This first book-length presentation of the results of our excavations at el-Jib has been written for the general reader who is concerned with the contribution that archaeology has made to the ...biblical history of the site... In telling the story of Gibeon I have tried to show how the tale of the city unfolded week by week and year by year through excavation and study. I have sought to give in these pages a personally conducted tour, as it were, of the ruins of ancient Gibeon and what we have seen in them... The results of the excavations at el-Jib are unique in that they can be related with a high degree of certainty to specific events described in the Old Testament. For the first time in the history of scientific archaeology in the land of the Bible an actual place name of a biblical city, neatly incised on clay, has been found under circumstances which make certain the identification of the name with the ruins.--from the Preface
Archaeology is a science in which progress can be measured by the advances made backward into the past. The last one hundred years of archaeology have added a score of centuries to the story of the ...growth of our cultural and religious heritage, as the ancient world has been recovered from the sands and caves of the modern Near East-Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, and Iraq. Measured by the number of centuries which have been annexed to man's history in a relatively few years, progress has been truly phenomenal. This book deals with the recent advance and with those pioneers to the past who made it possible. Interest in biblical history has played an important part in this recovery. Names such as Babylon, Nineveh, Jericho, Jerusalem, and others prominent on the pages of the Bible, have gripped the popular imagination and worked like magic to gain support for excavations.
This book is written from the widely shared conviction that the discovery of the ancient Near East has shed significant light on the Bible. Indeed, the newly-discovered ancient world has effected a revolution in the understanding of the Bible, its people, and their history. My purpose is to assess, in non-technical language which the layman can understand, the kind of change in viewing the biblical past which archaeology has brought about in the last century. Since the text of the Bible has remained constant over this period, it is obvious that any new light on its meaning must provide a better perspective for seeing the events which it describes. In short, I am concerned with the question, How has history as written in the Bible been changed, enlarged, or substantiated by the past century of the archaeological work?--from the Preface
This anthology brought together the most important historical, legal, mythological, liturgical, and secular texts of the ancient Near East, with the purpose of providing a rich contextual base for ...understanding the people, cultures, and literature of the Old Testament. A scholar of religious thought and biblical archaeology, James Pritchard recruited the foremost linguists, historians, and archaeologists to select and translate the texts. The goal, in his words, was "a better understanding of the likenesses and differences which existed between Israel and the surrounding cultures." Before the publication of these volumes, students of the Old Testament found themselves having to search out scattered books and journals in various languages. This anthology brought these invaluable documents together, in one place and in one language, thereby expanding the meaning and significance of the Bible for generations of students and readers. As one reviewer put it, "This great volume is one of the most notable to have appeared in the field of Old Testament scholarship this century."
Princeton published a follow-up companion volume,The Ancient Near East in Pictures Relating to the Old Testament(1954), and later a one-volume abridgment of the two,The Ancient Near East: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures(1958). The continued popularity of this work in its various forms demonstrates that anthologies have a very important role to play in education--and in the mission of a university press.
The science of Palestinian archaeology was born in the spring of 1890, when a rare genius, W. M. Flinders Petrie, found an ancient mound of buried cities worthy of his ability to observe and ...interpret. In a scant six weeks of digging, this pioneer set the pattern for over half a century of excavations. Others, to be sure, had dug in Palestine before, but none had hit upon a sure means for dating the ancient ruins which he had uncovered. It remained for Petrie to discover the secret of method.
Petrie was an Egyptologist who had been asked by the
ASSYRIA, ISRAEL’S ENEMY Pritchard, James B
Archaeology and the Old Testament,
05/2012
Book Chapter
In the annals of archaeology the recovery of ancient Assyria stands out as a unique triumph. At the middle of the nineteenth century, two men, excavating along the upper Tigris River, discovered ...palace after palace of the Assyrian kings, richly documented with cuneiform inscriptions on their walls. At about the same time, the painstaking labors of two generations of scholars in deciphering cuneiform were crowned with success, so that the spectacular monuments from the Assyrian palaces could be placed almost immediately in the framework of written Assyrian history.
This achievement of discovery and decipherment provided a wealth of new material
THE MAKING OF A MAP Pritchard, James B
Archaeology and the Old Testament,
05/2012
Book Chapter
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, no area of the earth’s surface comparable in size to Palestine could claim to have received as much attention from the outside as the Holy Land. Pilgrims ...by the hundreds had written stories of adventures on their visits to its holy places. Many had drawn maps of their journeys, indicating the routes that they had taken to the shrines, and had filled in details of rivers, mountains, cities, and tribes, as they supposed them to have been from their reading of the Bible and the writings of Josephus, Eusebius, and Jerome.
An industrious
LAW AND WISDOM Pritchard, James B
Archaeology and the Old Testament,
05/2012
Book Chapter
Rarely in the annals of archaeology has the excavator been able to oblige his colleague the philologist by producing from the earth the very monument which the latter had suspected to have been in ...existence. One such extraordinary case was the discovery of the three large pieces of the famous Code of Hammurabi at Susa in December 1901 and January 1902 by Jacques de Morgan.
On the basis of the publication a few years earlier of clay tablets containing laws from the Old Babylonian period, Friedrich Delitzsch, in his famous lecture of 1902, “Babel and Bible,” said: “After Hammurabi had
