William F. Albright - Influence and Legacy

Influence and Legacy

Albright's publication in the Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 1932, of his excavations of Tell Bir Mirsim, and further descriptions of the Bronze Age and Iron Age layers of the site in 1938 and 1943, marked a major contribution to the professional dating of sites based on ceramic typologies, one which is still in use today with only minor changes. "With this work, Albright made Israeli 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".

As editor of the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research between 1931 and 1968, Albright exercised deep influence over both biblical scholarship and Palestinian archaeology, an influence further extended by his prolific writing and publishing (over 1,100 books and articles). Albright used this influence to advocate "biblical archaeology", in which the archaeologist's task is seen as being "to illuminate, to understand, and, in their greatest excesses, to "prove" the bible.". In this Albright's American Evangelical upbringing was clearly apparent. He insisted, for example, that "as a whole, the picture in Genesis is historical, and there is no reason to doubt the general accuracy of the biographical details" (i.e., of figures such as Abraham). 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.

In the years since his death, Albright's methods and conclusions have been increasingly questioned. Fellow Biblical archaeologist William Dever notes that " central theses have all been overturned, partly by further advances in Biblical 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."

Biblical scholar Thomas L. Thompson notes that the methods of "biblical archaeology" have also become outmoded: " 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' ..."