False claims

M. I. Finley

Razor. The Rediscovery of a Great Citadel of the Bible Yigael Yadin (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £5.25). Atoms of Time Past David Wilson (Allen Lane £4.95) Among the innumerable Palestinian placenames in the Old Testament, a few stand out from the ruck, One is Hazor, burnt to the ground by Joshua in his conquest of Canaan. Hazor alone, says the Bible, was utterly destroyed by him, for it was "the head of all those kingdoms." The trouble is that Hazor was again destroyed by Deborah, and she has to be dated

about a century later than Joshua. This contradiction was resolved by the ancient rabbis and the Talmud through clever exegesis.

The alternative is to accept error, and then to decide which of three accounts is the wrong one three because the 'Song of Deborah' in Chapter five of the Book of Judges, unlike the Preceding prose chapter four, mentions only the waters of Megiddo, not Hazor. One Plausible explanation, then, is that the intruder Is chapter four, interpolated by a scribe or editor who had Joshua in his mind and fuddled the events. The Bible goes on, in the Book of Kings, to

report that Solomon rebuilt Hazor as an Israelite city, and that it was destroyed once again, and finally, by Tiglath-pileser III of Assyria (at a date which we can fix as 732 BC). Eventually all memory of its location disap peared until 1928, when John Garstang, following some nineteenth-century hunches, excavated a mound (tell) 15.5 kilometres north Heights the Sea of Galilee, from which the Golan 'leights are easily seen seven or eight kilometres to the east. Garstang had only three

Weeks in which to work, and he could establish no more than probabilities.

Certainty, and some startling discoveries, were left for Professor Yigael Yadin, and a few statistics. are in order. He led a team of f°rtY-five archaeologists, architects and other technical experts, employing up to two

hundred and twenty labourers at a time, for four successive seasons of three months each from 1955 to 1958; he returned briefly in 1965, and for another full season in 1968. The Hazor

they uncovered included not only the fully Occupied tell but also two hundred acres of flat

!and alongside it, surrounded by a massive

trtification-wall. It was all destroyed by fire between 1250 and 1200 BC, the period of Joshua, and was not rebuilt until the time of Solomon. So no Deborah: those who held Chapter four to be an editor's blunder were Proved right. fMuch of interest emerged. The date of destruction, fixed by the Mycenean pottery _oun.d in th ruins, contributes to the continuing Inquiry into the date of the Exodus, and

even, u by a complex network of evidence, into e date of Hammurabi. A two-hundred acre City in this region is nothing short of spectacu31ar (though we need not accept Yadin's guess of

sclu,°00 inhabitants, based on fifty per thousand ivare metres, a figure for which he offers not a Shred of justification). The capital of the great ntill[ttite Empire, for example, was little more

twice that size. And our knowledge of the relig0 and the building technology of the

rt,la.anites has been enhanced. i;unfortunately, Yadin has little interest in the m,e of the people. I cannot find a single sentence

Which even asks the question, How did these 30,000 (or whatever the number) exist? How was their society organised? Where were their sources of food and metals? Dates, pottery, temples and fortifications fill out his horizon. Hence the claim that we now have "a comprehensive history of the site" for more than two thousand years rests on an unacceptably restricted sense of "history": a few dates and a few destructions, some shrines and other objects, and nothing more.

Yadin is a man of many parts. A leading military figure in the war for Israeli indepen dence and then Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army, now Professor of Archaeology at the Hebrew University, he also personifies the maxim that in many archaeologists there is a script-writer struggling to get out. This is his third publication on Hazor. The first was the standard full-scale report, in two volumes with two more of plates, published in Jerusalem between 1958 and 1961; then a book published by the British Academy in 1972, based on the Schweich lectures of 1970, also addressed to a professional audience; now this new volume for the general reader, when the script-writer was allowed to get out after all.

The present volume is a picture-book in the first instance. Of the two hundred and eighty pages, more than half the space, I should judge, is taken by nearly four hundred pictures in colour and black-and-white, splendidly repro duced. As a sample of Israeli book design and production, the book deserves full marks. However, the pictures are not numbered and there is no list, nor is scale indicated very often, so that checking and study are frustrating experiences. And the text itself is only half or less than that of the British Academy volume, though the same ground is covered. The language is often identical, but not always, and indeed not often enough: Yadin's notion of vivid writing leads to distortions of more than one kind.

To begin with, almost as if he anticipated the blurb writer's inevitable "archaeologist as detective" (we have had enough of that silly metaphor), the book is constructed round "the enigma of Joshua and Deborah," posed in the opening and not "solved" until the penultimate chapter. In the British Academy book this is dealt With in a single, matter-of-fact para graph: the excavations upheld the hypothesis that chapter four of the Book of Judges is an intrusive error. Everyone but the most fanatical fundamentalist has accepted for generations that the historical accounts in the Old Testament are full of such contradictory bits, and one of them has now been sorted out. But that makes no scenario, and in the new book we read, after two hundred pages of cliff-hanging: "At long last, the excavations provided testimony to the true course of events; and it turns out to be exactly as described in the Bible — if one reads critically!"

The exclamation-mark is Yadin's favourite form of punctuation, just as everything is "huge" or "beautiful" as the case may be. Cobblestone floors are beautiful, crude geometric designs on pottery are beautiful, an even cruder attempt at the human form is Picassoesque, ad infinitum. Some Cypriot jugs "may have been used for exporting opium" (and the words "may have been" are dropped in the picture caption). No reason is given for that speculation, nor are we told who exported to whom, but opium adds an obvious frisson to mere jugs.

All this is a pity, for Yadin's reputation as an excavator is deserved. In one respect, he is the envy of all archaeologists: no other commands such resources in money and manpower, including (at Masada) the services of the Israeli Engineer Corps. One could have been certain, even if he had not said so explicitly, that his Hazor team was "equipped with all the modern technical facilities available, photographic laboratories, surveying and drawing tools."

Nowhere does Yadin employ carbon-14 dating, thermoluminescence or even computers, the equipment and the techniques

which the BBC science correspondent, David Wilson, hopes will rescue archaeology from the arts and return it to its rightful original home "as part of science.This opposition has become as wearily familiar as a tic. The looseness of language in Atoms of Time Past, the inadequate information and the mysterious omissions — he never mentions the most important book published in this country on the "new archaeology," David Clarke's Analytical Archaeology — will introduce little light into the confusion. Any archaeologist worth his salt will employ all the newest technical resources if he can afford the equipment — and if it is of any use to him. It is pure fetishism to treat everything "scientific" (often a false synonym for "technological") as automatically superior to anything "not scientific."

Consider carbon-14 dating. Apart from the fact that a whole generation of archaeologists was misled by the false premises underlying the original "scientific" method, it is a further fact that the new technique has a recognised margin of error. Had Yadin submitted burnt materials from the destruction level of Hazor to the radiocarbon test, 1250± 100 is the kind of date he would have obtained. That's good enough for the Stone Age, but what about Joshua and Deborah? The solution of the Biblical contradiction would have been no nearer than it had been before. 1250 -± 100 can be any date between 1350 and 1150 BC, and what we want to know is something much more precise, say 1250 or 1150? It was the sequence of Mycenaean pottery styles, worked out by an "arts" not a "science" technique, which proved exact enough to give the answer.

Archaeology is either a historical discipline or it is a pastime. Like all historical disciplines, it will use every technique and expertise available and appropriate, but techniques have never interpreted data, and never will.

M. I. Finley is Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge University

Fiction