GOD'S CARTOGRAPHERS

The leading fathers of biblical archaeology and scholarship found the (supposedly “Eastern”) culture of the (indigenous) Canaanites and Philistines distasteful and religiously inferior to, and destined to be replaced by, the ethically superior Israelite (i.e. “Western”) culture. Thus the highly influential American biblical archaeologist William Foxwell Albright (1891–1971) – an early advocate of the “clash of civilization” theory – was a founding father, the dean of restorationist–historicist archaeology. Albright had an enormous impact not only on the rise of New and Old Testament archaeology, but after 1948 he became a key patron of Israeli biblical archaeology. Te founding fathers of historicizing völkisch Israeli archaeology, including Benjamin Mazar and Yigael Yadin, were keen disciples of Albright and advocates of historicist maximalism and the historicity of the Genesis narrative which supposedly originated in the second millennium BCE.

Indeed, since the nineteenth century scriptural geography, biblical scholarship and biblical archaeology have sought to reinvent the Bible's literary, allegorical and metaphorical narratives into an ethno-nationalist history. With their ethno-centric understanding of Palestine's ancient history, they have contributed enormously to the suppression of Palestinian history and the de-Arabization of the history, geography and place names in Palestine (Thompson, 2008: 1–15; Aiken, 2010).