The ASOR Family Tree: William Foxwell Albright :An Elaboration on “Dawn and Descent: Social Network Analysis and the ASOR Family Trees”
The current issue of NEA includes the article “Dawn and Descent: Social Network Analysis and the ASOR Family Trees” by Diane Harris Cline, Eric H. Cline, and Rachel Hallote (NEA 87:2 2024:122-131). The article is based on a survey of ASOR members to determine educational experience and connections or family trees among the scholars. The results shed light on the “urban myth of William F. Albright as the ‘founder’ of biblical archaeology.” Instead the focus is on German Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch (122).
In my previous blog, I explored the Methodist role in the development of the Albright’s biblical thought. Through Methodist Review the child in Chile was introduced to the conflict between the forces of light and darkness in the biblical arena. Methodist Robert W. Roger’s book A History of Babylonia and Assyria published by Methodists became known to young William through Methodist Review. Thereafter Albright’s course was set. He would fight the fight not by being a missionary or a circuit rider like his father, but through archaeology.
Methodist Review did more than introduce him to Rogers and archaeology. Through it he became aware of Friedrich Delitzsch as well. Long before Albright became an undergraduate at Methodist Upper Iowa College or graduate student at Johns Hopkins, he was aware of Delitzsch.
PAN-BABYLONIANISM
When Albright read Methodist Review in Chile and Iowa, he learned of another weapon in the battle against Wellhausen besides archaeology as exemplified by Rogers’ book: the synthesis called Pan-Babylonianism. This doctrine expressed and extolled the exalted position of ancient Babylonia as the disseminator of higher culture not just directly within the ancient Near East but indirectly to the world (Arnold and Weissberg 2002; Huffmon 1983; Larsen 1995). It posited that the ancient Babylonians had developed an early astral understanding of the heavens and the earth which much later became the basis for the biblical texts especially at the beginning of the Book of Genesis. Essentially, through Pan-Babylonianism, Babylon had usurped Jerusalem, Jews, and the Bible as the cultural lodestone for western civilization since the biblical religion derived from the Babylonian culture. This followed on the heels of the effort to use non-Semitic Sumerians to undermine the Jewish contribution to civilization (see Cooper).
Methodist Review disseminated information about Pan-Babylonianism to Albright even before “Pan-Babylonianism” became a named school of thought in the 20th century. The idea of Babylonia’s prominent cultural position was not new. In fact, Rogers in 1894 already had claimed in Methodist Review that the Egyptian culture had been borrowed from Babylonia so the idea that biblical patriarchs from Mesopotamia had been immersed in the same culture was not necessarily a farfetched one to Albright (Rogers 1894). Possibly this was one of the earlier articles by Rogers which Albright had read prior to the purchase of A History of Babylonia and Assyria at age 10 (see his letter to Rogers dated October 18, 1924, American Philosophical Society). The January 1899 issue of Methodist Review addressed this subject in more detail. The “Archaeology and Biblical Research” section was entitled “The Religion of Babylonia” and it began:
Babylonia, now generally regarded as the cradle of the human race, possessed, as the monuments of that land clearly show, a very high degree of civilization at least four thousand years before our era (Methodist Review 1899:135).
Its religion was highly developed and it was only natural that the Hebrews who were of Babylonian origin be familiar with it (Methodist Review 1899:136). Shortly afterwards, this concept expressed by Rogers would become a fully developed methodology first enunciated in 1902 by his colleague Friedrich Delitzsch in what became the “Babel and Bible” controversy.
Before turning to those lectures, there was a discovery of note which changed the thinking of scholars in the field. The discovery was that of Hammurabi’s Law Code in December, 1901-January, 1902, in the Persian city of Susa in modern Iran by the French. Apparently the 7 1/2′ tall stela had been taken from Babylon as war booty millennia ago. Methodist Review reported:
The discovery of this remarkable code is one of the greatest triumphs of archaeology and is of paramount interest to students of ancient history (Methodist Review 1903c:641).
Methodist Review was enthused because Hammurabi, dated to about 2250 BCE at that time, The more extensive notice occurred in a book review on Babel and Bible by Friedrich Delitzsch in the January 1903 issue.
When Austen Henry Layard and George Smith were busily engaged in utilizing the newly discovered and deciphered Assyrian and Babylonian inscriptions all England was deeply stirred by the confirmations of the Old Testament Scriptures which they produced. From that day to this we have heard much of the importance of archaeology to the Christian apologist, and in quite recent times a battle royal has been fought over the question as to whether archaeology would be able to slay the dragon of Higher Criticism (Methodist Review 1903b:155).
Suddenly, what appeared was a new type of archaeology which minimized the value of the Old Testament instead of championing it!
Methodist Review was referring to the actual lectures of Delitzsch that were the basis of “The Babel and Bible Controversy.” Considering how archaeology and Assyriology had been used as weapons of war on behalf of the historicity of the Bible, the journal characterized these lectures as “the revenge of Assyriology and Near Eastern archaeology on the Old Testament” (Larsen 1992:128). Certainly, they became an important as part of the ongoing struggle between science and religion. In hindsight, they also stand as budding expressions of a virulent anti-Semitism that soon would consume both Delitzsch and Germany. How could the Assyrians be Semitic if they were such formidable warriors? Wasn’t Jesus more likely to be the descendant of an Assyrian Aryan who settled in Israel/Judah than a Jew? Pan-Babylonianism proved to be a powerful weapon in the war of the words that could be wielded effectively for the forces of light or of darkness. Such military and cosmic vocabulary is exactly appropriate in the analysis of this phenomenon.
Albright would have learned from reading Methodist Review that the German emperor was present at that January 13, 1902 lecture at the Academy of Science in Berlin before the Deutsche Oriental-Gesellschaft, the German counterpart to the American Oriental Society. Now this learned society was to be the stage for a new round of biblical confrontations. The foundation memorandum published in the respected journal Orientalistische Literaturazeitung noted that the discoveries of the previous decades had revised the understanding of those original conditions … where we find the roots of our own culture, our time-reckoning and starlore, our system of weight and measure, as well as important parts of the religious concepts which are contained in the Old Testament (Larsen 1989:188).
Could those “original conditions” that were the roots of modern Germany have been Semitic … or Jewish? Perhaps there was a way to undermine the Jewish and Semitic basis to both the Old and New Testaments.
In his first lecture of 1902 to the society, Delitzsch mocked this archaeological combat underway among what he called the “Bible-lands,” Germany, England, and the United States:
What is the reason for these efforts in remote, inhospitable, and dangerous lands? What is the reason for this expensive rooting through rubble many thousands of years old, all the way down to the water table, where no gold or silver is to be found? What is the reason for the competition among nations to secure excavation rights to these deserted mounds, and the more the better? (Delitzsch 1906:1)
The answer, of course, was the Bible. The Bible was the cause of this vast waste of time, money and energy in god-forsaken terrain seeking bits and pieces of ancient rocks and clay. So regardless of what Delitzsch had to say about the relation of the Bible to Mesopotamia, one readily detects the lack of enthusiasm for the entire venture in the first place.
A second lecture followed one year later on January 12, 1903. By this time, Delitzsch was aware of the hostile reaction to his first lecture and upped the ante in his direct assault on the Hebrew Bible as a basis for authority for German Christians (Arnold and Weissberg 2002:455). Albright would have read the following perspective by Methodist Review about the book Delitzsch wrote from these lectures:
Our only regret about the book is that Delitzsch wrote it. It gives far too much aid and comfort to the new school of wild criticism of which the talented Hugo Winckler is the chief exponent. The whole aim of Winckler at present seems to be to prove the utter dependence of Israel upon Babylon (Methodist Review 1903:157).
Indeed it may be said that Winckler was the most bellicose and radical representative of the Pan-Babylonian school of thought (Carena 1989: 96-97, 111). Delitzsch also was criticized in a 1903 article in Methodist Review entitled “Some Diseases of Modern Biblical Criticism” (Konig).
If Albright had sought to pursue this area of interest on his own, he might have acquired one of three published versions the Delitzsch paper: Babel und Bibel, (Leipzig, 1902); Babel and Bible: Two Lectures Delivered before the Members of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft in the Presence of the German Emperor, (New York, 1903); or Babel and Bible: Significance of Assyriological Research for Religion, (Chicago, 1906) where he would have read that Delitzsch equated Amraphel of Genesis 14 with Hammurabi (Delitzsch 1906:7, 62). Although he did order books by mail especially from Germany (Albright 1948:164), he never provided a full list of what those books were. Fortunately, the Southern Baptist Seminary maintains a record of the books it received from the Albright estate. That listing includes a 1921 publication of Babel und Bibel but not the 1902 German or any English versions.[1] At this point it can not be determined when Albright first read Delitzsch’s lectures either in German or English but there should be no doubt that he was kept abreast on the ongoing controversy through Methodist Review.
In May 1903, the “Archaeology and Research” column in Methodist Review was fully devoted to the subject of “Babel and Bible.” The opening lines were:
“Babel und Bibel” is the alliterative and captivating title of a small brochure from the pen of Friedrich Delitzsch, professor of Assyriology in the University of Berlin. No publication of its size–only fifty-two pages, or not more than ten thousand words–has attracted in recent years such general attention as this address of Professor Delitzsch (Methodist Review 1903a:470).
The synthesis of Assyriology and archaeology presented to the general public engendered no hostile reaction;[2] the interpretations which followed did, as reported in Methodist Review in May, 1903:
First, Delitzsch declared that he did not believe in a personal revelation from God (Methodist Review 1903a: 471).
Second, Delitzsch declared that Old Testament stories were outgrowths of Babylonian mythology including the very name of the deity of Israel! (Methodist Review 1903a:472).
Third, Delitzsch declared that not only was the name of the Israelite deity derived from Babylonia but, so was the concept of monotheism! (Methodist Review 1903a:473).
One might have expected, based on this report, for Methodist Review to have condemned Pan-Babylonianism along with Higher Criticism as an arch-enemy of people of faith, with Delitzsch joining Wellhausen as a high priest of rationalism.
Methodist Review did poke fun at this new school of thought. In September, 1905, the fourteen-year-old William would have read an article “The Masai and Higher Criticism” in the Archaeology column (Methodist Review 1905b). The column paralleled the Masai “of Semitic origin” and the biblical traditions based on an ethnographic study just published in 1904. The conclusion:
Had Delitzsch or Winckler or Cheyne discovered these Masai traditions on Babylonian tablets they would have without a moment’s hesitation, declared that they had at last the original of the Hebrew Ten Commandments (Methodist Review 1905b:811).
The article parlayed this insight into the declaration that the Masai, Hebrew, and Babylonian traditions all derived from the shared time and space in Arabia “away back”:
The discovery of the Masai traditions, coming upon the heel of the Babel and Bible controversy and the arrogant deductions of Winckler regarding the Hebrews and their traditions, has given a severe shock to the arbitrary conclusions of the literary-historical school of criticism which had built so extensively upon a philological basis (Methodist Review 1905b: 812).
The column ended with a ringing endorsement of the Hebrews for being the people who survived the mighty empires of the ancient world and who “gave the world the corner stone of all religion, monotheism” (Methodist Review 1905b:813).
Delitzsch had been characterized as one “perfectly willing to abandon corrupted scriptures, and especially the Old Testament, as a means to complete the Reformation” (Marchand 1996, 225). Yet despite the pronouncements of this future spokesperson for anti-Semitism, American Protestants found certain advantages to the Pan-Babylonian approach. After all,
God could and did use evil intentions of human warriors to accomplish his own benevolent purposes. This doctrine of God’s prevailing power and purpose was traditionally called the doctrine of providence. Clergymen of the period believed and preached it with a passion. They interpreted world history in light of it (Smylie 1959: 205).
Thus Methodist Review could use Pan-Babylonianism without embracing the more extremist ideas of the Babel and Bible school. It accepted as reasonable the proposal that there would be continuities, as well as significant differences, between polytheistic pagan Babylonia and monotheistic biblical Israel. The May, 1905 column reported in “Delitzsch’s Last Lecture,” that the latter had conducted himself in a responsible manner in his February 1905 presentation to the German Oriental Society in contrast to his paper three years earlier (Methodist Review 1905a: 483). Nonetheless, in the January, 1906 issue, the full column was devoted to the status of the war between Babel and Bible (Methodist Review 1906). But of particular importance, the conflict was framed in terms of the Higher Criticism debate:
There was, however, no leader of national importance to throw down the gauntlet, to challenge the radical critics, apparently so firmly entrenched behind the “scientific” breastworks of historical theology.
But unexpectedly and without a moment’s warning the lightning struck. The immediate occasion was that famous lecture by Professor Delitzsch before the German emperor and other celebrities (Methodist Review 1906:139).
That speech sparked a public outcry which initiated a public examination of the accepted “advanced thinking” of the biblical critics… and revealed the yawning gap between professor and pastor in Germany (Methodist Review 1906: 140). Methodist Review provided a university-by-university breakdown of the students in Germany in the summer semester of 1903 divided into the students taking classes with traditional versus Higher Criticism professors. The analysis revealed that the tide had turned against radical critics (Methodist Review 1906, 142). The concluding statement of hope easily could have been written by the post-World War II Albright school as well:
It stands to reason that if the majority of students are brought under the influence of conservative teachers, and that by their own will, the results will be favorable to more evangelical and spiritual work in their churches after they have become pastors (Methodist Review 1906: 143).
So the fourteen-year-old William would have read about how Delitzsch inadvertently was helping reverse what the destructive forces of Higher Criticism had achieved: how could the first millennium BCE evolutionary model of Wellhausen be correct if two to three millennia earlier there had been highly advanced cultures of great sophistication and learning in the ancient Near East? (Albright 1948)
One may see in this debate over Babylonia, the first attempt to create a secular synthesis that encompassed Egypt to Elam and the many millennia of the pre-Greco-Roman world: that unity would have been appealing to William in the library of his parents constructing imaginary worlds in his mind (Cross 1973:4). Regardless of whether Pan-Babylonianism was right or not, it represented the attempt by an individual to bring order to this newly revealed ancient universe, precisely as Albright himself would do in From the Stone Age to Christianity in 1940. It was the effort and not the merit of the claim which warrants attention.
A reminder of the importance of the comparative approach in the study of religion to Albright (Freedman 1989:34-35) occurred in the September, 1912 Methodist Review, the year before he left for Hopkins. Another Rogers book was reviewed, this one entitled Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testament. Comparative study was praised not condemned as long as it was done properly the way Rogers had in this new book published by The Methodist Concern:
Nothing seems to have escaped his keen vision. The author unquestionably has furnished the most complete collection of cuneiform literature ever brought together in any language for the purpose of illustrating the Old Testament …. Those who know The [sic] History of Babylonia and Assyria, and the Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, by the same author, know something of the thoroughness and skill with which Professor Rogers handles the material which his superior scholarship places at his command …. It should have, and without doubt will have, a prominent place in the libraries of all earnest Bible students ….(Methodist Review 1912:834-835)
Both the Gilgamesh flood story and Abraham in the time of Hammurabi are mentioned. So even before Albright matriculated at The Johns Hopkins University, Albright would have been well aware from Methodist Review of the positive value of comparative study and the historicity of Abraham in the time of Hammurabi.[3]
As this review and the previous blog show, Methodism is the unsung and not so invisible hand helping to mold the mind of the person who one day would stand on the pinnacle of biblical archaeology in America.
References
- William Foxwell Albright. Pp. 156-181 in American Spiritual Autobiographies, ed. Louis Finkelstein. New York: Harper and Brothers.
Arnold, B. T. and Weisberg, D. 2002. A Centennial Review of Friedrich Delitzsch’s ‘Babel und Bibel’ Lectures. Journal of Biblical Literature 121:441- 457.
Carena, O. 1989. History of the Near Eastern Historiography and Its Problems, 1852-1945, Neukirchen: AOAT.
Cooper, J. 1991. Posing the Sumerian Question: Race and Scholarship in the Early History of Assyriology. Aula Orientalis 9:47.66.
Cross, F. M. 1973. W. F. Albright’s View of Biblical Archaeology and its Methodology. Biblical Archaeologist 36:2-5.
Delitzsch, F. 1906. Babel and Bible: Significance of Assyriological Research for Religion. Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company.
Freedman, D. N. 1989. W.F. Albright as an Historian. Pp. 33-43 in The Scholarship ofWilliam Foxwell Albright: An Appraisal, ed. Gus W. Van Beek. Atlanta: Scholars Press.
Huffmon, H. B. 1983. Babel und Bibel: The Encounter Between Babylon and the Bible. Pp. 125-34 in Background for the Bible, ed. M. P. O’Connor and D. N. Freedman. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
Konig, E. 1903. Some Diseases of Modern Biblical Criticism. Methodist Review 85 (Fifth Series 19):701-716.
Larsen, M. T.
1989 Orientalism and the Ancient Near East. Pp. 181-202 in Humanities Between Art and Science: Intellectual Developments 1880-1914, ed. Mogens Trolle Larsen and Michael Harbsmeier. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag.
1992 Seeing Mesopotamia. 107-131 in The Construction of the Ancient Near East, ed. Ann C. Gunter. Culture and History 11.
1995 The ‘Babel/Bible’ Controversy and Its Aftermath. Pp. 95-103 in vol.1 of Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, ed. Jack Sasson. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Marchand, S. L. 1996. Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Methodist Review
1899. The Religion of Babylonia. 81 (Fifth Series 15):135-138.
1903a. Babel and Bibel. 85 (Fifth Series 19):470-473.
1903b. Book review of Babel and Bible. 85 (Fifth Series 19):155.
1903c. The Code of Hammurabi. 85 (Fifth Series 19):641-644.
1905a. Delitzsch’s Last Lecture. 87 (Fifth Series 21):483.
1905b. The Masai and Higher Criticism. 87 (Fifth Series 21):810-813.
1906. Theological Reaction in Germany. 88 (Fifth Series 22):139-143.
1910. Abraham. 92 (Fifth Series 26):480.
1912. Book review of Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testament by Robert William Rogers. 94 (Fifth Series 28):831-835.
Rogers, R. W. 1894. The Origins of Egyptian Culture. Methodist Review 76 (Fifth Series 10):51-63.
Smylie, J. E. 1959. Protestant Clergymen and America’s World Role, 1865-1900: A Study of Christianity, Nationality, and International Relations. Ph.D. diss., Princeton University.
[1] A copy of Babel und Bibel, published 1903, was part of the Albright book collection donated to Southern Baptist Seminary but the date of Albright’s acquisition is unknown. Hermann Gunkel’s response published in 1904 also was in the donation (see Gunkel 1904), but the date of acquisition by Albright also is unknown. Interestingly, the collection does include Israel und Babylonien: Der Einfluss Babyloniens auf die israelite Religion by Hermann Gunkel which was published in 1903. Of course, Albright could have acquired this book at a much later date. Albright greatly preferred the scholarship of Gunkel to that of Wellhausen as was made abundantly clear in Albright’s 1964 introduction to a reprint of Gunkel’s The Legends of Genesis where Albright writes: “Wellhausen proves to have been wrong almost throughout, whereas Gunkel was right much of the time” [“Introduction” in The Legends of Genesis: The Biblical Saga and History, Hermann Gunkel, (New York, 1964), p. ix.
[2] In a letter dated July 16, 1903, Paul Haupt, Albright’s future teacher, wrote to A. H. Sayce, a strong advocate of the historicity of the story of Genesis 14, that: “So far as Assyriology is concerned, what he [Delitzsch] has said is merely a repetition of we all have been saying for many years …” (John Hopkins University Archives, Paul Haupt).
[3] The Sunday School Times article of January 22, 1910 by Prof. Ungnad entitled “Archaeology’s Vindication of Father Abraham” was cited in “Abraham,” Methodist Review 1910
