Queries & Comments

BAR Unfair to Quote Dever’s Popular Lectures and Footnotes

To the Editor:

Your highly selective use of quotes (“Whither ASOR?” BAR 09:05) on my view of “Biblical archaeology”—most from older popular lectures or taken out of context from the footnotes of scholarly articles—seriously distorts my position. You might have quoted the Biblical Archeologist (Spring 1982, p. 103), where I wrote: “I do not deny that ‘biblical archaeology’ exists, but I do question whether it can be an academic discipline in the strict sense. In my view, ‘biblical archaeology’ is not a branch of archaeology at all. It is rather an interdisciplinary pursuit—a ‘dialogue’ between specialists in Near Eastern archaeology and biblical historians. This pursuit can (and indeed in our case must) be scholarly … ” (italics mine).

It is in that sense that I use the word “amateur” (to which you take such objection) to describe most “biblical archaeologists,” i.e., part-time workers in the field of archaeology. Incidentally, my definition is not novel. It agrees with that of the late G. Ernest Wright, the acknowledged father of “Biblical archaeology,” who described this enterprise as “a special ‘armchair’ variety of general archaeology” (Biblical Archaeology, p. 17).