This post continues my serial review of Terje Oestigaard’s new book Political Archaeology and Holy Nationalism. If you have not been following this series, you might prefer to begin with the book note and my reviews of chapters 1, 2a, 2b, 2c, 3a, 3b, 3c, and 4a (dividing chapters 2, 3, and 4 into smaller sections was necessary to keep the reviews manageable).

Beginning on p. 145, Oestigaard enters into a discussion of the temple mount. Yitzhak Sapir recently sent me two e-mails regarding this part of Oestigaard’s book, and I will occasionally paraphrase or quote Yitzhak’s e-mails in this post.

Oestigaard’s description of the temple mount is beset by, well, a bit of sloppiness. It is strange that someone supposedly so concerned with careful handling of “ethnicity” could make so blanket a statement as “The Arabs control the major part of this area” (p. 145), as if “the Arabs” were a monolithic entity or ethnicity—even while he knows full well (see pp. 147) that it is a specific Islamic organization, the Waqf, that administers the al-Aqsa mosque and compound. It’s curious that Oestigaard quotes, apparently approvingly, a statement that “[t]his area is none other than the ancient temenos of the Temple of Solomon” (p. 147, quoting H. Stierlin, Islam, Volume 1: Early Architecture from Baghdad to Cordoba, Taschen, 1996), when in fact we cannot know this to be true. As Yitzhak pointed out, it’s also curious that Oestigaard uses “BCE” and “AD” to mark dates, rather than preserving either the BCE/CE or BC/AD pairs, but I’m not sure whether to make anything of it. Oestigaard rightly notes that the wanton “destruction of archaeological strata and data” (p. 147) by bulldozers and trucks that cart loads of dirt off to the city dump is a major archaeological problem, but even though he knows the Waqf to be responsible, he somehow decides that Zionists who criticize the Waqf for such destruction are a bigger threat because of their nationalism. Yitzhak pointed out to me a number of other small flaws in Oestigaard’s presentation that add up to a big dose of slipshod research and presentation.

“The problem,” Oestigaard writes, “is how the Palestinians can create their own past without using the same interpretative practice as the biblical scholars. One way to do that is by writing the history of the peoples biblical scholars have neglected to write” (p. 150). Aside from the postmodern mumbo-jumbo about “construct[ing] a democratic past”—as distinct from constructing an accurate picture of the real past, whatever it may or may not have been, a goal about which Oestigaard seems not to care at all—Oestigaard seems not to appreciate that his solution of “writing the history of the peoples biblical scholars have neglected to write” partakes of exactly the same premises for which he criticizes biblical archaeologists, especially the premise that one can trace ethnicities backward through time. If it is at all possible to trace Palestinian ethnicity back through time in the southern Levant, then why is it illegitimate to try to trace Israeli ethnicity back through time in the southern Levant? Contemporary Israelis do, in fact, have a better claim to tracing their ethnic heritage back to Iron Age Cisjordan and Transjordan than to contemporary Palestinians—if that matters in the current disputes over land. Moreover, it is precisely biblical and Syro-Palestinian archaeologists who have been most active in trying to write the histories—using archaeological data—of neglected peoples such as the Philistines, Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, and so on. Even if these labels, derived from the Bible, turn out to be faulty, we will know they were faulty thanks to the work of biblical and Syro-Palestinian archaeologists who chose to focus on these putative neighbors of ancient Israel. Can Oestigaard possibly really think that there would be archaeologists out digging for Philistines and Moabites, if not for biblical archaeology?

Oestigaard ends his book with a transparent statement of his political agenda:

Based on history, archaeology, common principles for nation-states and indigenous rights, the Palestinians have equal rights to territory and land as the Israelis. If archaeology and the Bible cannot contribute to this aim, but rather stimulate and encourage nationalism, chauvinism, political misuse, struggle and war, society is better off without both archaeologists and biblical scholars. (p. 152)

You don’t even have to be a careful reader of the book to realize that Oestigaard gives no evidentiary basis whatsoever for the first sentence quoted above. He does not provide any historical or archaeological evidence for the claim, nor does he provide any analysis or even explanation of “common principles for nation-states” from a political science perspective, nor does he justify the characterization of contemporary Palestinians as “indigenous” to the southern Levant. The second sentence quoted above—the very last sentence of the book—pulls the rug right out from under any claim Oestigaard had to making a solid argument about scientific archaeological methodology. In that final sentence, Oestigaard baldly states his criteria for whether biblical archaeology is worthwhile: if it contributes to parity in land claims between Palestinians and Israelis, then it’s worthwhile, but if not, “society is better off” without it. Notably absent is any concern for getting at the truth. If we could get in a time machine, go back and observe, and find out that Bill Dever’s reconstruction of “Israelite origins” was 100% accurate, it still wouldn’t matter to Oestigaard. The truth is, at the end of the day, irrelevant in Oestigaard’s critique; only political outcomes matter. While I am, in fact, no Zionist, and feel a great deal of sympathy for the plight of contemporary Palestinians (for one of the reasons, see the maps in Kyle’s post here), I cannot possibly sign onto Oestigaard’s project, such as it is.

In the final analysis, although there are few penetrating questions here and there in Oestigaard’s book, I must conclude that Oestigaard ends up very far from having proven his case. He spends 150+ pages of quasi-rambling prose, painting biblical and Syro-Palestinian archaeologists with far too broad a brush, knocking down straw men, overgeneralizing, and ultimately subordinating truth (whatever its content might be, and I don’t claim to know) to a political agenda—making him not that much different from his quasi-illusory targets in the discipline of biblical archaeology.

This post continues my serial review of Terje Oestigaard’s new book Political Archaeology and Holy Nationalism. If you have not been following this series, you might prefer to begin with the book note and my reviews of chapters 1, 2a, 2b, 2c, 3a, 3b, and 3c(dividing chapters 2 and 3 into smaller sections was necessary to keep the reviews manageable).

The opening paragraphs of chapter 4 hearken back to some of Oestigaard’s earlier comments. He introduces the chapter by revealing that in this chapter he

will stress and put focus on the role of archaeology as a social practice rather than as a scientific practice. Or to put it another way, if the consequences of archaeological knowledge production as a social practice is not taken seriously, it is difficult to preserve a scientific and serious image. (p. 126)

So what is it that’s really important to Oestigaard, being scientific or having a certain image? I am no scientist, but I think Oestigaard understands science poorly—or else he provides proof positive that the “human sciences” are not “sciences” at all. Oestigaard writes:

Science has to be anarchistic in its enterprise. It is construction by de-construction. Since data are changing, new data arise, other approaches and new knowledge are the basis of our prejudices, and we have different points of departure. A scientific practice has to criticise and be deconstructive if it is supposed to be constructive. A contemporary truth will be one of the best satisfactory explanations or understandings of a problem within our research horizon at a given moment, but this change [sic] through time. What is left is a temporary core of contemporary truths in a plural world. Science is always a dynamic, ambiguously defined and changing social practice. In its very basis science has to be critical because if not, old paradigms and ideas will be retained no matter which arguments we use in the current discourse and debate. (pp. 126–127)

To be sure, science often moves forward when scientists criticize, question, and investigate current explanations, but this hardly makes science “anarchistic in its enterprise.” Indeed, modern science works hard toward articulating hypotheses that will stand the test of time and experimentation to such an extent that they become theories and, with further investigation and observation, perhaps even attain the status of laws in our understanding of the cosmos. I would be greatly surprised to discover any scientist—that is, anyone working in the natural sciences—who regarded the laws of physics as “temporary … truths in a plural world.” Yes, in the future we might learn things that would cause us to refine our understandings of those laws, but the law of gravity, for example, is not subject to social whims. Quantum gravity is not a hermeneutical problem.

It is also eminently clear that Oestigaard has no idea what deconstruction is, apart from a trendy buzzword that one may insert into any random paragraph to sound postmodern. “Deconstruction” is not synonymous with “challenging prevailing ideas” or “reverse-engineering an idea.” Despite the great difficulties involved in defining just what “deconstruction” is, the term most properly attaches to an interpretation of a text that shows how that particular text is, at some deep level, at odds with itself.

Contradicting the second sentence of this chapter—”most of the archaeology produced is only read by the archaeologists themselves” (p. 122)—Oestigaard goes on to talk about the uses to which archaeology might be put by non-archaeologists in society. After a bit of “power/knowledge” talk derived from Foucault, or at least from Foucault’s terminology, Oestigaard begins to try to “illuminate the problems with biblical and Israeli nationalist archaeological interpretative practice” (p. 131). He chooses to use Hazor as a test case. He criticizes the earliest excavations, which began in 1955, for the excavators’ lack of theoretical sophistication in ascribing “Israelite” ethnic identity to certain occupation layers at Hazor. He also rightly criticizes those scholars who uncritically summarize biblical narratives as if those narratives related straightforward historical facts.

Yet Oestigaard continues to put forward charges that does not substantiate, and I do not think he can substantiate them. For example, Oestigaard claims that “pottery sherds and stratigraphical layers ‘just become’ Israelite, Phoenician, Philistine, and so forth. The problem is that when these layers, pots or cities once are labelled, the labels never disappear” (p. 134). Yet if one actually reads widely in “biblical archaeology” or “Syro-Palestinian archaeology,” one will find plenty of debate over whether this or that feature of, let’s say, hand-burnished red-slip pottery is really diagnostic of an ethnicity, or only of a region, or a time frame, or none of the above. In the actual discourse of biblical and Syro-Palestinian archaeology, the labels just are not as sticky as Oestigaard claims. Similarly, a claim like “These Israelite cities are, together numerous [sic] other sites, Israeli sites, not Arab or Palestinian sites, although it is evidently [sic] that many of them have both earlier and later occupation phases” (p. 134, emphasis in original) can only be made by someone who hasn’t really bothered to read very many actual excavation reports written by archaeologists working on long-occupied sites. The distinction between Roman-era Sebaste and ninth-century Samaria—geographically the same site—is commonplace and a perfect example of how working archaeologists do in fact make significant distinctions between the various occupation phases. Everybody who has even dipped a foot into biblical archaeology knows that biblical archaeologists distinguish, for example, between the “Canaanite” (pre-Israelite) occupation layers at Hazor and the “Israelite” occupation layers at Hazor. If you’re still not convinced, go find any good book-length treatment of Beth-shean, a site that was occupied more or less continually from the Middle Bronze Age to the Roman era at least, and perhaps beyond (though I haven’t investigated it that far in time). Oestigaard’s claim that, to biblical archaeologists, “[t]he stratigraphical layers beneath and above the ‘Israelite’ layers are inferior but most often irrelevant because they are not a part of Israel’s history” (p. 134) is simply not borne out by the actual research reports.

I’m not at all interested in trying to defend the uses of archaeology by folk like Moshe Dayan, the topic of the next major subsection of Oestigaard’s chapter 4. Likening the Six-Day War to Joshua’s conquest of Canaan in the Bible is unconvincing from an historical point of view, and also deeply ironic from a theological or moral/ethical point of view, since Joshua’s war is presented in the Bible as basically genocidal. Curiously enough, though, it is precisely the work of biblical archaeologists and Syro-Palestinian archaeologists that has revealed just how tenuous is the claim that the narrative in the book of Joshua represents a historical reality. So when Oestigaard quotes Michael Prior to the effect that “scholars have to take a moral stance when the Bible is used for contemporary, ideological and political purposes” (p. 141), he seems to want readers to believe that biblical archaeologists and Syro-Palestinian archaeologists haven’t done this, when that’s not true at all.

In the next subsection of the chapter, Oestigaard accuses biblical archaeologists with denying the achievements of the pre-Israelite inhabitants of Canaan, and of denying “their right to exist” (p. 142). What it means to deny a “right to exist” to people who have been dead for thousands of years, I have no idea. However, it’s clear that to some extent Oestigaard is following Keith Whitelam’s notion of the “silencing” of Palestinian history. Oestigaard insists that “Palestinian history must cover all aspects of the region’s history independent of the Hebrew Bible. Palestinian history demands its own time and space, something which it has been denied for more than a century by the discourse of biblical studies” (Oestigaard, p. 143, citing Whitelam). Oestigaard seems to imply that there is some sort of historical, ethnic link between the pre-Israelite inhabitants of Palestine and modern-day Palestinians, but he apparently fails to see the irony in this claim. Throughout the book, especially in chapter 2 but also right here in chapter 4, Oestigaard blasts biblical archaeologists and Zionists for thinking that Israeli(te) ethnicity can be traced backward from the modern day to the Iron Age, but with no hint of embarrassment he seems to claim that one can trace Palestinian ethnicity backward from the modern day to the Bronze Age! Indeed, unless one can trace modern Palestinian ethnicity back to the Bronze or Iron Age, then it makes no sense to excoriate archaeologists studying those periods for “ignoring” people groups that weren’t there at the time—and so far, all attempts to trace modern Palestinians’ roots back to pre-Roman Palestine have, as far as I know, utterly failed. (Modern Palestinians certainly have nothing to do with genealogical or cultural descent from Abraham’s son Ishmael, as I often hear conservative church folk claim nowadays, but that is beside Oestigaard’s point.)

Finally, Oestigaard does get to a point with which I can entirely agree: “there have existed multi-ethnic societies in Transjordan and Palestine for several millennia. Therefore, it is totally irrelevant to argue about who came first and thereby legitimise access to land and territory by myths of a path ethnicity” (p. 144). Yet Oestigaard fails to appreciate the fact that is precisely biblical and Syro-Palestinian archaeologists who have revealed the “multi-ethnicity” of the ancient southern Levant! By the way, speaking of politicization, why does Oestigaard refer to “Transjordan and Palestine” instead of “Transjordan and Cisjordan”? Could it be that he, too, is driven by a political agenda, as much as the Zionists?

Only this one is a little bit twisted—unintentionally, I think. It turns out that Paizo Publishing, publisher of Dragon and Dungeon magazines for the last few years, takes its name from a koine Greek word, παίζω. According to the Paizo FAQ, cofounder Johnny Wilson knew the word from biblical Greek and suggested it for the company. In koine Greek—the language in which the New Testament documents were written—παίζω means “to play,” as in “to play a game,” or “to play a musical instrument,” or “to play [like a child].”

There’s a curious irony here, however. In point of fact, the verb παίζω appears only once in the New Testament, and it’s in a decidedly negative context:

μηδὲ εἰδωλολάτραι γίνεσθε καθώς τινες αὐτῶν, ὥσπερ γέγραπται· ἐκάθισεν ὁ λαὸς φαγεῖν καὶ πεῖν καὶ ἀνέστησαν παίζειν (1 Corinthians 10:7)

“Do not become idolaters as some of them did; as it is written, ‘The people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play.’” (1 Corinthians 10:7 NRSV)

The reference is to the worship of the golden calf at the foot of Mount Sinai (Exodus 32). Thus, although drawing on biblical (well, koine) Greek for the company’s name, the Paizo founders inadvertently invoked a scene of wanton idolatry, which to cognoscenti might dredge up all the old stereotypical nonsense associated with Jack Chick tracts condemning fantasy games (as well as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien).

(Cross-posted on Icosahedrophilia.)

Some of you may recall my recent foray into mind mapping using various mind mapping software packages for Mac OS X. This morning I received a very kind e-mail from Olga Danilana, PR Manager for Computer Systems Odessa, the company that publishes ConceptDraw MINDMAP. In my earlier survey of mind mapping software I had not considered ConceptDraw MINDMAP, because I did not realize that a Macintosh version was available. The company is currently promoting MINDMAP 5, which is currently available for Windows only (a universal binary for Mac OS is “coming soon”). Therefore I had overlooked MINDMAP 4.5, which is indeed available for Mac OS.

Immediately upon receiving Olga’s e-mail, I downloaded ConceptDraw MINDMAP 4.5 for Macintosh and gave it a quick try. Since I have already purchased NovaMind, any other product will have to be quite impressive to draw me away from a recently-purchased package. When I first launched MINDMAP, I thought that it just might be that impressive. The interface is more attractive, and somewhat more Mac-like, than NovaMind’s, and I found the functions to be very intuitive. It was very easy for me to quickly assemble a small mind map as a test, and to quickly perform some operations that I find clunky or unintuitive in NovaMind. Also, the ConceptDraw website actually highlights Bible study as one of the uses of mind maps, which of course touched a soft spot in my heart. Unfortunately, MINDMAP 4.5 for Macintosh does not support Unicode—and that’s an absolute deal-breaker for me. I must have support for Unicode, and especially for right-to-left Unicode Hebrew, in any “productivity” software I purchase. Therefore, I will not be switching to MINDMAP from NovaMind—at least not to MINDMAP 4.5.

Another factor in my sticking with NovaMind over the other packages is that NovaMind is a tidy neighbor to my other applications. ConceptDraw MINDMAP installs a folder with a bunch of subfolders and shared libraries, as you see below:

NovaMind doesn’t. The NovaMind icon sits at the top level of my Applications directory and the application or package contains within itself everything it needs. The only exceptions are libraries of graphics and styles—aspects of the software that are user-defined—and these are nicely tucked away in the appropriate Library folder, well out of sight.

At this point in my experience with mind mapping software, NovaMind has several distinct advantages over MINDMAP 4.5 and the other packages I’ve tried:

1. NovaMind is less expensive and the company offers a 30% discount for educators.
2. NovaMind gives you access keys for both the Mac and Windows version with a single purchase. Thus, I can put NovaMind for Mac on my laptop and NovaMind for Windows XP on the computer in our homeschool classroom for the kids to use (we just have to coordinate so we’re not running the software at the same time on both computers, in order to comport with the license agreement).
3. NovaMind provides a wide variety of training and tutorials, along with excellent and responsive customer service. This is not necessarily unique to NovaMind, but in my short experience I have found it to be characteristic of NovaMind.
4. Most of all, NovaMind has decent right-to-left Hebrew Unicode support, while the competitors don’t. If you want to use Hebrew in your mind maps, as I do (indeed, as I must), then NovaMind is the clear front-runner on the Mac right now.

Both NovaMind and MINDMAP are due for updates soon, so I might do more comparisons after the release of NovaMind 4 and MINDMAP 5. For the moment, NovaMind meets my needs better than any of the other packages available.

(By the way, I tried to e-mail this information to Olga, but for some reason, my e-mail bounced back to me. Olga, if you’re reading this and didn’t get an e-mail from me, I’m sorry that the e-mail message didn’t go through.)

Update: A day after posting these reflections, I got an e-mail from Olga informing me that ConceptDraw MINDMAP 5 for Mac—still in development—will support Unicode (and it will also be a universal binary). I will definitely want to take another look at MINDMAP when version 5 is released.

This post continues my serial review of Terje Oestigaard’s new book Political Archaeology and Holy Nationalism. If you have not been following this series, you might prefer to begin with the book note and my reviews of chapters 1, 2a, 2b, 2c, 3a, and 3b (dividing chapters 2 and 3 into smaller sections was necessary to keep the reviews manageable).

The final subsection of Oestigaard’s chapter 3 is very short, a scant four pages. At the beginning of this short subsection, Oestigaard repeats his claim that “[w]ithin the biblical archaeologist’s research horizons and prejudices there are a priori proposed truths determining the questions possible to ask and answer” (p. 122). Here again, though, as throughout the whole book, Oestigaard does not actually substantiate this claim, nor does he even bother to try. In fact, I do not think this claim can be substantiated, unless you define “biblical archaeologist” very, very narrowly—too narrowly to include Bill Dever, Oestigaard’s parade example of a “biblical archaeologist.” Indeed, for Oestigaard’s repeated charge to be true, there would have to be some sort of institutional authority or very strong informal cabal capable of putting the kibosh on “impossible” or taboo questions. Yet it doesn’t take long when perusing the literature of “biblical archaeology” (conceived at least as broadly as Oestigaard must, in order to include Dever) to find many “taboo” questions being asked.

There is a prima facie plausibility to what Oestigaard says next, but upon further reflection it might be false, or at best “trivially true” (to borrow a phrase from Duane Smith). Oestigaard claims that

biblical archaeology is as it always has been and always will be; a puzzling-solving normal-scientific enterprise within the biblical framework characterised by fact or data-gathering activities. It consists of empirical work undertaken to articulate the paradigm theory, resolving some of its residual ambiguities and permitting the solution of problems to which it has previously drawn attention.

If Oestigaard means by this that many archaeological digs in Syria-Palestine have been undertaken with a desire to answer questions raised by study of the biblical narratives, then this to some extent undoubtedly true, but it’s hardly a devastating critique. What would be really devastating is if Oestigaard could show that the Bible determined the answers in advance—but despite his repeated claims to this effect, by the end of chapter 3 he has not actually demonstrated this claim to be true, nor has he even undertaken such a demonstration. However, the claim seem even more “trivially true” when one considers that the “problems” some biblical archaeologists want to “solve” are very broad and ill-defined “problems” indeed, on the order of “What can we learn archaeologically about the Moabites?” or “What can we learn archaeologically about the Philistines?”

Later in the same paragraph, Oestigaard claims that “[t]he puzzle solving may lead the biblical archaeologists to becoming [sic] ‘more assiduous in accumulating irrelevant data, selectively presented to support an a priori viewpoint’ (Gould 1987:292), instead of challenging various dogmas” (pp. 122–123; the lack of italics for the a in a priori is in the original). Once again, though, it is precisely through the work of “biblical archaeologists” that some “dogmas” have come to be challenged!

Oestigaard then launches into another criticism of Dever, but despite some length quotations, Oestigaard seems to misunderstand Dever. Consider the following:

Dever argues that ‘the Biblical writers concluded that Israel’s election and survival were nothing less than a miracle. Who are we, their spiritual heirs, to disagree?’ (Dever 1990:84). I cannot see how it is possible to take biblical archaeology seriously as a scientific branch of archaeology when the researcher’s faith determines the questions and answers possible to accept. It seems rather arrogant that the same man accepting miracles in archaeological explanations criticise [sic] other biblical archaeologists for scandalous nonsense, amateurism and sensationalism … (pp. 123–124)

Nobody who has actually read Dever’s work carefully and understood it well can possibly think that Dever “accept[s] miracles in archaeological explanations”! The statement that Oestigaard quotes is a rhetorical flourish by which Dever wishes to distance himself from any suggestion that his archaeological research—which has definitely challenged some “dogmas”!—undermines faith in God, as distinct from naïve acceptance of the biblical narrative as sober historical reporting. Dever is trying to avoid alienating his Christian and Jewish readers at the same time that he tells them that the patriarchal sojourns, the exodus, and the conquest never happened. This hardly constitutes “the researcher’s faith determin[ing] the questions and answers possible to accept”! Oestigaard is not criticizing the real Dever, but a mischaracterization of Dever.

Then there follows a very interesting passage, which I will go ahead and quote at length so that you can share my perplexity.

The reaction to biblical archaeology, even in the Holy Land, must be that Near Eastern archaeology gives a clearer picture of the past, a picture different from that of the Bible, and thus biblical archaeology has failed in its attempt to integrate the two different disciplines. William Dever concludes in Recent Archaeological Discoveries and Biblical Research (Dever 1990:171–172):

We may or may not someday be able to demonstrate that all the events recorded in the Bible did or did not take place, but in the end it matters very little. Religious consciousness leaps beyond event to meaning. Claims for truths of a higher order are simply not amenable to historical or archaeological investigation; nor do they benefit by historical or archaeological confirmation. They are matters of faith.

So what then is the purpose of biblical archaeology? Archaeology and the Bible do not belong together, and biblical archaeology is a contradiction in terms. But, within the research horizon and perception of the world, including all ontological and epistemological truths, it is impossible for biblical archaeologists as long as they cling to the term ‘biblical archaeology’, to separate between the Bible and archaeology, and there will always be a hidden and biased agenda. Near Eastern archaeology by its very name opens up for other areas and emphases of investigation whereby it is possible to combine religion and research in other ways.

Well … might any of Oestigaard’s reasoning in the final paragraph reflect some of the reasons that Bill Dever himself has long argued against “cling[ing] to the term ‘biblical archaeology’” and has instead argued in favor of a “Syro-Palestinian archaeology”? Again, many of Oestigaard’s claims are simply made rather than argued, and a number of them seem “trivially true” while other criticisms seem to be misplaced—and most of the critique really seems like “old news” to me. Oestigaard certainly does not break any significant new ground at the end of chapter 3.

I have just recently begun reading The Hobbit to my nine-year-old son, Nathan. We’re moving pretty slowly, because reading aloud is just plain slower than silent reading; wer’e getting through about six or seven pages each night before his bedtime. It’s been a long time since last I read The Hobbit, and I’d somewhat forgotten how delightfully it is written. If you haven’t read The Hobbit in a while, or—God forbid!—you’ve never read it at all, give yourself a treat and read the book that defined twentieth-century fantasy fiction, by the author who practically invented the genre.

(Cross-posted on Icosahedrophilia.)

Now it’s not as if Hector Avalos really needs any defense, least of all from me. Longtime readers may remember that I disagreed pretty strongly with some things that Hector wrote in the SBL Forum last summer. Hector himself graciously sent a long reply, and to my shame I have not kept up my end of the dialogue. But despite the fact that have disagreed with Hector in the past, and despite the fact that my comments are, well, nothing more than my comments, I just cannot sit by without responding to the Discovery Institute’s scurrilous attacks on Hector.

Hector was recently awarded tenure promoted to full professor (thanks to Pim van Meurs for the correction in the comments below) at Iowa State University (for which congratulations are in order, but are not the main point of this post). During the same round of promotion-and-tenure considerations, however, one Guillermo Gonzalez was denied tenure. Gonzalez is a Senior Fellow of the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture—an arm of the Discovery Institute—so naturally the “Intelligent Design” crowd has mounted an all-out attempt to paint Gonzalez’s failure to receive tenure as an ideological move against Gonzalez because of his support for “Intelligent Design.” Plenty has been written in the blogosphere in defense of Iowa State’s denial of tenure to Gonzalez, and that’s not what I’m going to write about here. However, as part of their case (in the court of public opinion) against Iowa State, the Discovery Institute have decided to attack Hector Avalos, and that’s just not right.

On the Discovery Institute’s “Evolution News and Views” web site, the headline screams, “Iowa State Promotes Atheist Professor Who Equates Bible with Mein Kampf While Denying Tenure to ID Astronomer.” Now this is really curious, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s rank hypocrisy: the DI wants to claim that Gonzalez has been persecuted for his ideology, and so their tactic is—you guessed it—to attempt to persecute Hector for his ideology. Second, it’s rank hypocrisy: the DI constantly claims that ID is about science, not about religion, so why should they care one whit about Hector’s view of the Bible?

I suppose that Hector would be a natural target for the ID crowd, since he was apparently instrumental in drafting and promoting an anti-ID petition at Iowa State a couple of years ago. Well, good for Hector! I’ve disagreed with him on other topics, but had I been on Iowa State’s faculty, I would have been his ally in opposition to ID.

The DI web “report” makes much of Hector’s comparisons, in his 2005 book Fighting Words, between the Bible and Mein Kampf (though I think the DI presents the case too simplistically). I’ll go ahead and quote the DI web page at length:

Just how extreme Avalos’s view of the Bible is can be seen in his previous book, Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence (2005), in which he repeatedly equates the Bible with Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Indeed, in a section of the book titled “Scripture: A Zero-Tolerance Argument,” Avalos actually suggests that the Bible is worse than Mein Kampf:

In fact, Mein Kampf does not contain a single explicit command for genocide equivalent to those found in the Hebrew Bible… Thus, if all of Mein Kampf is to be rejected simply for its implied genocidal policies, we should certainly reject all of the Bible for some of its explicit and blatant genocidal policies. [p. 363]

At other points, Avalos appears to blame Jewish people for Hitler’s attempt to exterminate them, locating the origins of the Holocaust in what he calls “Hebrew racism.” Consider the following passages:

“The purpose here is to show that the Nazi policy of genocide was based on premises quite similar to those in the Hebrew Bible.” [p. 316]

“the Nazi Holocaust represents the synthesis of attitudes found in both the New Testament and the Hebrew scriptures.” [p. 318]

“[Scholars Katz and Wolpoff] fail to see the parallels between certain practices promulgated in the Hebrew Bible itself. Indeed, the supreme irony of the Holocaust is that the genocidal policies first systematically enunciated in the Hebrew scriptures were reversed by the Nazis. Nazi ideology simply had better technology to do what biblical authors had said they would do to their enemies.” [pp. 318-319]

“Hitler saw himself as trying to counteract Hebrew racism, which he saw as the main counterpart and enemy of the German race.” [p. 319]

As if these statements were not enough …

What’s telling here is that, despite their outrage, the best critique the DI can muster is a half-hearted attempt at something resembling post-Holocaust sensitivity. They do not, and indeed could not argue with intellectual integrity (not usually high on the list for the DI when it goes into attack mode), that Hector is wrong—because, simply put, he’s not. The Tanakh—the focus of my professional activities and a significant factor in my own religious convictions—offers up some positively genocidal texts, and not just as narratives, but as divine law. As a Christian believer, I wish that weren’t the case, but I’m not going to whitewash matters and pretend that those texts aren’t there. I have even written about this myself (but unfortunately that article sits right in the gap between the SBL’s online Semeia archive and Rosetta’s archive of older Semeia volumes). Yes, of course Hector’s comparison is provocative, but it’s also accurate.

The DI post goes on to grab a few other quotations from Fighting Words, and to present them without any analysis whatsoever. They are presented, out of context, simply for shock value. The DI is counting on readers to respond emotionally, out of offense—and is counting on readers not to bother to ask whether Hector’s statements are accurate or inaccurate. Now it just so happens that I disagree with some of Hector’s value judgments, but those value judgments are not self-evidently wrong (any more than mine are self-evidently right), and therefore tossing them up on a web page as part of a smear campaign is completely inappropriate. And William Dembski’s atrocious attempt to try to make Hector look like a dishonest CV-padder is beneath contempt.

Have I mentioned that I disagree with Hector on a number of points? He’s an atheist and I’m a believer; that alone will tell you that we don’t see eye to eye. But I am outraged by the DI’s attempts to slander a reputable and ethical scholar just because they’re upset that he got tenure when their pal didn’t.

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Those words are, of course, “creationist” and “museum.”

Nevertheless, Kentucky is being saddled with a young-earth creationist “museum” sponsored by Answers in Genesis. The Creation Museum opens on May 28 in Petersburg, Kentucky (and for some reason, the fact that it’s not in Texas or Tennessee makes me feel a little better, though we do have Glen Rose down south):

The Creation Museum, opening May 28, 2007, presents a “walk through history.” Designed by a former Universal Studios exhibit director, this state-of-the-art 60,000 square foot museum brings the pages of the Bible to life.

A fully engaging, sensory experience for guests. Murals and realistic scenery, computer-generated visual effects, over fifty exotic animals, life-sized people and dinosaur animatronics, and a special-effects theater complete with misty sea breezes and rumbling seats. These are just some of the impressive exhibits that everyone in your family will enjoy.

I’m reasonably certain that the Page Museum at the La Brea tar pits was not designed as a theme park, and its docents actually dispense accurate information about prehistoric life (though not so far back as the dinosaurs). Forget Petersburg; come to Los Angeles and learn some real science.

As you might guess, there’s plenty of buzz about this place in the blogosphere, both among bibliobloggers and science bloggers. Jim has already mocked the place, and used it to beat his (misguided binary) drum about “history” vs. “theology” in the Bible; Duane gives a long and excellent fisking to some of AiG’s nonsense philology. On the science and mainstream media side, consult the NCSE’s roundup.

I’ve blogged about this topic often enough that I needn’t say more at this point, I think. I won’t be booking tickets to Kentucky anytime soon.

Almost everyone in the biblioblogosphere has already mentioned the passing of anthropologist Mary Douglas, who contributed much to my understanding of Leviticus. R.I.P.