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Transcription
The podcast discusses the influence of Orientalism on the study of ancient religion in Jerusalem. Orientalism, coined by Edward Said, refers to the Western style of dominating and exerting authority over the East. Early European and American tourists viewed Jerusalem through an Orientalist lens, hoping to find evidence that validated the Bible and justified European colonization. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi Codices in the mid-1900s further fueled the development of biblical scholarship. The scrolls contained some of the oldest known copies of Hebrew Bible texts and shed light on the community at Qumran, potentially the Essenes. However, the identity of the authors, when the scrolls were hidden, and the connection to Qumran remain uncertain. Similarly, the Nag Hammadi Codices, Gnostic texts written in Coptic, were discovered in Egypt. These findings were influenced by Orientalism and were later studied by European and American scholars. Hello and welcome! It's been a long time, but it's great to be back discussing ancient religion once again here on the podcast. I'm super excited about today's topic, as we'll be discussing archaeology in Jerusalem and the problems surrounding it, both past and present. I've got my coffee here, and I'm ready to go, so grab a cup of your own, sit back with me, and let's talk. History is inseparable from religion. At least, that's what a historian might tell you. The development of religion may be one of the most common ways that historians mark time. This is true for myself as a scholar of both Middle Eastern history and classical studies. I'm kind of used to studying religion at this point. Today, I aim to explore the development of Judeo-Christian religion through the lens of forgotten and found sacred texts, which have not only influenced the way we think about religion, archaeology, and scholarship today, but have been influenced by the same since the 1800s. Coined by Palestinian scholar and author Edward Said, the term Orientalism is the foundation for our discussion today. Said published a book with this term as the title in 1978, in which he wrote about the definitions of Orientalism and their impact on East-West relationships. He defined Orientalism first as an area of academic study, i.e., Oriental studies, which is kind of problematic in itself. Second, he defined Orientalism as a system of thought that draws a distinctive line between East and West, the Orient and the Occident. And lastly, Said writes of, and this is a direct quote, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. In other words, this third definition positions Orientalism as the system of ideas and beliefs, which gives the West its own power to exert over the East. The West may then use this power to colonize other territories and put special emphasis on their otherness. Orientalism suggests that natives have no daily routine and instead have exotic and mysterious ways of life which can never be understood by the colonizers. East and West don't overlap. They're mutually exclusive. So how does Orientalism frame much of the biblical scholarship that came out of this region in the mid-1900s? Well, it wouldn't have been possible without tourism, which really took off as an industry in the Middle East during the late 19th century. The first European and American tourists who encountered Jerusalem in the 1800s were led by this notion of Orientalism. Jerusalem was the land of the Bible, and for those visiting the region, it was supposed to be unchanged since ancient times. Mark Twain once visited Palestine in 1867 and wrote about his trip in his book, The Innocence Abroad, which was published two years later, in 1869. He had a lot to say about the Holy Land, and Jerusalem in particular, calling the city mournful, dreary, and lifeless. It's hard to know whether or not Twain, who was famously a satirist, really believed his own claims, though. He may have just been making a mockery of other travelogues of his day. But regardless of this fact, his words and attitudes towards Palestine were less than positive, giving us some insight into popular American and European thought on the Holy Land at the time. And Mark Twain wasn't alone in his thinking. Archaeologists and explorers were led to Jerusalem not only by the possibility for great treasure, but the idea that they might perhaps find something that proved the Bible to be true, literal or not. Louis-Félicien de Celcy of France and Charles Wilson and Charles Warren of England were three such explorers who all dug in Jerusalem in the 1860s. These men were responsible for the findings of the Tomb of the Kings, Wilson's Arch, and Warren's Shaft, respectively. The explorers believed in a European race to recover the biblical secrets locked beneath the Holy City, says author Andrew Lawler in his book Under Jerusalem, what is essentially a case study of quote-unquote bad archaeology in Jerusalem. Their Orientalist beliefs led them to think that they had the authority to dig where they wanted, when they wanted, and how they wanted, in the hopes of finding any shred of evidence which would prove the white European Christian right to the Holy City by way of Judeo-Christian tradition and colonialism. Okay, we've discussed the background of Orientalism and how it affected early modern travel to the Levant, and now we can discuss the findings of the two major forgotten and found texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Codices. Both were uncovered in the mid-to-late 1940s and have since caused the development of their own fields of scholarship surrounding the text. For the purposes of this discussion, let's begin with the discovery of the scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered in 1947 in some caves north of Khirbet Qumran, a once-occupied ancient settlement which is located just 25 miles east of Jerusalem, near the coast of the Dead Sea. Frank Moore Cross, an American scholar from McCormick University who worked on the scrolls, described their finding like this. Two Bedouin shepherd lads – yes, he called them lads – were grazing their sheep and came upon the caves. When one of them, Muhammad Adib, threw a rock into the cave, the two friends heard a shattering noise instead of rock hitting rock. Afraid of the possibility of djinn or wild animals, they fled and went back later to enter the cave in the hopes that there would be gold. Instead of gold, Muhammad Adib and his friend Ahmed Muhammad found some scrolls in jars in this cave, and these were the original seven Dead Sea Scrolls. So, in short, the scrolls were discovered by two Bedouin shepherds who just so happened upon them. It wasn't until 1949, after the creation of the State of Israel, that excavations began in Qumran with Roland Deveau, who was a French-Dominican priest from Les Cols Bibliques. In total, the excavations have now turned out about 15,000 fragments from 800 to 900 different texts found scattered throughout Qumran's 11 caves and mostly written in Hebrew. But here's where things get a little dicey. The Dead Sea Scrolls contain some of the oldest known copies of texts from the Hebrew Bible, but they also include texts written about the actual community that lived at Qumran. The efforts of many European and American scholars on trying to ascertain just who lived there has led some to believe that these people were the Essenes, a Jewish sect written about by a few ancient writers like Philo, Josephus, and Pliny the Elder. In fact, these three writers have the only known references to the Essenes in history. Each of their accounts presents something a little different, but we can say with some certainty that the Essenes were probably a celibate male community that believed strongly in ritual purity. Whether or not the archaeology supports the fact that the Essenes were the Qumran community remains to be 100% proven, but that hasn't stopped archaeologists and scholars from running with that hypothesis and just taking it at face value. And why take it at face value? Well, the Essenes believed in a teacher of righteousness whom some scholars have compared to Jesus. So if the Essenes were early followers of the Jesus cult and held some of the oldest copies of the Torah, it's no surprise that some non-native Christians would recognize this as a Christian claim to the Holy Land. What's missing from the equation is 1. Who wrote the scrolls? 2. When were they hidden? And 3. Were they written and hidden by the same people? And did those people live at Qumran? It's bad archaeology to accept the first answer that makes sense and not dig any further. Pun intended. The story of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices is a similar one, equally steeped in Orientalism as the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Nag Hammadi Codices, a collection of Gnostic texts written in Coptic, were discovered in 1945 at Jabal al-Tarif, Egypt by a local farmer named Muhammad Ali, or perhaps his brother Abdul al-Najd. While digging in the area for fertilizer, he found a jar that contained part of the Nag Hammadi library. James Robinson, an American scholar from Claremont Graduate University, would later write a pretty convoluted tale of the events leading up to the discovery about 30 years later. Robinson mentioned that Muhammad Ali originally left the jar, fearing it contained a djinn, and did not return to the site for 30 years due to some murders that happened nearby. Robinson claimed that these murders were, quote-unquote, not altogether uncommon happenings in the blood feuds still found in rural Egypt. But the episode bears no real significance to the discovery of the documents, so there is a question as to why he chose to include almost two full pages' worth in his 1979 account. None of this was found in the reports of Jean Durres, a Nag Hammadi scholar who began his work in the 1950s. Overall, Robinson's account is long, wordy, and confusing, and I myself still don't quite understand everything he was trying to say. What's important to note is that his account, much like Frank Moore Cross's, is steeped in Orientalism. Both obviously found very little importance to the role of the locals who actually discovered the texts themselves. Cross referred to Muhammad Adib and Ahmed Muhammad as lads, and Robinson made it incredibly clear that he thought Muhammad Ali was somewhat incompetent because he couldn't remember the details of the discovery, but never mind the fact that Robinson was interviewing him some 30 years later. In both cases, the original texts found were sold to antiquities dealers at an incredibly low price, given how valuable they really are. After that, the texts were undertaken by small groups of European and American scholars who would spend the rest of their lives working on piecing fragments back together, translating, and interpreting the texts themselves. Essentially, the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi Library developed their own body of scholarship, which continues today. For years, the contents of these texts were kept a secret, but just like bad archaeology, this is bad scholarship. The goal of academia is to learn all that you can and then share it with the world. What is knowledge for everybody? That being said, there is knowledge that is not for everybody. The kind of secretive scholarship that developed around these texts parallels the texts themselves, which contain information that we as modern readers who are part of the out-group can never hope to understand. There are so many nuances in each that, for cultural and religious reasons, perhaps we shouldn't try to understand them. I think that that's part of the problem with how these texts were acquired, interpreted, and understood. The European and American scholars who worked on them in the latter half of the 20th century wanted to prove something. Perhaps to prove the Bible or Christian rites to the Holy Land, or to gain some special understanding of the universe after reading the texts. Personally, I believe that the scholars shouldn't have tried to assign meaning to these texts according to their own belief. Bad archaeology leads to bad scholarship. Unfortunately, the truth and objectivity of modern archaeological work in Jerusalem has been obscured by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for many years. Perhaps one of the most egregious acts of archaeology occurred after the Six-Day War in 1967, when Israeli soldiers utterly destroyed the Mugrabi Quarter of Jerusalem without government permission in order to expose the Western Wall and begin construction on today's Western Wall Plaza. This expelled some 650 Arab residents from their homes, which they had lived in for generations. And above the Western Wall lies the Temple Mount, an important holy site for both Jews and Muslims. This has now also become a contested place, as Temple activists and far-right Israelis have called for the destruction of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the eradication of Palestinians in order to restore the Temple, thus cementing their right to everything from the river to the sea. Any archaeological evidence that proves the Bible gives credibility to Israeli-Jewish slash Zionist claims to the land. And Netanyahu's far-right government not only supports but funds archaeological projects which undermine the position of Palestinians in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. These archaeological sites and ongoing excavations in Jerusalem have become a tool to create a Judeo-Christian-centric narrative which discounts the experience of non-Israelis. Many of these sites and digs are also majorly funded by evangelical Christian groups as perhaps as a form of eschatological protectionism, i.e. the notion that the events of the Book of Revelation will happen when Israel is fully a Jewish state, a history which has roots in the Reformation. While I'm super interested in that topic as well, and I could talk on it for hours, I am almost out of time today and would like to give you my closing thoughts before I get way too off-topic. So, archaeology is complicated. It allows us to view the past from the material perspective, which is something that literary and artistic evidence can't quite give us. That's why it's so important to do good archaeology, because good archaeology leads to good scholarship, which should mean that the right voices are heard. Religious and racial biases hinder our ability to see the past from more than one angle, so when looking at any aspect of history or piece of evidence, it is absolutely imperative to watch for biases. Always remember that just because it's the dominant narrative or it seems to make the most sense, that doesn't mean it's true and objective. It means we must ask questions, share the knowledge we have, and don't go looking for answers where they're not meant to be found. And with that, I am out of time, but I would like to say a quick thank you to Dr. Bowen, who has made this a great semester. I was happy to be a guinea pig for this class, and I am excited to learn some Hebrew next semester. Thanks for listening, and see you later.
