William Foxwell Albright

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William Foxwell Albright at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

William Foxwell Albright (born May 24, 1891 in Coquimbo , Chile , † September 19, 1971 in Baltimore , USA ) was an American Biblical archaeologist and philologist of ancient oriental languages.

Life

Albright was born in Chile, the oldest of six children to a Methodist missionary. He graduated from Upper Iowa University in Fayette, Iowa . In 1916 he made his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University , where he was professor of Semitic languages from 1929 to 1958 . From 1922 to 1929 and from 1933 to 1936 he was also director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem .

Albright led expeditions to the biblical sites in ancient Syria, especially Palestine , to southern Arabia and the neighboring regions. After the First World War , the scientist ushered in a new phase of biblical archeology and developed - together with his colleagues George Andrew Reisner (1867–1942) and Clarence Stanley Fischer (1876–1941) - archeology, which previously was only a largely intuitive scientific basis had become a scientific discipline. He became known through his excavations in Gibeah and on Tell Beit Mirsim , in which he consistently applied the method of determining the age of a culture based on ceramic finds, and through the identification of biblical cities. Albright gained public notoriety for his contributions to the Authentication of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948, but his scientific reputation is largely based on his role as a leading theorist and practitioner of Biblical Archeology .

According to Albright's research, there is a clear historical background to what the Bible says. He was thus in opposition to many biblical scholars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially the Wellhausen School, which denied the framework of the Pentateuch and the books Joshua and Judges a historical background. However, the school of Albrecht Alt (1883–1956) and Martin Noth (1902–1968) had already restricted Wellhausen's one-sided view through hermeneutic and factual-exegetical arguments. However, Albright did not go as far as Yehezkel Kaufmann (1889–1963), who considered even the smallest details of the biblical representations to be photorealistic images.

Albright summarized his life's work in the monograph From the Stone Age to Christianity. Monotheism and the Historical Process , Baltimore 1st edition 1940 (German Bern 1948). The foreword to the German translation of his book The Bible in the Light of Antiquity Research (1957) wrote Otto Eißfeldt , who was close to the school of Albrecht Alt.

Albright received numerous awards throughout his life. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1929, the National Academy of Sciences in 1955, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1956 . In 1967 he became a corresponding member of the British Academy . In 1957 he received an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and in 1969 he was the first non-Jew to be made an honorary citizen of Jerusalem ( Jakir Yerushalayim ).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed April 29, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Digging with the Bible The Jerusalem Post , May 24, 2016

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Albright, William Foxwell
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American Biblical Archaeologist
DATE OF BIRTH May 24, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Coquimbo , Chile
DATE OF DEATH 19th September 1971
Place of death Baltimore , USA