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. |
| Academic background | |
| Education | |
| Thesis | The Assyrian Deluge Epic[1] (1916) |
| Doctoral advisor | Paul Haupt[2] |
| Influences | Louis-Hugues Vincent[3] |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | |
| Sub-discipline | Biblical archaeology |
| School or tradition | Biblical archaeology |
| Doctoral students | |
| Notable students | Harry Orlinsky[12] |
| Influenced | |
William Foxwell Albright (May 24, 1891 – September 19, 1971) was an Americanarchaeologist,biblical scholar,philologist, and expert onceramics. He is considered "one of the twentieth century's most influential American biblical scholars,"[17] having become known to the public in 1948 for his role in the authentication of theDead Sea Scrolls.[18] He was a leading theorist and practitioner ofbiblical archaeology, and is regarded as the founder of the biblical archaeology movement. Albright served as the W. W. Spence Professor of Semitic Languages atJohns Hopkins University from 1930 to 1958 and was the Director of theAmerican School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem for several terms between 1922 and 1936.
Albright was born on May 24, 1891, inCoquimbo, Chile,[19] the eldest of six children of the AmericanEvangelicalMethodist missionaries Wilbur Finley Albright andCornish-American Zephine Viola Foxwell.[20] Albright was an alumnus ofUpper Iowa University.[21] He married Ruth Norton in 1921[22] and had four sons. He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree fromJohns Hopkins University inBaltimore, 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 theAmerican School of Oriental Research inJerusalem from 1922–1929, and 1933–1936, and did important archaeological work at sites in Palestine such asGibeah (Tell el-Fûl, 1922) andTell Beit Mirsim (1926, 1928, 1930, and 1932).[23]
Albright became known to the public in 1948 for his role in the authentication of theDead Sea Scrolls,[24] but made his scholarly reputation as the leading theorist and practitioner ofbiblical 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."[25] Albright was not, however, abiblical literalist; in hisYahweh and the Gods of Canaan, for example, he argued thatYahwism andancient 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".[26]
Although primarily a biblical archaeologist, Albright was apolymath 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 pharaohShoshenq I—the BiblicalShishaq—came to power somewhere between 945 and 940 BC.[27]
A prolific author, his works in addition toYahweh and the Gods of Canaan, includeThe Archaeology of Palestine: From the Stone Age to Christianity, andThe Biblical Period fromAbraham toEzra. He also edited theAnchor Bible volumes onJeremiah,Matthew, andRevelation.
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.[28][29] He was elected to theAmerican Philosophical Society in 1929.[30] He was elected a member of the United StatesNational Academy of Sciences in 1955 and a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1956.[31][32] 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. TheAmerican School of Oriental Research, Jerusalem, was renamed theAlbright Institute of Archaeological Research, in honor of Albright's archeological achievements.[33][34]
From the 1930s until his death, he was the dean of biblical archaeologists and the acknowledged founder of thebiblical archaeology movement. Coming from his background in Germanbiblical 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 studentGeorge Ernest Wright inherited his leadership of the biblical archaeology movement, contributing definitive work atShechem andGezer. 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 asJoseph Fitzmyer,Frank Moore Cross,Raymond E. Brown, andDavid 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".[35] Thus Albright and his students influenced a broad swath of American higher education from the 1940s through the 1970s, after which revisionist scholars such asT. L. Thompson,John Van Seters,Niels Peter Lemche, andPhilip 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 inphenomenology andMax Weber in the fields of sociology and thesociology 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.[citation needed]
Albright's publication in theAnnual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 1932, of his excavations of Tell Beit Mirsim, and descriptions of theBronze Age andIron 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 madeIsraeli 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".[36]
As editor of theBulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research from 1931 to 1968, Albright influenced biblical scholarship andPalestinian archaeology.[33] Albright advocated "biblical archaeology" in which the archaeologist's task, according to fellow biblical archaeologistWilliam G. Dever, is "to illuminate, to understand, and, in their greatest excesses, to 'prove' the Bible."[37] Here, Albright's AmericanMethodist upbringing was clearly apparent. He insisted, for example, that "as a whole, the picture inGenesis is historical, and there is no reason to doubt the general accuracy of the biographical details" (i.e., of figures such asAbraham). Similarly he claimed that archaeology had proved the essential historicity of theBook of Exodus, and the conquest ofCanaan as described in theBook of Joshua and theBook 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 inBiblical 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.'[38]
Biblical scholarThomas 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" ...[39]
| Professional and academic associations | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | President of theSociety of Biblical Literature and Exegesis 1939 | Succeeded by Chester C. McCown |
| Awards | ||
| Preceded by | Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement 1967 | Succeeded by |
