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Understanding Albright: A Revolutionary Etude

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

John A. Miles Jr.
John A. Miles Jr.
Affiliation:
Associate Editor for Religion, Doubleday & Company, Inc, New York N.Y. 10017
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Extract

“It is impossible for men to judge the inner motives of any superior acquaintance.”

William Foxwell Albright

In a still valid survey of one hundred years of biblical research, Herbert F. Hahn offers the following status quaestionis:

Interpretation of the Bible in the present day has reached a point of crisis. A seeming return to the age-old emphasis on the doctrinal content of Scripture and its essential unity throughout the sacred books—a return to traditionalism which nevertheless denies that it is a step backward—has dominated recent discussion of biblical interpretation.… The crisis grows out of a loss of confidence in the historical approach on the part of many who formerly favored it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 69 , Issue 1-2 , April 1976 , pp. 151 - 175
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1976

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References

1 Hahn, Herbert F., The Old Testament in Modern Research (Philadelphia: Fortress, expanded edition 1966) xi.Google Scholar

2 Hardwick, Stanley Eugene, Change and Constancy in William Foxwell Albright's Treatment of Early Old Testament History and Religion, 1918–1958 (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, New York University Ph.D. thesis, 1965) 570.Google Scholar

3 Albright, William Foxwell, ”In Memoriam Melvin Grove Kyle,” BASOR 51 (1933) 6.Google Scholar

4 Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, 2/2; (Chicago: University of Chicago, second edition 1970) 66.Google Scholar

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid., 10.

7 Ibid., 64.

8 Ibid., 62–63.

9 Albright, William Foxwell, “Archeology Confronts Biblical Criticism,” The American Scholar 7 (1938) 176–88.Google Scholar One sees the (helpful) hand of an editor at various points in this article. It is, for example, most uncharacteristic of Albright even at his most popularizing to add a parenthesis explaining the term “postexilic.” Some of Albright's best writing, edited or unedited, is to be found in his rare contributions to secular journals of general learning.

10 Ibid., 180.

11 Albright, William Foxwell, History, Archaeology and Christian Humanism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964) 304.Google Scholar Cf. The Autobiography of Gibbon (New York: Meridian, 1961) 68Google Scholar: “… the dynasties of Assyria and Egypt were my top and cricket ball; and my sleep has been disturbed by the difficulty of reconciling the Septuagint with the Hebrew computation. I arrived at Oxford with a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed.” W. Robertson Smith had a similar childhood.

12 Ibid., 308.

13 Ibid., 309.

14 For an interesting (if finally unsuccessful) defense of Wellhausen, cf. Smend, R., “Bibelkritik und philosophisches System im 19. Jahrhundert,” TZ, March-April 1958, 114.Google Scholar According to Smend, Wellhausen learned of the Graf hypothesis in 1867 and had nearly finished his own work by 1874 when he read Vatke's Biblical Theology.

Wenn Wellhausen Vatke wuerdigt, von dem er “das Meiste und Beste gelernt zu haben” bekennt, dann immer als den Kritiker, der auf den Spuren de Wettes gemeinsam mit Leopold George die später so genannte Grafsche Hypothese begrändet hat. Was in Vatkes Buch “von wissenschaftlicher Bedeutung ist, stammt,” sagt Wellhausen, “nicht von Hegel.” Wo er einmal etwas allgemeines auf Vatkes Art der Geschichts-betrachtung zu sprechen kommt, da rührnt er ihm nach, er habe, “Hegelianer oder nicht: das ist mir einerlei … ein bewundernswerth treues und feines Gefühl für die Individualität der Sachen” besessen.

In Smend's opinion, de Wette wrote analysis, Vatke Hegelian synthesis, and Wellhausen “vom philosophischen System befreite historische Synthese.”

15 Albright, William Foxwell, “Historical and Mythical Elements in the Story of Joseph,” JBL 37 (1918) 111–43.Google Scholar

16 Kuhn, Structure, 103.

17 Albright, History, Archaeology and Christian Humanism, 311.

18 Kuhn, Structure, 162–63.

19 The heuristic expectation, of course, was that the events being checked had taken place. Cf. From the Stone Age to Christianity (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, second edition, 1957) 274, n. 1Google Scholar; after referring to then recent scholarly reconstructions of the conquest, including his own, Albright adds: “The probability is that the actual course of events was closer to the biblical tradition than any of our critical reconstructions have been, and that some vital clues still elude our search.” In Christianity Today (January 18, 1963) 360, the following exchange takes place:

Questioner: You have stood out among modern scholars in emphasizing the confirmation archaeology gives to the trustworthiness of the Bible. Would you view a reference in the biblical narratives as presumptive evidence of historical facticity?

Albright: Certainly. In many cases, however, archaeological confirmation or illustration is necessary before we can understand the historical meaning of biblical narrative or allusions.

20 Albright was aware of what may be described loosely as his right-wing following, but he scarcely welcomed it. Fundamentalism he regarded as a form of gnosticism farther removed than Wellhausen from orthodoxy. And though he thought the apologetic use of archeological findings quite appropriate, he complained that this use was “so often accompanied by a painful lack of critical spirit that archaeological apologetics is regarded with suspicion by serious scholars” (“Archeology Confronts Biblical Criticism,” 182).

21 Cf. supra, 152.

22 Albright, “Archeology Confronts Biblical Criticism,” 181.

23 Kuhn, Structure, 157–58.

24 Ibid.

25 Cf. Albright, Stone Age to Christianity, 121.

26 Albright, History, Archaeology and Christian Humanism, 46.

27 Ibid., 319.

28 It is, perhaps more exactly, a classic Protestant claim. Conceivably, the whole Albright apparatus could be harnessed to the hypothesis that the thirteenth was the greatest of centuries. In general, Protestantism takes the past as normative and corrects the present, Catholicism takes the present as normative and corrects the past, in this regard following St. Paul's example rather than his instruction.

29 The Bible and the Ancient Near East, ed. Wright, G. E. (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1965), ch. 2Google Scholar, “Biblical History in Transition,” 35–36.

30 Albright, “Archaeology Confronts Biblical Criticism,” 183.

31 Albright, History, Archaeology, and Christian Humanism, 261.

32 Ibid., 267. Cf. Copleston, Frederick, S.J., A History of Philosophy, Vol. 6 (New York: Doubleday, Image Books, 1960) 176–77:Google Scholar

It is indeed arguable, at least from a Christian point of view, both that an interpretation of history as a process of development towards a determinate goal cannot be anything else but a theological interpretation and that a non-theological interpretation of history, so far as it is capable of validity, is reducible to the sort of statements about history which historians themselves are competent to make. In other words, it is arguable, from a Christian point of view, that there can be no such thing as a philosophy of history, if this term is understood to mean an interpretation of the whole of history as an intelligible movement toward a determinate goal and if a systematic distinction between philosophy and theology is presupposed. However, if it is claimed that there can be no such thing as a philosophy of history in this sense, the claim must obviously be understood with reference to a valid philosophy of history.

Emphasis added. Cf. also Karl Loewith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago, Phoenix Books).

33 Cf. supra, 158.

34 Albright, History, Archaeology, and Christian Humanism, 310.

35 Ibid., 312.

36 Ibid., 320.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid., 274–75, 283–84.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid., 274.

42 Ibid.

43 Albright, Stone Age to Christianity, 122.

44 Albright, William Foxwell, “Archaeology and Religion,” ch. 18 in Science, Philosophy, and Religion: A Symposium (New York: Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc., 1941) 285.Google Scholar

45 Albright, William Foxwell, Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1942; fourth edition, 1956) 5.Google Scholar

46 Albright, Science, Philosophy, and Religion, 294.

47 Cf. Hahn, Old Testament in Modern Research; Gilkey, Langdon, “Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language,” JR 41 (1961) 194ff.Google Scholar, and Naming the Whirlwind: The Renewal of God-Language (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969)Google Scholar the latter to be read as the fulfillment of a promise made in the 1961 article; Childs, Brevard, Biblical Theology in Crisis (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970)Google Scholar; Boers, Hendrikus, “Historical Criticism Versus Prophetic Proclamation,” HTR 65 (1972) 393–414Google Scholar, and less directly Theology Out of the Ghetto: A New Testament Exegetical Study Concerning Religious Exclusiveness (Leiden: Brill, 1971)Google Scholar; Wink, Walter, The Bible in Human Transformation: Toward a New Paradigm for Biblical Study (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973).Google Scholar

48 The pseudepigrapha seminars and gnosticism study groups which now so crowd the programs of biblical societies have long since ceased to be, in any reasonable sense of the phrase, “biblical studies.” They might, however, well be called “studies in monotheism and the historical process,” borrowing an Albright subtitle and, wittingly or not, continuing the Albright agenda. It is sometimes asserted that when, in this way, erstwhile biblical scholars no longer find it necessary to justify their Hellenistic or Semitic studies as propaideutic to biblical exegesis, their religious vision is gone. The truth is, however, that not every religious vision which includes the Bible focuses on it. Christian students of gnosticism may “read” the primitive and post-primitive church as biblical exegetes read the Bible. In any event, when a critic like Walter Wink writes, “… many of us might well say with Nietzsche, ‘Ich habe meine Gruende vergessen’— I have forgotten why I ever began,” he seems rather to narrow the range of possible religious grounds for historical study.

The broader religious grounds for historical study are suggested in a quote from Alfred Loisy who, despite his “duel with the Vatican,” remained thoroughly Catholic in historical sensibility:

Jesus foretold the kingdom, and it was the Church that came; she came, enlarging the form of the gospel, which it was impossible to preserve as it was, as soon as the Passion closed the ministry of Jesus. There is no institution on earth or in history whose status and value may not be questioned if the principle is established that nothing may exist except in its original form.

A willingness to look beyond the primitive church for revealed truth is a fortiori a willingness to look beyond the biblical canon. Was it the encounter with this willingness that made Albright's wife's conversion to Roman Catholicism a turning point in his own intellectual development?

49 Albright, History, Archaeology, and Christian Humanism, 303.