I read subscribe to quite a few blogs, and hundreds of items hit my RSS feed every day. In an effort to simplify my life, I’m going to be unsubscribing from a number of blogs. Right now I subscribe to almost 100 different “bibloblogs” or blogs on closely related subjects. There are a number of these—especially those oriented primarily toward New Testament topics—to which I subscribe out of goodwill toward the blogger, but I don’t really read most of the actual posts. Many of these will be disappearing from my personal RSS subscriptions tonight, though not from the blogroll on Higgaion. I don’t wish to give offense to any particular bloggers, and I won’t be posting a list of my unsubscriptions, but I did want to give a “shout out” to all of you posting on topics outside my specific areas of interest, and I encourage you to keep on blogging. But I must simplify my life, and I can’t continue to try to monitor 100+ biblioblogs plus those of friends and family and those on other topics. As Los Angeles mayor Tony Villaraigosa is fond of saying, “I love you each; I love you all.” I just can’t go on reading you all.

Westboro Baptist Church, home base of the execrable Fred Phelps of “God hates fags” fame, has lost a lawsuit brought against it in a U.S. district court. Read more about it at CNN.com. Albert Snyder of York, Pennsylvania sued Westboro Baptist Church, Fred Phelps, and his two daughters for invasion of privacy and intent to inflect emotional distress after they picketed his son’s funeral. Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder was killed in Iraq; Phelps’s hateful contingent has become infamous for picketing the funerals of fallen soldiers, claiming that those deaths are due to the United States’s toleration of homosexuality. In this case—apparently the first time a deceased soldier’s family has sued the picketers, or the first such case to be resolved—the jury awarded the plaintiff $2.9 million in compensatory damages, $6 million in punitive damages, and $2 million for causing emotional distress. The judge noted that the award “far exceeds the net worth of the defendants.” Good. Maybe they won’t be able to afford to print up any more hateful signs or afford bus tickets to picket other people’s funerals.

From Sci Fi Wire:

Television producer Greg Berlanti will try to make his jump to the big screen with a live-action Green Lantern film from Warner Brothers. Meanwhile, David Dobkin has been signed by Warner Brothers to head up a film featuring the Flash (Wally West, for those keeping score). This movie is being planned as a spin-off to follow Warner’s Justice League movie (no word yet on whether the same applies to Green Lantern). Rounding out the superhero film news, Sony has hired James Vanderbilt to write a script for Spider-Man 4. It’s not yet certain that the film will ever be made, but Sony is scoping out a 2009 release.

In news fit for Halloween, rumor has it that X-Files 2 is set to begin filming on December 10, 2007. Both David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson are reported to be back in their classic roles. Also, Ridley Scott’s production company is developing Tell-Tale, a modern-day reimagining of Edgar Allen Poe’s classic short story The Tell-Tale Heart.

Finally, another rumor has it that Josh Lucas is up to play Captain Christopher Pike in J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek movie.

Hear all about it on the Onion Radio News.

Some of my, er, nonacademic writing has just appeared in Halls of Horror (Tabletop Adventures, 2007), a generic role-playing game supplement that “provides 150 creepy descriptions in a modern setting: building interiors (and more) for use in any RPG from the pulp era to the present day” (per the publisher’s description).

Hear all about on the Onion Radio News.

Specifically, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (hat tip: Jim West). Unfortunately, we have here yet another newspaper story in which a genuinely interesting find is overblown, and one interpreter’s speculations are presented as reliable facts. After reading the report, I have absolutely no idea how Jim can call it “one of the best I’ve seen in a long time.”

The article starts out with a bit of Ron Tappy’s “spiritual biography” before it actually turns to the Tel Zayit abecedary. According to the author, PPG staff writer Mark Roth,

The discovery was described by some experts as the most important find in biblical archaeology in the last 10 years.

What “experts” are these? The find is cool and even exciting, to be sure, but “the most important find” in the last decade? If this is true, it’s been an awfully slow decade.

Roth continues:

One reason for the buzz was that the stone suggests the earliest Hebrew Scriptures could have been written down in that era — hundreds of years earlier than many scholars had believed.

The Tel Zayit abecedary suggests no such thing. All it suggests is that somebody in the tenth century knew how to write a Hebrew-style alphabet. Given that we know (e.g., from the Amarna letters) that Bronze Age (earlier than the tenth century!) Canaan supported a scribal class, why should we be surprised to find that at least one person knew how to write an alphabet? Okay, maybe the abecedary suggests a little bit more than that. Given that the inscriber seems to have made some mistakes in the alphabet, that may indicate that it was originally a student exercise or practice text—which would give us two literati in that place and time. Yes, I realize that in this paragraph I’m consciously minimizing the importance of the Tel Zayit abecedary. The abecedary really is truly interesting for the meager hints it gives us about the development of alphabetic writing, letter forms, and maybe about scribal culture in the tenth-century southern Levant. But it is still a long and winding road from “some guy in the southern Levant scratched an alphabet in stone” to “the earliest Hebrew scriptures might have been written down in the tenth century.” There is simply no link at all between the stone and the scriptures, except for the alphabet. If you want to try to use an artifact to show literacy in the tenth century, the Gezer calendar is a much, much better bet (and even it can’t give you “some the scriptures might have been written in tenth century”).

According to Roth,

For Dr. Tappy, the alphabet stone also suggests not only that King Solomon was a real historical figure, but that he did in fact have a growing kingdom at the time, because Tel Zayit sits on the border of Solomon’s Judah and the kingdom of Philistia, where the Philistines lived.

Can anybody spell “circular reasoning”? What about “begging the question”? I sincerely hope that Tappy was more careful about what he said than Roth was about what he wrote. The Tel Zayit abecedary has not a thing in the world to do with the historicity of Solomon. The physical location of Tel Zayit has not a thing in the world to do with the historicity of Solomon. Just to be clear, let’s spell out the necessary chain of reasoning here. “The Bible says that Solomon reigned in Judah in the tenth century BCE. Well, the Bible doesn’t precisely say the tenth century BCE, but we can place Solomon there thanks to working backwards from secure dates. The Bible says that Solomon had a large kingdom that butted up against Philistine territory in the west. If we map the Judean-Philistine frontier as described in the Bible, Tel Zayit lies along that vague frontier. Some guy in the tenth century wrote an alphabet on a stone. Therefore, the Bible is right both about Solomon’s existence and the extent of his kingdom, at least in the west.” Say what? If the Tel Zayit stone read, “This is the border of Solomon’s kingdom,” that would be relevant. But it doesn’t; it’s just an alphabet (and a possibly mangled one at that). I’ve already blogged about this at length (here, here, here, and here; see also this guest post by Paul Iversen).

In the PPG article, Tappy again (see my earlier posts on the abecedary; links above) puts forth the notion that the stone was intended to have apotropaic powers:

While some have suggested the alphabet stone might have been used to train scribes, Dr. Tappy, the G. Albert Shoemaker professor of Bible and archaeology at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, favors another theory.

The stone was part of a wall when it was found, he said, and “I do know that within a reasonable period of time after this period, the ancients believed the alphabet itself had power.”

Since Tel Zayit probably sat on the edge of Solomon’s kingdom, Dr. Tappy said, it’s possible the stone was built into the wall of the city as mystical protection against Judah’s enemies.

“I think the stone bespeaks an attempt to establish a presence in that part of the region, and if already the ancients were thinking of the alphabet as having magical powers to ward off evil, that may be another good reason to have it down there on the border.”

Yes, the stone was found in a wall, but all of the reports from the excavation, including Tappy’s own at last year’s SBL meeting, point to the stone’s presence in the wall as a secondary usage. Moreover, if I understood Tappy’s SBL presentation correctly, the alphabet would not even have been visible on the stone given its location and orientation in the wall. Moreover, the bowl-shaped hollow on one side of the stone (opposite the alphabet) seems hardly sensible if the stone were intended from the very beginning to be a wall fixture. The wall mounting seems, based on those reports, to be a secondary usage (for more on this, see Paul Iversen’s guest post, linked above). But be all of that as it may, note again how the presumption of the biblical extent of Solomon’s kingdom drives the interpretation of the stone’s function. The reasoning is worthy of insertion into the theme from the Thomas Crown Affair (“Round, like a circle in a spiral … never ending or beginning, on an ever-spinning wheel”).

The remainder of the article actually does give some useful information about tels, and about how archaeologists work on tels, but for me all of that is overshadowed by the huge leaping assumptions that govern the first part of the report.

This post continues my series of posts debunking some of the Tanakh-related silliness in Steve Berry’s Da Vinci Code-wannabe novel The Alexandria Link. Please read part 1 and part 2 if you haven’t already.

The Alexandria Link is a novel brimming with conspiracies, all centered around what must be the worst-kept secret in the world, the survival of materials from the library of Alexandria. One of the conspiratorial forces is a not-very-secret society of European businessmen, the Order of the Golden Fleece. The leader of the Order’s ruling council—a man named Hermann (I’m not sure of all the spellings of proper nouns, as my copy of the book is the audio version), who occupies something called the Blue Chair—knows all about George Haddad’s “research,” and wants to prove it true by means of documents from the library of Alexandria. Hermann thinks that if Haddad’s theories—remember, Haddad claims that the pre-exilic Israelites and Judeans actually lived in Asir, not Palestine—could be proven, both Israel and Saudi Arabia would be destablized, and the members of the Order would be ready to pounce on the new economic opportunities this destabilization would afford. (For some reason, Hermann doesn’t seem to have considered that destabilization of Israel and Saudi Arabia would likely lead to a shooting war, and perhaps even a nuclear one—or maybe he thinks that, too, would be good for business.)

In chapter 57 of the novel, Hermann and other members of the Order of the Golden Fleece, including one Henrik Thorvaldsen (one of the good guys), have gathered at Hermann’s estate for the Order’s winter meeting. Hermann brings forward his proposal for the destabilization of Israel and Saudi Arabia, which elicits a skeptical response.

“Displacing the Jews is impossible and ridiculous,” one of the members said from the floor. Thorvaldsen knew the man, a Norwegian heavy into North Atlantic fishing. “Chronicles makes clear that God chose Jerusalem and sanctified the temple there. I know my Bible! First Kings says God gave Solomon one tribe so David would have a lamp before him in Jerusalem, the city he chose for himself. The re-establishment of modern Israel was not an accident. Many believe it came by heavenly inspiration.” Several other members echoed the observation with Bible passages of their own, from Chronicles and Psalms.

“And what if all that you quote is false?” [Hermann asked.]

Leaving aside the fact that Berry’s scenario of European business leaders quoting scripture in pro-Zionist rapture-ready fashion is even less realistic than George Haddad’s geographical fancies, Hermann’s question is actually quite interesting, and is one that biblical scholars are constantly asking of their source material. If you’re not already in on this conversation, I recommend you begin with either The Bible Unearthed or David and Solomon by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman. There are plenty of reasons for asking whether the biblical stories about David and Solomon—not to mention Joshua, Moses, and Abraham—really “tell it like it was.” But the real questions to be addressed about the historical in/accuracies of the Bible are much, much more interesting than the silly geographical nonsense put forward in The Alexandria Link.

Much of what Hermann tells the Order in chapter 57 is simply a retread of the same ground covered in earlier expositions of Haddad’s theories (e.g., by Larry Daly in chapter 52, for which see my previous post). However, Hermann also holds forth on the history of the Bible, and makes some ludicrous statements along the way.

“And how do we know of [the Abrahamic] covenant?” Hermann asked. “Only one source: the Old Testament … But its authenticity is seriously in doubt.”

So far, so good. Far from describing any of the legitimate reasons to question the historicity of the Abrahamic covenant, however, Hermann offers a terribly garbled account of textual transmission.

“If I were to have a deed to each one of your estates, documents that were decades old, translated from your respective languages by people long dead by people who could not even speak your language, would not each one of you question its authenticity? Would you not want more proof than an unverified and unauthenticated translation?” Hermann paused. “Yet we have accepted the Old Testament without question as the absolute Word of God …”

—no, Berry really has a German say that to a roomful of European business moguls—

“… What do you know of this ‘Word of God’? You know its history? Its author? Its translator? Those words were written thousands of years ago by unknown scribes in Old Hebrew, a language dead now for more than two thousand years. What do you know of Old Hebrew? … Your lack of knowledge is understandable. It was a highly inflected language in which the import of words was conveyed by their context rather than their spelling. The same word could and did have several distinct meanings, depending on how it was used. Not until centuries after the Old Testament was first written did Jewish scholars translate those words into the Hebrew of the time. And yet those scholars could not even speak Old Hebrew. They simply guessed at the meaning, or even worse, changed the meaning. Then, centuries passed, and more scholars, this time Christian, translated the words again. They too could not speak Old Hebrew, so they too guessed. With all due respect to your beliefs, we have no idea as to the Word of God.”

After this exchange, Hermann goes into his own riff on Haddad’s geographical theories, even purporting to show the assembled order a map outlining “the land of Moses.” No, really.

Hermann’s notion of later translators muffing the Tanakh through linguistic ignorance is a theme that runs through the novel, and deserves a bit of attention here. Berry has Hermann describe Hebrew as “a highly inflected language.” Well, I suppose that’s right, as far as it goes, though I’m not sure what it means to refer to any language as highly inflected. Far from making a language less precise, though, inflection actually aids precision. According to the Oxford American Dictionary, “to inflect,” when used as a grammatical term, means “change the form of (a word) to express a particular grammatical function or attribute, typically tense, mood, person, number, case, and gender.” Thus, a higher degree of inflection actually yields a higher degree of grammatical precision. To illustrate this, let me give an example from my first-year Hebrew students’ recent homework. The artificial Hebrew phrase read אשׁת האישׁ הרע. If the Hebrew word order were reproduced in English, this phrase would read “the wife of the man—the evil one.” But who is evil, the man or the wife? Anybody who has had, oh, about half a semester of elementary biblical Hebrew can plainly see that the adjective רע agrees with אישׁ, not with אשׁת (that is, the construct form of אשׁה) in gender. Therefore, the phrase must be read “the evil man’s wife.” There is no ambiguity here, and it’s precisely the inflectedness of Hebrew that erases any ambiguity here. That’s not to say that Hebrew is never ambiguous. Far from it. Indeed, narrative ambiguity in the Hebrew Bible is one of my special areas of interest. But to go from “Hebrew is a highly inflected language” to “therefore you can barely understand it” is the height of silliness.

Next, Hermann says that, in Old Hebrew, the “import of words was conveyed by their context rather than their spelling”—as if that were not true in every human language! Hermann likes to toss around various forms of the word “mean,” so I’ll use that as an example. “Mean” can, er, mean such things as (1) to intend to convey or signify ["What does the word 'mean' mean?"]; (2) to intend something to be the case ["I meant to get milk at the grocery store, but I forgot"]; (3) to have as a consequence or result ["Of course you know, this means war"]; (4) stingy ["She felt mean at not giving a tip"]; (5) unkind or spiteful ["My little brother was mean to me"]; (6) inferior or poor ["The hotel room was mean and small"]; (7) excellent, skillful, or effective ["You are one mean cook"]; (8) mathematical average (of a particular kind) [e.g., the arithmetic mean in statistics]; (9) a condition or state midway between two extremes [e.g., the Golden Mean]. (These definitions, and some of the examples, are drawn from the Oxford American Dictionary. And it’s certainly not as if spelling were irrelevant in biblical Hebrew—ask any of my students who have ever confused אם with עם!

Hermann’s claim that “Not until centuries after the Old Testament was first written did Jewish scholars translate those words into the Hebrew of the time” is prima facie silly. Berry wants readers to regard the Aleppo Codex (et al.) as a translation from “Old Hebrew” into medieval Hebrew. The facts aren’t on his side, though. I haven’t read enough medieval Hebrew (e.g., Maimonides and so on) to know how different that is from biblical Hebrew, but I certainly have read enough biblical Hebrew alongside the Hebrew of the Dead Sea scrolls and various Hebrew inscriptions from Palestine (e.g., the Lachish letters, which I mentioned in a previous post, along with ostraca from Samaria, Yavneh Yam, and so on) to attest that the Hebrew of the seventh- and sixth-century BCE ostraca is essentialy the same as biblical Hebrew. Certainly the Dead Sea scrolls prove that the Hebrew of the medieval codices is the same as the Hebrew of the second- and first-century BCE biblical manuscripts among the Dead Sea scrolls. I don’t mean that every text is word-for-word the same, of course—that’s what makes “textual criticism” so interesting—but the language is the same sort of Hebrew. Now it may well be that in their vocalizations, the Masorets occasionally guessed, and guessed wrong; but that does not mean that the Masoretic Text represents a translation from an older form of Hebrew in to a younger form of Hebrew. The same holds, mutatis mutandis, for Hermann’s remark about Christian translators and translations (later narrowed in the novel to a focus on Jerome and the Latin Vulgate); their work was not perfect, but neither did they engage in sheer wholesale guessing.

After another exchange with other members of the Order, Hermann continues to display his (and, by extension, Berry’s, since Hermann is presented as a reliable informant on these matters) ignorance. He’s still riffing on the place-name correspondences at the heart of Haddad’s theory (which channels the real-life proposals, minimally altered, of Kamal Salibi):

“Ask yourself: why has no paleographic or archaeological evidence ever been found to substantiate biblical locations in Palestine?”

Um, Herr Hermann? It has. There are some locations whose identification is in doubt, of course. But there are some that can hardly be questioned: Hazor, Megiddo, Beth-shean, Samaria, Lachish, Jerusalem—off the top of my head. The premise is false, and therefore the question is nonsense. But Hermann’s not through spouting nonsense.

“The answer is simple: those locations are not there. They lie hundreds of miles to the south, in Saudia Arabia.”

“And why has no one ever noticed this before?” [an unidentified member of the Order asked.] Thorvaldsen appreciated the question, as he’d been thinking the same thing.

“There are only half a dozen or so scholars alive who can effectively understand Old Hebrew. None of them besides Haddad apparently was curious enough to investigate.”

If only this were meant as a comedy! But Hermann, and Berry, seem deadly serious. Only half a dozen or so scholars alive who can effectively understand Old Hebrew? Give me a break. I can stroll down the halls of UCLA and trip over more than half a dozen people who can read epigraphic Hebrew with considerable facility. Moreover, it’s just ludicrous to say that no qualified scholars have been curious enough about the locations of biblical sites to investigate. Good grief, why do you suppose so much archaeological digging has gone at, say, Tell Hazor, Tel es-Safi, Sebaste/Samaria, Beth-shean, Megiddo, Gezer, Lachish, Jericho, and so on down the line, including—as much as possible—Jerusalem? W. F. Albright and Nelson Glueck should be rolling in their graves.

Hermann goes on to give an example from Haddad’s research—I assume Berry cribbed it from Salibi’s books—purporting to illustrate and confirm Haddad’s thesis. Specifically, Hermann-channeling-Haddad-channeling-Salibi claims that biblical scholars and archaeologists have mis-identified the site of biblical Dan. Based solely on vague phonological correspondences between modern Arabic place-names in Asir and biblical Hebrew place-names, Hermann/Haddad(/Salibi?) claim(s) that Laish/Dan was really in Western Arabia. By the way, the scenario put forward in the novel also requires that Tyre and Sidon have been misidentified, and were really in West Arabia themselves—but this is disguised beneath the transliterations offered. Apparently neither Hermann, nor Haddad, nor Berry (not sure about Salibi) has bothered to learn about the Zoilos votive inscription—a Hellenistic-era inscription regarding a vow to “the god who is in Dan” (or “god of the Danites”), found at (you guessed it) Tel Dan. There’s also the Tel Dan stela, which strongly suggests that the region around Tel Dan witnessed some sort of military altercation between the Arameans and the Israelites. Yet none of this matters in Haddad’s/Berry’s fevered scenario, in which real-life evidence and arguments simply don’t exist and everything hinges on the phonological similarities (sometimes stretched quite thin) between place-names.

And then things get really goofy.

“Throughout the Old Testament["—this is Hermann speaking again, reporting to the Order on Haddad's research—"]the Jordan is noted by the Hebrew yarden, but nowhere is that term ever described as a river. The word actually means ‘to descend,’ a fall in the land. Yet translation after translation describes the Jordan as a river, its crossing a momentous event [at flood stage!—RCH]. The Palestinian Jordan River is no great waterway. The inhabitants of both banks have waded across it for centuries. But here”—he pointed to mountains that cut across the map—”is the great West Arabian escarpment, impossible to cross except where the ranges fold, and even there it’s difficult. Every instance where the Old Testament speaks of Jordan, the geography and the story match what’s on the ground here in Arabia.”

Well, now, that’s not quite right. As far as I know, the Hebrew word for “river,” נהר, is not used in apposition to the proper noun ירדן. That much seems to be accurate. There is, however, Job 40:23, where ירדן and נהר stand in synonymous parallelism with one another. Although Joshua 3–4 does not actually use the word נהר to describe the Jordan, it is absolutely clear that the story presupposes the Jordan as a body of water. Joshua 3:15 (“Now the Jordan overflows all its banks throughout the time of harvest”) is particularly overt. Hermann’s/Haddad’s/Salibi’s alternative, that the biblical Jordan is a mountain escarpment in West Arabia, just can’t fit the biblical narratives. (If your’e tempted to be skeptical of these biblical narratives anyway, that’s a completely different issue; realize that for Hermann/Haddad/Salibi to be right, the biblical narratives must be accurate right down to the place-names, but simply misinterpreted by later readers with reference to the geography.) There all these little inconvenient things like the references to “the waters of the Jordan” and “the plain of the Jordan.” And while ירדן does seem to be etymologically related to the Hebrew verb ירד, “to go down,” “going down” is a perfect description of what the Jordan River does from its headwaters on its path toward the lowest lake on earth, the Dead Sea.

Hermann is certainly not one to be deterred by the facts, though. It’s amazing how effective special pleading can be.

“Have there not been discoveries that link Palestine with the Bible?” [an anonymous member of the Order—useful only as a cardboard character to throw Hermann a question that Berry considers a softball—asked.]

“There have been discoveries, but none of the inscriptions unearthed so far proves anything. [Now Hermann is channeling Jim West.—RCH] The Moabite stele found in 1868 speaks of wars fought between Moab and Israel, as mentioned in Kings. [2 Kings 3, to be precise.—RCH] Another artifact found in the Jordan valley in 1993 says the same. [No; Hermann is referring, quite ineptly, to the Tel Dan stele, which speaks of a battle between Aram and Israel and was found not in "the Jordan valley," but at the aforementioned Tel Dan.] But neither say that Israel was located in Palestine. Assyrian and Babylonian records tell of conquests in Israel, but none says where that Israel was located.”

Hermann goes on to try to claim that the Mesha stela/Moabite stone, the Tel Dan stela, and the various Assyrian and Babylonian inscriptions refer to battles fought in Arabia rather than in Palestine. Balderdash. But again, it’s amazing what special pleading can get you.

“Not one remnant of the first Solomon’s temple remains. Nothing has ever been found, though Kings says he used great stones, costly stones, hewed stones. Would not a block have survived?”

This argument is both silly and disengenuous at the same time. If there ever was a “Solomon’s temple,” the cost of its building materials and their manner of preparation are completely irrelevant to the likelihood of our finding them (this is the silly part). Of more importance (this is the disingenuous part) is the fact that the presumed site of the pre-exilic Judean temple in Jerusalem (let’s not call it “Solomon’s” just yet) is underneath a Muslim sacred site currently in use, which precludes any real archaeological investigation of the site. Moreover, the biblical narrative claims that the “first temple” (surely there was some sort of shrine in Jerusalem or the vicinity long before the pre-exilic Judean temple) was destroyed by the Babylonians during their invasion (dated to 586 BCE)—an entirely plausible claim. The remains would likely either have been cleared away or re-used to construct the so-called “second temple,” and here we must really distinguish between a whole series of “second temples”: Zerubbabel’s (if it’s for real), the Hasmoneans’, and Herod’s, at least. At each stage of subsequent construction on the site, it’s quite possible that rubble from an earlier edifice was cleared away or re-used. For all we know, some of the “great stones, costly stones, hewed stones” used to construct the walls of Herod’s temple were re-used from “Solomon’s” temple. Besides, “no archaeological signs of Solomon’s temple” is a far cry from “the pre-exilic Israelite and Judean experience was really in Asir, not Palestine.”

He [Hermann] came to the point. “What happened is that scholars have allowed their preconceptions to color their interpretations. They wanted Palestine to be the land of the ancient Jews from the Old Testament, so the end governed the means. Reality is far different.”

Well, the last line is correct: reality is far different than Hermann’s fantasies.

“Archaeology has proven one thing: that the Palestine of the Old Testament consisted of people living in hamlets or small towns, mainly scrub farmers, with only fragments of high culture. A rustic society, not the highly astute Israelites of the post-Solomon era.”

Here again, Berry has Hermann get close to some interesting facts, but then he spins them in entirely the wrong way. I will refer you once more to the work of Finkelstein and Silberman as a good entry point into these issues. What Hermann says about the population of Palestine holds good for the early Iron Age, in general. But there were, nevertheless, large (for the time) population centers with plenty of evidence of high culture, including Egyptian high culture (Beth-shean, for example). The later you get into the Iron Age, the more the “big” cities grow, and the more high culture you can observe (e.g., the ivories from Megiddo and Samaria). Berry, speaking through Hermann, does not seem to appreciate the really interesting implications of these findings; instead, he simply transfers the biblical picture of “post-Solomon Israel” to a different geographical locale. Again I say, “Silly.”

There’s more foolishness to come later in the book (and, hence, more posts to come in this series). It’s just ridiculous. A consortium of European businesspeople want to call into question the validity of God’s promises to Abraham. To do this, they send an operative off in search of an Old Testament in Old Hebrew, supposedly to be found among the documents rescued from the library of Alexandria, so they can prove that the real geographical setting for the narratives was West Arabia instead of Palestine. They should have just reprinted a bajillion copies of Tommy Thompson’s book on the patriarchal narratives, which is a far more interesting, powerful, and realistic critique of the historicity of Abraham and so forth.

(P.S. Duane, am I getting any better at ranting? I feel that I still don’t have the knack.)

About three weeks ago, I began a series of posts reviewing some specious plot points in the recent novel The Alexandria Link, by Steve Berry. In that earlier post, I showed how one of the story’s protagonists, Palestinian biblical scholar George Haddad (as one reviewer put it, “A Palestinian named ‘George’?”), fails to get basic facts straight. (Yes, I know he’s a fictional character. I’m not really fisking George. I’m really exposing Berry’s mistakes.) Before George has time to explain more to Cotton and Pam Malone, two mysterious figures—Cotton takes them for Mossad agents—appear and shoot Haddad. Cotton takes clues from Hadad’s apartment and sets out on a quest to find the object of Haddad’s interest: the lost library of Alexandria.

Several chapters later, in Washington, DC, several characters gather to try to understand why so many people want Haddad dead. The dramatis personae here are US government operative Larry Daly; Stephanie Nelle, who had been Cotton Malone’s handler when he worked for an intelligence operation within the US Department of Justice (huh? they have an intel branch?); Cassiopeia Witt, a European spy; and Mossad agent Heather Dixon. Quoting the conversation in full would require reproducing virtually the whole chapter, which would be inappropriate and a bit mind-numbing. Therefore, I’ll just try to hit the highlowlights of the chapter.

Daly tells Stephanie Nelle (Berry has a truly annoying habit of defaulting to last names for his male characters and first names for his female characters—Cotton Malone is consistently “Malone,” while his ex-wife is consistently “Pam”; Larry Daly is “Daly,” Brent Green is “Green,” but Stephanie Nelle is always “Stephanie”) that back in the 1970s, George Haddad sat down with a Saudi Arabian “gazette” (I’m sure it was “really” a gazetteer) and began to translate the place names into “Old Hebrew.” (In an author’s note at the end of the book, Berry says that he used “Old Hebrew” consistently because “biblical Hebrew” or “rabbinical Hebrew” or any other term for this language would have been confusing—showing again that Berry barely knows what he’s talking about.) “Why he was doing that,” Daly says, “I have no idea. Sounds like watching paint dry.” Indeed.

But the kicker is that, according to Daly, Haddad noticed that “some of the locations were biblical.” That is, he could identify phonological similarities between the Arabian place-names and biblical place-names. Hardly a shock, given that Hebrew and Arabic belong to the same language family. In fact, early “explorers” and “biblical archaeologists” like Nelson Glueck (to choose but one example) relied on such correspondences to propose certain biblical site identifications in Palestine. The novel’s Haddad, however, found so many correspondences in a 400 x 100 mile strip of West Arabia that he concluded the biblical references were actually to those West Arabian sites.

“Haddad is an expert [in Old Hebrew],” Daly said. “And here’s the problem. These biblical place names he noticed were concentrated in a strip about four hundred miles long and one hundred miles wide, in the western portion of Saudia Arabia.”

“Asir?” Cassiopeia asked. “Where Mecca is?”

Daly nodded. “Haddad spent years looking at other locales but could find no similar concentration of Old Hebrew biblical place names anywhere else in the world, and that included Palestine itself.”

Stephanie realized that the Old Testament was a record of ancient Jews. So if the place names in modern-day West Arabia, translated into Old Hebrew, were actually biblical locations, that could have enormous political implications. “Are you saying there were no Jews in the Holy Land?”

“Of course not,” Dixon said. “We were there. All he’s saying is that Haddad believed the Old Testament was a record of the Jewish experience in West Arabia, before they traveled north to what we know as Palestine.”

“The Bible came from Arabia?” Stephanie asked.

“That’s one way of putting it,” Daly said. “Haddad’s conclusions were confirmed when he started matching geography. For more than a century, archaeologists have tried to find in Palestine sites that match biblical descriptions, but nothing fits. Haddad discovered that if you match locales in West Arabia, translated into Old Hebrew, with biblical geography, location after location matches.”

Clearly, Berry’s characters live in a parallel universe where “world-renowned expert” means something like our “crackpot.” Daly’s “nothing fits” in the final paragraph quoted above is perhaps meant even within the story frame as an exaggeration, but it’s a silly one. What about Bethlehem (Arabic Bayt Laḥm, Hebrew Beit Leḥem)? Jericho (Arabic ’Ariḥa, Hebrew Yeriḥo)? Bethel (Arabic Beitin, Hebrew Beitel)? Beth-Shean (Arabic Bayt Šan or Beisan, Hebrew Beit Še’an)? Gibeon (Arabic el-Jib, Hebrew Gibe’on)? Shiloh (Arabic Seilun, Hebrew Shiloh)? Shall I go on? No; I’ll let Todd Bolen add more, or correct any of these that are in error, if need be. It’s just not the case that the Arabic place-names in Palestine don’t align well with biblical place-names. I’m not saying that every proposed identification is perfect, of course, and a number of sites remain unsuccessfully identified. But there are also cases where investigators have pretty well connected certain sites with biblical places even in the absence of phonological similarities. I’m sure that Aren Maier could give an example or two.

To cite but one example for myself: as I understand it, there is virtually zero doubt that biblical Lachish is to be identified with the Lakiša of the Amarna letters, with the city that Sennacherib besieged c. 701 BCE, and with modern Tell el-Duweir. The Lachish letters, from a later period (c. 586 BCE), seal the deal. In Haddad’s scenario, Israel and Judah were in West Arabia, but after the exile, the “returnees” just couldn’t hack living there, so they migrated northward to Palestine and renamed a bunch of older places to match the old familiar place-names from West Arabia. The continuity between Amarna-age, Iron Age, Persian era, and even Roman-era place names in Palestine pretty much skewers this silliness, but to stick with Lachish: for Haddad’s theory to hold water, Jews would have had to migrate under Persian imperial authority from Babylonia to West Arabia, pack up their belongings including inscribed potsherds, migrate with Persian permission to Palestine, successfully displace the local inhabitants, and bury the aforementioned Lachish letters in precisely the right archaeological stratum. This strains credulity to the breaking point. The parsimonious idea that the Amarma age Lakiša is the biblical Lachish, which is the same site as Tell el-Duweir where the Lachish letters were found will surely win this fight.

Berry’s novel is a kind of Indiana-Jones-meets-Jason-Bourne scenario, so there has to be a quest to find proof for Haddad’s theory. One of the conceits of the novel is that many of the books and scrolls once contained in the now-lost library of Alexandria were smuggled out before the library itself was destroyed. As the conversation mentioned above continues, Daly tells his companions that Haddad believed proof of his theory could be found in the lost library of Alexandria.

“What kind of proof could there possibly be?” Stephanie asked.

Daly seemed impatient. “Haddad told the Palestinian authorities five years ago that he believed ancient documents could be used to verify his conclusions. Just an Old Testament, written before the time of Christ in its original Hebrew, could prove decisive. None older than the tenth century exist today …”

That tenth-century Bible is, of course, the famous Aleppo Codex. In the “Author’s Note” at the end of the novel, Berry writes:

The Aleppo Codex (chapter 23), dated from 900 CE, is on display in Jerusalem and remains the oldest surviving Old Testament manuscript. A Bible from a time before Christ, though, like the one noted in chapter 79, would certainly change everything that is known about the Old Testament.

As far as I know, the Aleppo Codex is still the oldest known bound copy of the complete Hebrew Bible. But here, Daly—and through him, Berry—displays a woeful ignorance of the textual history of the Hebrew Bible. Daly, and all other characters in the book (including the putative expert, Haddad) treat the Hebrew Bible as a single, unified composition. The fact that the individual books of the Hebrew Bible originated, for the most part, more or less independently of one another, at widely varying times (how widely varying is debated, but not the fact of the variance), is one of which the novel’s characters (and its author?) remain completely ignorant. Elsewhere in the novel, someone states that Haddad was hoping to find, among the documents from the library of Alexandria, a complete Bible in Old Hebrew dating to the fourth century BCE. That would be a mighty nifty trick, considering that such a Bible would certainly not include the book of Daniel, and might not include one or more of Esther, Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles, Ecclesiastes, or the canonical Psalter, depending on the dates at which these documents reached their familiar canonical (so to speak) forms.

Moreover, if you’re anything like me, you want to reach through the novel’s pages, grab George Haddad by the lapels, shake him around a little, and scream in his face, “Come on, man! Haven’t you heard of the Dead Sea scrolls?” Over the past several months, tens of thousands of visitors have filed patiently through the San Diego Natural History Museum precisely to view fragments of biblical texts that date as much as 150 years before the time of Christ. Yet Haddad and all the other characters in the novel seem, to repeat myself, utterly ignorant of the Dead Sea scrolls’ existence. The Dead Sea scrolls—which do not include copies of the entire Tanakh, but come relatively close, close enough to be exciting to text critics—have been known for half a century (by readers of Time magazine, but not by world-renowned biblical scholar George Haddad!), and agree with the Aleppo Codex’s Masoretic Text for the majority of the Tanakh. This is not to say that there are no differences between the Dead Sea scrolls’ biblical manuscripts and the Masoretic text-type; quite to the contrary, there are many differences, and these are quite intriguing. But given our knowledge of the Dead Sea scrolls, one justly wonders just what sort of proof Haddad might expect to find in an old biblical manuscript. If he were to find the same place-names as in the Aleppo Codex, that would prove nothing, for then his “older, better” Bible would not depart from the younger copy; if he were to find different place-names, then these would not comport with the names he retrojected from his Saudi Arabian atlas, and his data would fall out from under him. Only a Bible that was dramatically different in content would do the trick, yet what the novel posits (I’ll give more details later) is merely the manipulation of place-names.

By the way, the Bible’s own account of Israel’s connections to West Arabia is much more interesting than the one posited in the novel. The biblical writers were well aware of West Arabia—they called it, or the southern part of it at least, “Midian.” The biblical story of Moses’s life—whatever their probative status for reconstructing Israelite history—assign him a Midianite wife and, by extension, in-laws. The book of Exodus credits Moses’s Midianite father-in-law with inventing the Israelite’s hierarchical system of courts (out of fear that his son-in-law would get judicial burnout). At least this one Israelite or Judean author felt that Israel and/or Judah owed a cultural debt to West Arabia. But no biblical author locates Israel there geographically.

Well, that’s about all the nonsense that bubbles out of the characters’ conversation in chapter 52. Some of you may still be thinking that I’m wasting my time arguing for good sense against fictional characters in a novel. Well, it’s not quite that simple. Berry writes in the “Author’s Note”:

In 1985, [Kamal] Salibi detailed this theory in a book entitled The Bible Came from Arabia. Salibi expounded on his ideas in three other works: Who Was Jesus? (1988), Secrets of the Bible People (1988), and The Historicity of Biblical Israel (1998). George Hadad’s experiences in how he noted a connection between West Arabia and the Bible, detailed in chapter 52, mimic Salibi’s. Also, the Saudi government did in fact bulldoze entire villages after the publication of Salibi’s first book. To this day, the Saudis refuse to allow any scientific digging in Asir. The maps in chapters 57 and 68 are from Salibi’s research. The idea that the land promised by God in the Abrahamic covenant lies in a region far removed from what we regard as Palestine is, to say the least, controversial. But as Salibi and George Hadad both noted, the matter could be easily proven or dismissed through archaeology.

Clearly, Berry thinks that he is having his characters advance a genuine theory—much like Dan Brown seemed to believe parts of his own fiction, and possibly to draw on the crackpot theories of Leigh and Baigent (Holy Blood, Holy Grail). It’s just possible that somebody might buy it (although the reviewers have not been kind)—and that makes it worthwhile to discuss and debunk the claims in favor of reality. The real debates over the accuracy of biblical historical narratives are far more interesting than Haddad’s channeling of Salibi’s provocative but completely misguided theory.

There’s more to come.

I just learned a few minutes ago about Free Rice, a website where you can take a vocabulary quiz and feed the poor all at the same time—in fact, there’s a causal relationship between the two. Go play a word game for a while and feed some hungry people.