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Archaeological Commentary on the Bible
By Gonzalo Baez-Camargo
Garden City, Doubleday, 1984. 289 pp. $17.95.

In recent decades, as archaeology has evolved into a highly technical scientific enterprise, interest in the lands of the Bible has also increased. These developments have produced a greater need to communicate archaeological discoveries to a popular audience. Since theological assumptions have frequently affected archaeological interpretation, there is a genuine fear in the academic community that this task will not be performed responsibly. This volume, already celebrated as a reliable archaeological guide for the general reader, will do nothing to alleviate that concern.

The author is the late Gonzalo Báez-Comargo, a well known journalist and linguist in the Spanish speaking world, who served as translator and special consultant in the United Bible Society. His travels in the Middle East and contacts with Israeli archaeologists stimulated him to produce this verse-by-verse archaeological commentary, designed "for the ordinary student of the Bible who has neither the time nor the means to delve into the imposing bibliography on the subject." Each listing is documented and correlated by abbreviation to a bibliography; there is also a general index. With the encouragement of his UBS colleague, Eugene A. Nida, the Spanish edition was revised and translated into English, and is dedicated to the "five great ones of Biblical Archaeology"-Petrie, Albright, Glueck, de Vaux, and Kenyon, now all deceased.

It should be stated immediately that the aim and method of this study may appear impressive and attractive, but it is a mere facade, concealing the wrong-headed approach to archaeology that has dominated much of biblical scholarship for far too long. The author seems completely unaware of the current debate that has challenged the legitimacy of biblical archaeology as a discipline, reflected even in the writings of the "great ones" that he honors. Such inept and naive efforts 'to use archaeology to prove the Bible can only further discredit the necessary and legitimate attempt to synthesize ancient texts with material cultural remains. The discussion is not only often superficial and out-of-date, but also imbalanced. Almost half of the biblical books are discussed in less than a page or not at all. Of 30 illustrations, only five refer to the Hebrew Bible. The entire Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha are passed over in silence. Nor is the reader put in touch with many of the accessible and primary contributions in the literature. Even the familiar travel guides are absent-G. Lankester Harding's The Antiquities of Jordan (1959), John Wilkinson's Jerusalem As Jesus Saw It (1 979), or Jerome Murphy-O'Connor's The Holy Land (1980), just to mention a few. Basic to the discussion are only a handful of popular journals and books, although over a hundred are listed in the bibliography.

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Far more disturbing than these inadequacies are the numerous errors in fact or judgment that riddle the discussion. Just a few examples will illustrate the point. Allusions to the customs of the patriarchal period are found in texts from Ebla, Mari, Nuzi, Amarna, and Ugarit, sources ranging from 2300 to 1200 B.C. No mention is made of George Mendenhall's fundamental analysis of the Mosaic covenant and Near Eastern suzerainty-vassal treaties or his provocative thesis about the "conquest" of Palestine. He seems unaware that Glueck's view of the early Iron Age Edomite settlements and identification of Sela with Umm al-Biyara has been challenged by Crystal Bennett's excavations on the Transjordanian plateau. The seal of "Amos the scribe" is not in Hebrew script, nor are the figures in Persian garb; the script is commonly identified as Moabite, and the figures Mesopotamian (Isaiah 1: 1). Some of the mistakes are derived from indiscretion in the use of his sources. The Murashu documents from Nippur are not the archives of "a Jewish family of the fifth century B.C." (contra G. Cornfeld), but simply the receipts of a commercial firm referring to Jews. The minting of coins was not a Greek invention of the fifth century B.C. (contra G. Ernest Wright), but of Lydia in the seventh century.

The sparse treatment of the New Testament is characterized by similar errors and oversights. At Mark 7:31, the German expedition to Umm Qeis (ancient Gadara) should have been mentioned. The Egyptian records of a provincial census have nothing to do with the client-kingdom of Herod the Great (Luke 2:2). Herod Agrippa I (A.D. 37-44) ruled as a client king, not a Roman governor (Acts 12:1). The Nabataean ethnarch of Damascus was administrator of a commercial colony, not governor of the Roman city (II Cor. 11:32). The temple at Jerusalem was not under construction when the revolt took place in A.D. 66, but was completed shortly before the event (compare Josephus, AJ xx.ix.7 [219] with p. 226). Hadrian did not build the temple to Jupiter Capitolinus on "the very spot" of the Jewish temple (p. 215), but in another part of the city (Wilkinson, p. 178). Christianity became the official religion of the Roman state in A.D. 395, after Constantine's reign.

The dissemination of so much inaccurate information is to be regretted, especially since most of the errors could have been avoided if the author bad simply absorbed the literature listed in his bibliography. Some of the blame should be shared by Nida for encouraging the English translation and H. P. Scanlin, who was responsible for the "careful checking of the sources." But an archaeological commentary on the whole Bible is an ambitious undertaking for anyone. The mere existence of the data from so many diverse cultures and different languages of the ancient world is a sufficient deterrent to a comprehensive analysis by a solitary author. What is to be preferred is a team of scholars collaborating on such a project, or a narrower chronological scope. Philip King's current work on an archaeological commentary of the Minor Prophets (Amos, Hosea, Micah) offers what may be consid-

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ered as a reasonable and manageable enterprise and it can only be hoped that similar studies will be encouraged and promoted.

David F. Graf
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan