by
Damien F. Mackey
Both directly and indirectly, I have found certain insights of
William Foxwell Albright to have been enormously beneficial in helping
to piece together the biblico-historical (archaeological) picture puzzle.
In one particular case, though, I consider his proposed reconstruction
to have been an unmitigated disaster.
1. The big positives (a) - (d)
“W.F. Albright, in full William Foxwell Albright, (born May 24, 1891, Coquimbo, Chile—died Sept. 19, 1971, Baltimore, Md., U.S.), American biblical archaeologist and Middle Eastern scholar, noted especially for his excavations of biblical sites”.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/W-F-Albright
I find that professor W. F. Albright - although a scholar working within the restricting confines of the conventional model of archaeologico-history - had the unusual ability sometimes to burst through the seams of that tight model and to produce some very insightful new observations.
(a) His smashing impact on early dynastic chronology
One of his (as Dr. Albright) most remarkable forays beyond the suffocating walls of convention was his important synchronisation of the first ruler of Egypt, Menes, or Min (conventionally dated to c. 3100 BC), with the latter’s conqueror, Naram-Sin (conventionally dated to c. 2250 BC), of the famous Sargonid dynasty of Akkad.
On this, see my article:
Dr. W.F. Albright’s Game-Changing Chronological Shift
(3) Dr. W.F. Albright's game-changing chronological shift | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu
This synchronisation by Dr. Albright involved a massive shift in time, one to the tune of about a millennium, of conventional ancient dating.
That was bold, indeed!
It all at once brought into synthesis, the First Dynasty of Egypt; the Akkadian Dynasty; and the era of Abram (Dr. John Osgood’s research) and everything associated with that Patriarch (all of this, though, more accurately to be dated downwards to c. 1900 BC).
The importance of such a right synchronisation of this early (Patriarchal) period of biblico-history cannot be over-stated. And we must be grateful to W.F. Albright for having been prepared to make this courageous leap out of the conventional box.
However, as we are going to learn later on, in 2. (b), he, in 1922, wrongly re-set, back, also by about a millennium, later phases of the Bible such as the Joshuan Conquest and Jericho.
(b) Shifting the goalposts for biblical “Shinar”
Albright also was an early one to suggest a location, otherwise than southern Mesopotamia, for the biblical “land of Shinar”. This may perhaps, in part, have prompted various Creationists more recently to transfer their attention for Shinar away from that southern region. See, for example Ken Griffith and Darrell K. White’s:
An Upper Mesopotamian location for Babel
(11) An Upper Mesopotamian location for Babel | Kenneth Griffith - Academia.edu
leading to their prize discovery – as I would regard it – of the Mountain of Noah’s Ark’s landing:
A Candidate Site for Noah’s Ark, Altar, and Tomb
(11) A Candidate Site for Noah's Ark, Altar, and Tomb. | Kenneth Griffith and Darrell K White - Academia.edu
W.F. Albright had newly situated the land of Shinar to the N. Syrian kingdom of Hana: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1086/370017
Critical Notes
SHINAR-ŠANḠAR AND ITS MONARCH AMRAPHEL
Until recently no one seems to have suspected that the biblical Shinar might not have been identical with Southern Mesopotamia - using this term in its wider sense, following a classical usage which has now become all but universal. This view was only natural, since the identification of Shinar with Babylonia was practically required by the LXX translations of Is. 11:11, Zech. 5:11, to say nothing of the direct equivalence in Dan. 1:2. Until the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions most scholars associated the name with that of the classical district of Singara, modern Jebel Sinjâr, though the geographical equivalence appeared to be only approximate, since Singara is west of Assyria and considerably to the north of Babylonia.
The discovery of the native Babylonian term Šumer, "Southern Babylonia," altered the situation, especially since Šumer was then believed to stand for an older *Sungir, for *Sugir, assumed to be the more correct form of Girsu, the name of a town near Lagaš (if not a quarter of the latter).
Mackey’s comment: But see my re-identification of Girsu and Lagaš (Lakish) as, respectively, Jerusalem and Lachish. For example:
Yahweh, Solomon, Jerusalem - Ningirsu, Gudea and Girsu
(4) Yahweh, Solomon, Jerusalem - Ningirsu, Gudea and Girsu | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu
Albright continues:
The combination with Singara was now given up in favor of that with Šumer, hardly anyone attempting the paradoxical identification with both. It is the writer's purpose here to point out that the old identification with Singara is not only correct so far as the name is concerned, but also geographically.
In the Amarna correspondence of the king of Cyprus with the Pharaoh (EA, No. 35, 49 f.) the former warns the latter to avoid entangling alliances with the king of the Hittites and the king of Šanḫar. While most scholars have agreed with Weber's view that Šanḫar is Šincar, "Babylonia," the recent tendency has been to accept his later view (WA 1082) that it represents Mitanni. Knudtzon's suggestion (loc. cit.) that it was the district about the Sagûr river, in Northern Syria, has not found favor. In a Hittite list of countries published by Weber, after Winckler, Šanḫar is mentioned after Aššur and Bâbilu, before a gap which presumably contained the name Mitanni, since it is followed immediately by Alzîya and Papaḫḫi in Northern Mesopotamia. In the Egyptian inscriptions of the fifteenth century B.C. Sngr appears as an autonomous Mesopotamian state, along with Babylonia, Assyria, and Mitanni (Nhrn). At first sight Sngr seems rather remote from Šanḫar, but we must remember that the Egyptians often represented a š which came to them through west-Semitic channels by s, and that cuneiform ḫ often stands for ḡ. The Egyptians wrote the name of the important district of Nuḫašši in central Syria as Ngs, pointing to a pronunciation Nugaš. In the Aramaean monument of Zkr, king of Hamath and Nuḫašši the name is written Lcš, pronounced approximately Luḡáš - the old identification of Lcš with Luḫuti is hardly acceptable, though phonetically possible, since the Aramaeans often replaced š by t, on the principle of back-formation (Assûr - Atûr, etc.). From a number of other illustrations we may take the name Gilu-Hepa, written in Egyptian as Kr(l)gp, i.e., Gilu-Ǧepa. It is therefore certain that the forms Šanḫar, Sngr, and Šangar (Šincar has its i-vowel by Philippi's Law) of the Hebrews all represent the correct Šangar, the name of an important state or province in Mesopotamia, between Assyria, Babylonia, and Mitanni. What could this state have been?
In a paper in the Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society, I, 72-4, the writer has endeavored to show that Šanḡar represents the land known to its own sovereigns as Hana, on the Middle Euphrates. The capital of Hana, was situated at Tirqa, which has been located at a mound just south of the mouth of the Hâbûr.
[End of quote]
(c) Recognising the closeness of Ugaritic to biblical Hebrew
W. F. Albright even went rather close to realising that some of the El Amarna [EA] correspondents were writing in Hebrew.
Here is what I wrote about it in my university thesis (2007):
A Revised History of the Era of King Hezekiah of Judah
and its Background
AMAIC_Final_Thesis_2009.pdf
(Volume One, pp. 87-88):
Lab’ayu’s Speech
Lab’ayu is thought to have been no timid lackey of pharaoh, at least according to Albright:221 “The truculence of Labaya’s tone in writing to the court contrasts oddly with the grovelling subservience of most Palestinian chieftains”. Most grovelling of all perhaps was Abdi-Ashirta himself, who had written to pharaoh during a time of crisis:
LETTER 64: To the king, my lord, say. Thus says Abdi-Ashtarti [Ashirta], the servant of the king: At the feet of my king, my lord, I have fallen seven times ... and seven times in addition, upon breast as well as back. May the king, my lord, learn that enmity is mighty against me ....
Like Lab’ayu, the biblical Ahab [with whom I have identified Lab’ayu] could indeed be an outspoken person, bold in speech to both fellow kings and prophets (cf. 1 Kings 18:17; 20:11). But Lab’ayu, like all the other duplicitous Syro-Palestinian kings, instinctively knew when, and how, to grovel …. Thus, when having to protest his loyalty and readiness to pay tribute to the crown, Lab’ayu really excelled himself:222
“Further: In case the king should write for my wife, would I refuse her? In case the king should write to me: “Run a dagger of bronze into thy heart and die”, would I not, indeed, execute the command of the king?”
Lab’ayu moreover may have - like Ahab - used Hebrew speech. The language of the EA letters is Akkadian, but one letter by Lab’ayu, EA 252, proved to be very difficult to translate.223 Albright,224 in 1943, published a more satisfactory translation than had hitherto been possible by discerning that its author had used a good many so-called ‘Canaanite’ words plus two Hebrew proverbs! EA 252 has a stylised introduction in the typical EA formula and in the first 15 lines utilises only two ‘Canaanite’ words. Thereafter, in the main body of the text, Albright noted (and later scholars have concurred) that Lab’ayu used only about 20% pure Akkadian, “with 40% mixed or ambiguous, and no less than 40% pure Canaanite”. Albright further identified the word nam-lu in line 16 as the Hebrew word for ‘ant’ (nemalah), נְמָלָה, …the Akkadian word being zirbabu. Lab’ayu had written: “If ants are smitten, they do not accept (the smiting) quietly, but they bite the hand of the man who smites them”. Albright recognised here a parallel with the two biblical Proverbs mentioning ants (6:6 and 30:25).
Ahab likewise was inclined to use a proverbial saying as an aggressive counterpoint to a potentate. When the belligerent Ben-Hadad I sent him messengers threatening: ‘May the gods do this to me and more if there are enough handfuls of rubble in Samaria for all the people in my following [i.e. my massive army]’ (1 Kings 20:10), Ahab answered: ‘The proverb says: The man who puts on his armour is not the one who can boast, but the man who takes it off’ (v.11).
“It is a pity”, wrote Rohl and Newgrosh,225 “that Albright was unable to take his reasoning process just one step further because, in almost every instance where he
detected the use of what he called ‘Canaanite’ one could legitimately substitute the term ‘Hebrew’.”
Lab’ayu’s son too, Mut-Baal - my tentative choice for Ahaziah of Israel (c. 853 BC) … - also displayed in one of his letters (EA 256) some so-called ‘Canaanite’ and mixed origin words. Albright noted of line 13:226 “As already recognized by the interpreters, this idiom is pure Hebrew”.
Albright even went very close to admitting that the local speech was Hebrew:227
... phonetically, morphologically, and syntactically the people then living in the district ... spoke a dialect of Hebrew (Canaanite) which was very closely akin to
that of Ugarit. The differences which some scholars have listed between Biblical Hebrew and Ugaritic are, in fact, nearly all chronological distinctions.
But even these ‘chronological distinctions’ cease to be a real issue in the Velikovskian context, according to which both the EA letters and the Ugaritic tablets are re-located to the time of the Divided Monarchy. ….
(d) Balaam as an ‘Edomite sage’
“Balaam was an ancient Edomite sage”.
W. F. Albright
In his article, “The Home of Balaam” (JAOS, Vol. 35, 1915, p. 387), W. F. Albright stated:
Balaam was an ancient Edomite sage. The reading Aram in Num. 23, 7 is simply a corruption of Edom, a confusion which is common in the OT. The Koranic Iramu, or Aramu, which, according to the commentators, was situated south-east of Elath, apparently owes its existence to the same misunderstanding. The two passages in Num. 22, 5, and Deut. 23, 5, where the alleged Aramean home of Balaam is more definitely located at Pethor, represent late glosses.
This localization may perhaps be due to a popular etymology of Pethor, connecting it with Heb. פִתְר֣וֹן . interpretation of dreams … which exhibits a ת in Hebrew, while in Assyrian and Aramaic we have a שׁ (pašâru, פשר). …
[End of quote]
Thanks to this new appreciation of the ethnicity of Balaam, I was able to progress on to identifying the conqueror, Cushan-rishathaim as, not Aramean, but Edomite as well. Thus I wrote in my article:
Cushan rishathaim was a king of Edom
(3) Cushan rishathaim was king of Edom | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu
…. Having previously thought to have identified Balaam in that Edomite list (following Albright) … and knowing that Balaam (at the time of Joshua) to have pre-existed Cushan (the time of Othniel), I checked for an appropriate name not far below King No. 1 in the list, Bela ben Beor (or Balaam son of Beor):
1. Bela ben Beor from Dinhabah
2. Jobab ben Zerah from Bozrah
3. Husham from Teman
4. Hadad ben Bedad from Avith
5. Samlah from Masrekah
6. Saul from Rehoboth
7. Baal-Hanan ben Achbor
8. Hadar/d from Pau
King No. 3 looked perfect for Cushan, or Chushan: namely, Husham (or Chusham, חֻשָׁם).
Later I would learn that other scholars … had already come to this same conclusion (i.e., Husham = Cushan). ….
[Ends of quote]
At about this time I was given, in an e-mail, some rather sobering information about W. F. Albright that I shall be taking up in 2. (b):
….
Hi Damien. I am just coming up to the Balaam material in my thesis-writing, so this is welcome. I have had my sympathy for Albright considerably reduced, however, to find he was among those present at the secret meeting in Jerusalem in 1922 that 'fixed' the wrong dates to the archaeological eras ... Fr Pere Vincent's initiative, but Albright was complicit. ….
Continuing on with Balaam for the moment, W. F. Albright would also in his article, “The Home of Balaam”, conclude that Islam’s sage, Loqmân (Lukman), was based on the biblical Balaam.
“Loqmân seems to be a translation of Balaam,
as both Hebrew baláʹ and Arab. láqama mean to swallow”.
W. F. Albright
Regarding this I had written previously:
….
We have already found that the sage Loqmân (Lukman, Lokman) of the Islamic sura is based on (at least in part) as to his wise sayings the famous sage, Ahiqar, who was the nephew of the Israelite (Naphtalian) Tobit of the Book of Tobit.
Like Mohammed, Loqmân, emerging from the unreliable Qurân, would no doubt be a non-historical character, a composite, perhaps bearing likenesses to both Ahiqar, and Balaam centuries before Ahiqar.
W. F. Abright, following Dérenbourg et al., linked Loqmân to Balaam in his 1915 article, “The House of Balaam” (Jstor):
In 1850 Joseph Dérenbourg, in his Fables de Loqmân le Sage, following the suggestion of Ewald and Rödiger, identified the pre-Islamic prophet, Loqmân, mentioned in the thirty-first sura of the Qurân, with Balaam. …. Loqmân seems to be a translation of Balaam, as both Hebrew baláʹ and Arab. láqama mean to swallow. Translations of proper names from Hebrew are not infrequent; e. g. the modern Tell el-Qáḍî represents the ancient Dan. In the same way, the modern name of Megiddo, which means garrison, is Lejjun = Lat. Legio. …. Mohammedan commentators say that Loqmân belonged to the tribe of tribe of ‘Ad, and lived at Elath in Midian. Other reports concerning him, e. g., that he was a Nubian freedman, and was born in the tenth year of David’s reign … are late inventions. ….
[End of quote]
2. The big negatives (a) - (b)
According to the New World Enyclopedia article, “William F. Albright”:
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/William_F._Albright
….
Despite his focus on the archaeology of the Bible, Albright was not a biblical literalist. He accepted the basic idea of the documentary hypothesis and the mainstream opinions of the preceding two centuries of biblical criticism: Namely, that many of the books of the Hebrew Bible are comprised of various literary sources, each with its own theological view and agenda. In Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan, he expressed the view that the religion of the Israelites had evolved out of Canaanite polytheism into the biblical monotheism that saw God acting in history through the Jews as His "chosen people."
However, unlike some other bible scholars and archaeologists, Albright held that archaeology confirmed the basic historicity of the Bible. In this, Albright's American Evangelical upbringing was clearly apparent. He insisted that "as a whole, the picture in Genesis is historical, and there is no reason to doubt the general accuracy of the biographical details" (Finkelstein, 2007, 42). 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. ….
[End of quote]
It was inevitable that W. F. Albright, as a follower of the JEDP documentary hypothesis and, as we shall learn, of the conventional (Sothic-based) chronology, would fail miserably in some areas to bring convincing evidential support to his view that the historicity of the Bible was validated by archaeology.
Take, for instance, the two cases of:
(a) King Hammurabi, and Pharaoh Shoshenq as the biblical “Shishak”
According to the same New World Encyclopedia article:
….
Although primarily a biblical archaeologist, Albright also made contributions in many other fields of Near Eastern studies. For example, his … work on the Mari letters helped established an accurate date for Hammurabi, and a paper titled, "New Light from Egypt on the Chronology and History of Israel and Judah," established that Shoshenq I—the Biblical Shishak—came to power somewhere between 945 and 940 B.C.E. His work also laid the foundation for the understanding of ancient West Semitic culture in general, including the study of Canaanite religion as distinct from biblical literature. ….
[End of quote]
Yet something of a pioneer, W. F. Albright can be excused for not having been able to - just like so many others - secure a right date for King Hammurabi.
It would take until 1986 for Dean Hickman to establish that Hammurabi was a contemporary of King Solomon of Israel.
Almost half a century before Hickman, in 1938, W. F. Albright dated King Hammurabi to 1800 B.C., which is about 800 years too early. Still, this was - like his synthesis of Menes and Naram-Sin - a very significant downward re-setting of King Hammurabi by some 275 years from his former place. And he fully realised it, entitling his article, “A revolution in the chronology of ancient Western Asia” (BASOR 69, Feb., 1938).
W. F. Albright made another fateful choice when he embraced François Champollion’s identification of the biblical Shishak, at the time of King Rehoboam of Judah, with pharaoh Shoshenq I. This, a rare occasion when non biblically-minded historians insist upon a biblical connection with an historical person, has disastrously offset the history of the Bible against a wrong Sothically estimated date.
What Dr. David Rohl had said about the EA letters: “It is a pity that Albright was unable to …” applies here as well, because Dr. Rohl has, as well as anyone else, managed to debunk the conventional (Sothic) view that Shoshenq I could have been Shishak (A Test of Time: The Bible—from Myth to History, 1996).
Shoshenq I has been Sothically mis-dated and mis-identified.
Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky would get the identification right in Ages in Chaos I (1952), when he showed that Shishak was the Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh, Thutmose III.
For my development of this important identification, see e.g. my article:
Yehem near Aruna - Thutmose III’s march on Jerusalem
(4) Yehem near Aruna - Thutmose III's march on Jerusalem | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu
(b) Back-dating the Joshuan Conquest by a millennium
Returning to my friend’s concerned e-mail:
…. Hi Damien. I am just coming up to the Balaam material in my thesis-writing, so this is welcome. I have had my sympathy for Albright considerably reduced, however, to find he was among those present at the secret meeting in Jerusalem in 1922 that 'fixed' the wrong dates to the archaeological eras ... Fr Pere Vincent's initiative, but Albright was complicit. ….
Mathilde Sigalas will recount how W. F. Albright came to be in Jerusalem in 1922, there connecting with “a French scholar from the École biblique, Father Louis-Hugues Vincent”: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-55540-5_10
Between Diplomacy and Science: British Mandate Palestine and Its International Network of Archaeological Organisations, 1918–1938
….
The collaboration was also effective in terms of archaeological methodology at the beginning of the 1920s. The Presidents of the BSAJ, John Garstang (1920–1926), and of ASOR, William F. Albright (1920–1929/1933–1936), joined by a French scholar from the École biblique, Father Louis-Hugues Vincent, reflected together on a new dating method to classify antiquities.Footnote71 This classification was designated as that of the “Three Ages”Footnote72; dating of the Bronze Age, Iron Age and Modern period was modified to adapt to recent discoveries and ethnographic information on Palestine. The three scholars submitted their method to the scientific community during meetings of the POS. Adopted in 1922, the classification was implemented in archaeological sites for antiquities registration and analysis. The political context was also a reason for the policy, in an attempt to avoid subjective interpretations in favour of a particular civilisation.
This classification is an example of the effects of international collaboration within a foreign intellectual knowledge network, which developed in Jerusalem at the beginning of the 1920s. The three scholars were from “the three archaeological Schools in Jerusalem”Footnote73 and two were on the Board of Directors of the Palestine Oriental Society in 1922, Albright as President and Garstang as Director. The “New Chronological Classification of Palestinian Archaeology” was published in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (no. 7. October 1922) and the Revue Biblique (vol. 32. 1923) of the EBAF. This example demonstrates the openness of the scientific community based in Palestine and the shared aim of anchoring Palestinian archaeology as a scientific and formal discipline. ….
[End of quote]
My friend has since corrected the original description, “secret meeting in Jerusalem”, by clarifying that it was not actually “secret”.
The outcome of all this, a most unfortunate marrying of the Sothic chronology of Eduard Meyer with the skewed Palestinian chronology of père Vincent, has been to set back by a millennium real historical events such as the Conquest of Canaan by Joshua and his forces (the Middle Bronze I people of archaeology) and the overthrowing of (Early Bronze III) Jericho.
This was a great mistake on the part of W. F. Albright, whose correcting of conventional history by a millennium, which would work so well in the case of Menes, now backfired spectacularly on him in the case of the Fall of Jericho.
Had W. F. Albright been consistent in his view about the reliability of the Bible, he would have realised that the entire history of the Book of Joshua is verified by archaeology, the Bible being the key for accurately dating the archaeology.
Now we have the sad situation that it must be insisted that there was a Book of Joshua type of scenario, but occurring a millennium before Joshua, whose story must have been based upon this earlier set of archaeologically verifiable events.
Madness!
Critics are prepared to concede a ‘Proto-Joshua’, to ‘explain’ this, but heaven forbid that they should connect that vague entity to a real biblical Joshua.
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