Reference Books as Infomercials
Posted by Kushana Torumekia at 9/25/2007 4:01 PM 
Categories: Egeria, Women in Antiquity, Christianity, Archaeology, Bible
Categories: Egeria, Women in Antiquity, Christianity, Archaeology, Bible
Listen to this article
Last week's post had an unfortunate encounter with the dragons of the aether who, like cats, left only the head at my doorstep. Neither my helper nor my hosting company's technical support could help. I will try to repost the post.That said, this week I was thinking about this conversation I participated in LibraryThing:
http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=13512
(It's "Academic Study Bible Recommendation" on the Biblical History group.)
The trouble with Biblical archaeology is the eagerness to have every discovery be about the
Bible (or to be pertinent to the Bible or to have a personal link to someone in the Bible.) It
isn't (it doesn't, and it can't.) One is reminded of the mistakes Schliemann made in his eagerness
to discover the Iliad's Troy.
People in the past generally didn't put name tags or dates on things, streets didn't have signs,
cities did not have "Welcome to _____" at their borders. I'm not being flip, that's often what
archaeologists need before they can be certain — or else it is only possible that a certain set
of ruins was a particular city, or that an object belonged to someone. (See the TV show
History Detectives which wrestles with this possibility in nearly every episode.) Think of
how possible it is, also, that a personal possession of Alfred the Great or Hannibal of Carthage
might have survived to be found now. Who would have kept such an object? Who would have
remembered who it belonged to? Over centuries and changes of place and rule? One starts to get Indiana Jones-like visions, but Antiquity tended to have treasuries rather than museums, and
these tended to be looted (and melted down) rather than preserved. (Think of what the
Conquistadors did to South American natives' gold: they did not spare a thought for current
archaeologists and instead made contemporary coins with it (aye, pieces of eight) or luxury
objects that would interest their patrons.) Ordinary objects in Antiquity were thrown out when
they were no longer useful; once something's gone to the dump it's impossible to tell if it
belonged to someone famous or someone ordinary.
Archaeologists are excited to learn anything about the past, and of course it's fun to think
"Maybe..." about the things one finds. But there has been a thriving business of showing
pilgrims and tourists in the Holy Land "this is the very place where..." for centuries:
I saw a place a little raised, containing about as much space as tombs usually contain. I asked the holy men what this was, and they answered: "Here was holy Moses laid by the angels, for, as it is written: No man knoweth of his burial .... for as it was shown to us by our ancestors ... so do we show it to you, and our ancestors said that this tradition was handed down to them by their own ancestors .... If you wish to see the places that are mentioned in the books of Moses, come out of the door of the church ... and we will tell you each place that is visible from hence." Then we rejoiced greatly.(See section 22 in www.ccel.org/m/mcclure/etheria/etheria.htm. For who this lady is and when she is writing, see: go.owu.edu/~o5medww/egeria/index.htm.)
I can't recommend the Archaeological Study Bible because it gives into this pressure on two fronts: it is both too eager to tie artifacts to the Bible and too eager to support a particular theology. This is not a bias even a specialist could aways correct for: even a theologian does not remember the fine points of the assertions of every sect, and even an archaeologist cannot be familiar with every place and object. Thanks to the book's confirmation bias, the reader is left with the impression that discoveries of the past support a particular theology's reading of the Bible (and none other), this poorly serves the Bible (which has always been read in many different ways and on many levels) and archaeology (which must deal in possibilities and likelihoods rather than cold certainties.) It would be a more valuable resource if it left these uncertainties intact and prepared to reader study further, elsewhere, and make up their mind on their own.
(Religious groups can certainly promote their own views, but not under the guise of general reference or education. It is one thing to write a pamphlet about how Biblical archaeology supports a particular denomination or theological point of view — but passing it off as a reference book is an educational disservice and a kind of spiritual dirty pool.)
-Kushana
Comments