Biblical Archaeology School - William F. Albright and The Biblical Archaeology School

William F. Albright and The Biblical Archaeology School

The dominant figure in 20th-century biblical archaeology, defining its scope and creating the mid-century consensus on the relationship between archaeology, the Bible, and the history of ancient Israel, was William F. Albright. An American with roots in the American Evangelical tradition (his parents were Methodist missionaries in Chile), Director of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), (now the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research) through the `1920s and 1930s, editor of ASOR's Bulletin until 1968, and author of over a thousand books and articles, Albright drew biblical archaeology into the contemporary debates over the origins and reliability of the Bible. In the early decades of the 20th century this debate was dominated by the documentary hypothesis. This explained the Bible as the composite product of authors working between the 10th and 5th centuries BC, and raised the question of whether the books of the bible could be regarded as a reliable source of information for Solomon’s period or earlier." European scholars such as Hermann Gunkel, Albrecht Alt and Martin Noth were suggesting that the books of the Old Testament rested on a body of oral tradition that reflected genuine history, but could not themselves be regarded as historically accurate. Albright saw archaeology as the a practical means to test these ideas. Biblical archaeology, for him, therefore embraced all lands and any finds that could "throw some light, directly or indirectly, on the Bible."

Albright and his followers believed that archaeology could and should be used to shed light on the Biblical narrative, particularly the Old Testament. The influential academic positions held by Albright and his followers, and their immense output — Albright alone was the author of over a thousand books and articles — made their work highly influential, especially in America, and especially among ordinary Christians who wished to believe that archaeology had proved the Bible true. In fact the members of the school were not biblical literalists, and their main concern was to discriminate between those parts of the biblical story that were true and those that were embellishments.

By the middle of the 20th century the work of Albright and his students, notably Nelson Glueck, E. A. Speiser, G. Ernest Wright and Cyrus Gordon, had produced a consensus that biblical archaeology had provided physical evidence for the originating historical events behind the Old Testament narratives: in the words of Albright, "Discovery after discovery has established the accuracy of innumerable details of the Bible as a source of history." The consensus allowed the creation of authoritative textbooks such as John Bright's History of Israel (1959). Bright did not believe that the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph could be regarded as reliable history, or that it was possible to reconstruct the origins of Israel from the biblical text alone, but he did believe that the stories in Genesis reflected the physical reality of the 20th–17th centuries BC, and that it was therefore possible to write a history of the origins of Israel by comparing the biblical accounts with what was known of the time from other sources.