2927-9.
• Running, Leona G.; Freedman, David Noel (1975). William Foxwell Albright: A Twentieth-Century Genius. New York: Morgan Press. ISBN 978-0-8467-0071-5. Retrieved June 2, 2020.
• Sanders, Seth (2004). "Review of The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (2nd ed.), by Mark S. Smith". Journal of Hebrew Scriptures. 4. ISSN 1203-1542. Archived from the original on November 16, 2019. Retrieved June 2, 2020.
• Sherrard, Brooke (2011). American Biblical Archaeologists and Zionism: The Politics of Historical Ethnography (PhD dissertation). Tallahassee, Florida: Florida State University. Retrieved June 2, 2020.
• Tatum, Lynn (1995). "Review of Recent Archaeological Discoveries and Biblical Research, by William G. Dever". The Jewish Quarterly Review. 85 (3/4): 464–466. doi:10.2307/1454746. ISSN 1553-0604. JSTOR 1454746.
• Thiollet, Jean-Pierre (2005). "William Foxwell Albright". Je m'appelle Byblos (in French). Éditions H & D.
• Thompson, Thomas L. (2002). The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham (2nd ed.). Valley Forge, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press International. ISBN 978-1-56338-389-2.

Further reading

• Davis, Thomas W. (2004). Shifting Sands: The Rise and Fall of Biblical Archaeology. New York: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0195167104.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-516710-8.
• Elliott, Mark (2002). Biblical Interpretation Using Archeological Evidence, 1900–1930. Lewiston, New York: E. Mellen Press. ISBN 978-0-7734-7146-7.
• Finkelstein, Israel; Silberman, Neil Asher (2001). The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. New York: Free Press. ISBN 978-0-684-86912-4.
• Grena, G. M. (2004). LMLK: A Mystery Belonging to the King. Vol. 1. Redondo Beach, California: 4000 Years of Writing History. ISBN 978-0-9748786-0-7.
• Feinman, Peter D. (2004). William Foxwell Albright and the Origins of Biblical Archaeology. Berrien Springs, Michigan: Andrews University Press. ISBN 978-1-883925-40-6.
• Freedman, David Noel; MacDonald, Robert B.; Mattson, Daniel L. (1975). The Published Works of William Foxwell Albright: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Cambridge, Massachusetts: American Schools of Oriental Research. OCLC 1283778.
• Machinist, Peter. "William Foxwell Albright: the man and his work." In The Study of the Ancient Near East in the 21st Century: the William Foxwell Albright Centennial Conference, pp. 385-403. Winona Lake, In: Eisenbrauns, 1996.
• Van Beek, Gus W., ed. (1989). The Scholarship of William Foxwell Albright: An Appraisal. Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press. doi:10.1163/9789004369504. ISBN 978-1-55540-314-0.
• Van Beek, Gus W. "William Foxwell Albright: A Short Biography." In The Scholarship of William Foxwell Albright: An Appraisal, pp. 7-15. Brill, 1989.

External links

• Archaeology and the Hebrew patriarchs
• Archaeology and the prophets of Israel
• Light from archaeology on oral and written literature
• National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir
• Official AIAR website
• Question and answer session with William F. Albright after his lecture, Archaeology and the Hebrew patriarchs
• William Foxwell Albright, in Historical Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters