On June 24th I set off for what would end up being a fascinating two-week adventure. My first stop of many was in Fort Worth, Texas where I visited Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary’s Biblical Archaeology Museum, the Tandy Archaeological Museum. My visit to the museum coincided with a drastic transition at Southwestern. Just earlier that spring, the school had cut its entire archaeology program, fired several professors, and released a group of 20 graduate students. As such, I knew that while the artifacts and museum was formerly curated by the school’s now departed Biblical Archaeologists, the story I would get at the museum was very much a new one. The tour I received from Eric Mitchell, a professor of Old Testament was a new story and represented a new direction. In some ways then, though I received a tour of the museum, I also had the opportunity to observe what the future of Biblical Archaeology might look like at a school that parted ways with its program and professors. I would like to thank Dr. Mitchell for his time. Before starting off, this post is somewhat lengthy, and I spent a good deal of time on how the museum acquired its artifacts. If that sort of thing isn’t your particular interest, I would encourage you to skip to the section about the museum itself.
Museum History and Mission Statement
In the early 20th century, several professors at the seminary participated in archaeological excavations, acquiring a limited number of artifacts from a multitude of sources. The school’s archaeology devoted museum however only began in 1983 following the hire of George Kelm, a Southern Baptist Biblical Archaeologist. Prior to his arrival at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1980, Kelm was a professor at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and crucially for the development of the museum, served as co-director to the eminent Israeli archaeologist, Amihai Mazar’s excavations at Tel Batash, the biblical city of Timnah from 1977 to 1989. The Tandy was officially founded following a large donation by Charles D. Tandy, a wealthy business executive, and after the arrival of a permanently loaned collection made up of artifacts discovered at Batash. The museum’s first exhibition also included photographs, models, and maps to expound the history of Tel Batash, and the experience of excavating an archaeological site.
Over the years, the museum expanded in both size and scope, becoming a repository for numerous personal artifact collections owned by both archaeologists, and laypeople. The first expansion took place in 1990 when Ruth Martin, a former seminarian, who collected antiquities, bequeathed her 275-object collection of coins, cylinder seals, Roman Glass, and ancient Ceramics to the Museum. Other expansions include a number of ‘early Christian artifacts’ purchased through an anonymous donation made by a member of the Birchman Baptist Church, p, a group of artifacts from Phillip Hammond’s 1964-1966 excavation at Tell Hebron (Tell Rumeida), and part of the personal collection of Ken Campbell, a Presbyterian professor of new Testament. The museum has also benefited from a number of smaller gifts. According to the museum’s website, the Tandy Archaeological Museum is home to 19 collections and 1900 artifacts. With the recent departure of Southwestern’s archaeology collection, an unknown number of artifacts and some of these collections which were, owned by former professors rather than the museum itself, left the museum.
As the museum’s collections expanded, its display diversified to include an Old Testament Gallery, a New Testament Gallery, and an area for displaying special collections. With Kelm’s retirement from the school in the 1990s, the museum remained stagnant for many years, until in 2007, Southwestern inaugurated a new biblical archaeology program and rearranged the museum. In 2014, the museum was renovated with its old display scheme replaced by a unified exhibition focusing on the development of ceramics and other forms of material culture found in Palestine’s archaeological record beginning with the Early Bronze Age (3700-2500 BCE), and culminating in the early Islamic period (640-950 CE). From the time of its refurbishment until recently, the museum hosted an artifact loan program where they sent groups of artifacts to three local colleges. Over the years, the museum has hosted a number of special exhibitions focusing on topics like the development of lamps and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These exhibitions remain intermixed with the museum’s standard exhibition. With recent circumstances, it is unclear what the future holds for the museum.
At present the museum’s mission statement reads, “our museum produces regular exhibits, lectures and self-teaching displays which highlight the various cultures that existed throughout the Near East in antiquity. The museum has 19 collections with over 4,000 objects. Our collections are comprised primarily of archaeological objects as well as some ethnographic material. The Tandy offers a comprehensive study collection of pottery representing numerous typologies within each major period in the Ancient Near East.” Above all else, this statement reflects the viewpoint of the Biblical Archaeologists who formerly taught at Southwestern Baptist. Notably, the statement includes neither the word Bible, the Holy Land, Israel, Palestine, or belief. Instead, the statement is primarily directed towards the idea that the museum provides cultural context to a broad historical time period through examples of common material culture. With a broad mission of contextualization, and due to its limited signage, in many ways, the question of ‘what’ is being contextualized is open to both the visitor and the tour guide.
Artifact Origins
The artifacts at the Tandy museum broadly fit into three categories. The first category are artifacts obtained through division of finds laws first instituted in British Mandate Palestine and retained by Israel until the late 1970s and in Jordan until the present. According to these laws, objects found during excavation, which were considered duplicate, were shared between excavating institutions (or members of consortiums), and the state in whose borders the excavation took place. Though Kelm’s involvement in Amihai Mazar’s excavation at Tel Batash continued into the 1980s, after Israeli law repealed division of finds, as the excavation had begun before the institution of that law, Kelm, and the institutions to which he was attached remained entitled to a share of the antiquities found. While the Tandy says their collection is on permanent loan from the Israeli government, it is unclear why it is classified as such. One possibility could be that while the school “owns” the objects in practice and would have according to the prior law, on the technicality of the new law passed in the 1970s, all antiquities are considered the permanent property of the state, and as such, on a technicality, perhaps the objects are classified as permanently loaned.
The Tandy’s collection from Tel Hebron (Tell Rumedia) arrived through the same legal mechanism albeit with contingencies of their own. During the summer of 1966, Southwestern Baptist sent a professor, several students, and a certain amount of funding to Philip C. Hammond’s excavation in what was then the Jordanian West Bank. As Jordan maintained the division of finds laws first passed under the British Mandate, as a member of the excavating consortium, even if only for one-year, Southwestern Baptist was still entitled to a share of the site’s antiquities. Following the State of Israel’s conquest of the West Bank in 1967, they seem to have honored the previously existing agreement.
Lastly, the museum contains several groups of artifacts purchased by private collectors on Israel’s legal antiquities market. In many cases, an individual collects a large number of objects and when they reach a certain age, they might either no longer want their objects, or worry about those objects being a burden, or not properly taken care of after their passing. As such, the Tandy Museum serves as a long-term repository for antiquities originally collected for individual/private display. While some of these private collections donated are large, consisting of hundreds of objects, others are small donations given by individuals who might have purchased an antiquity or two during a church trip.
The Museum
When visiting the Tandy Archaeological Museum, one’s interaction with antiquity begins before entry. The Museum is based in one of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary's libraries, giving students easy access to the Museum in a place they would already frequent. Just walking past the museum, it would be entirely impossible to miss three glass cube displays filled with Iron Age storage jars. Though perhaps not the most exciting artifact to display up front, storage jars are some of the largest artifacts found in the archaeological record and as such, the three jars grab one’s attention, even when just entering the building. Getting up close to the jars, I immediately noticed their field numbering, indicating that they came from Tel Batash. Two of the objects were marked with a red dot, a symbol that I know, from working in Amihai Mazar’s lab in 2017, signifies that the objects had been photographed for publication prior to their arrival in the United States.
Walking around the corner as I waited for Dr. Mitchell, I noticed two cast objects, one, a full-sized copy of the famous Hammurabi Stele in the Louvre, and the second, a cast of the Mesha Stele, also in the Louvre. While I assume that my readers might be aware of Hammurabi and his law code with its many biblical parallels, the Mesha Stele is not as recognizable to a general audience. In short, the Mesha Stele is a 9th century BCE inscription notable not only for being the longest Iron Age inscription ever found, but also for the fact that it independently attests part of the Bible’s historical account from the point of view of the Moabites. As inscriptions that attest the antiquity of the Bible within a broader Near Eastern context, these two objects have been the subject of intensive study and discussion within Biblical Studies for over 150 years. Within more conservative circles, they have also been used to demonstrate the historicity and ‘truth’ of the Bible.
Entering into the Museum, I found myself in familiar territory. The first thing that one sees when walking into the Tandy is a semi-circle of cases, displaying the evolution of pottery forms from the Early Bronze Age (c.3700 BCE) to the end of the Iron Age (586 BCE). In my last posting, I briefly commented on the chronology of the Bible’s stories and how traditionally, the figure of Abraham has been dated to around 2000 BCE, well after the Early Bronze Age. While true that in some circles, the end of the Early Bronze Age is commonly associated with Abraham, in the context of the Tandy’s exhibition, I believe another factor is at play.
Since the early 20th century, World Archaeology has roughly divided the pre-classical past into three periods, the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. Though in the early 20th century understanding, each of these periods marked a specific technological advancement (with a strong racial element attached), a century and some of research has found that breaking down the past in this way is entirely arbitrary. Though Chalcolithic (c. 4500-3600 BCE) peoples are classified as stone age individuals, in many ways they far more resembled the peoples of the succeeding Early and Intermediate Bronze Ages than their Stone Age Ancestors. To further the point, people in the Early Bronze Age hadn’t even discovered bronze yet. My point in going on about this topic is this, the museum begins with the Early Bronze Age, I believe, because that period is arbitrarily put into the same cultural unit as the succeeding Middle and Late Bronze Periods. There is nothing essentially biblical or biblically connected about the Early Bronze Age, and yet as a period with the attached title of Bronze Age, it is included as part of the same story of biblical antiquity and context as later periods. To dwell on the Early Bronze Age at the Tandy for another moment, I was surprised to see, in the same case as four Early Bronze Age jars, a modern Chinese vase. When I asked Dr. Mitchell about its inclusion, not being the curator, he was uncertain why the object was there.
Continuing onto the Middle Bronze Age case, I was surprised by what I saw on its museum label. In addition to various other cultural descriptors for the Middle Bronze Age, the label referred to an “Amorite Invasion.” This terminology goes back to something called the Amorite Hypothesis, an early theory in Biblical Archaeology which argued for the historicity of the biblical patriarchs and the value of Genesis as a historical account. In short, the theory was that the movements of the Patriarchs from Mesopotamia to Canaan could be found in the historical record through the supposed movement (or invasion) of a nomadic group called to Amorites from Mesopotamia into the broader Near East, including the Levant. Though few follow this theory today, with most alleging that the patriarchs preserve local mythologies rather than historical memories, the inclusion of a reference to the “Amorite Invasion” was the first time the thought crossed my mind that the the “New” biblical archaeology at Southwestern in many ways resembled the “old.” As I later learned however, this label was a leftover from George Kelm's exhibition in the 1980s.
As we worked our way through to the Late Bronze Age, Dr. Mitchell pointed out a bowl with a lip on it and asked me to imagine a biblical figure using that lip both to scoop some food from a larger cooking pot and then eat it. Though not a specific biblical story, by presenting a biblical figure as using the object, Dr. Mitchell made the object much more evocative. This focus on storytelling, incorporating the objects in the museum, continued as we walked past more cases. Stopping at a case filled with grinding stones, hammer stones, and a sling stone, Dr. Mitchell told me about how he usually used the stones in the case to suggest the type of object David used to kill Goliath, despite the fact that only one object in the case fit that description.
As a side anecdote, while talking about how my previous museum visit to the Linda Byrd Smith Museum at Harding also included a “David Sling Stone” from the Elah Brook, the traditionally held site where David picked up his stones before facing Goliath, Dr. Mitchell told me theirs came from the Elah Brook as well. He did share with me that during one of his visits to the site, he had witnessed a dump truck emptying stones into the brook. Though not entirely certain, it is possible that so many pilgrims/tourists come to the site and leave it with a stone, that it’s necessary for the state to replenish the stones at the site so there are enough for everybody to take one, or perhaps even a few as a memento of their visit.
Continuing to a case with a large grinding stone, I expected to hear about the object’s important function in daily life, or at the very least, a Bible verse in which a character is described as grinding grain. With that in mind, I was surprised when Dr. Mitchell instead told the story of the Woman of Thebez. The short version is that in the book of judges, a revolt breaks out in Israel and only ends with the death of its leader who is killed by a woman who throws a grinding stone from the top of a tower. Gruesome. I think in some ways though, the presentation of this story, and a focus on biblical characters is perhaps suggestive of the difference between the biblical archaeologist as archaeologist, and the biblical archaeologist as one who provides context specifically to biblical stories, history, and events. The typical biblical archaeology approach to the grinding stone would be its function in daily life. Perhaps it would be placed in the hands of a biblical character. But, by using the story of the woman from Thebez, Dr. Mitchell I believe demonstrated a fundamental difference. For him, the object and archaeology’s importance stems from its importance to provide a clearer picture of the stories and characters of the Bible, rather than contextualize the world of the Bible or the world in which the Bible was written. When I asked Dr. Mitchell about his storytelling approach, he told me that he liked to conncect objects to biblical stories because doing so built on what people who visited the museum already knew. Thus, through narrative, the objects might be made more evocative for visitors than if they attested daily life alone.
Continuing through the semicircle, I was continuously struck by some of the objects from Tel Batash that made up part of the Tandy’s collection. Objects like ship anchors, a large mudbrick, and roof rollers are exactly the sort of items that one rarely finds on the antiquities market. Beyond that, the museum had numerous artifacts associated with daily life, really the entire suite from stone tools to spindle whorls. In this sense, through its past association with various excavations, the Tandy has obtained a collection greater in many ways than what can be bought. Turning the corner out of the semicircular display, I found my way to the museum’s collection of Mesopotamian artifacts. These included a small number of cuneiform tablets, a foundation cone or two, and some examples of cylinder seals. The museum’s Mesopotamian artifacts were greatly complimented by full sized replica casts of Assyrian Palace reliefs. Notably, one of these was the famous Lachish relief from Nineveh. This object, now at the British Museum shows, from the Assyrian point of view, the conquest of the Judahite city of Lachish, an event depicted in the Bible. I draw attention to this just to say that this artifact is one of a number from the broader Near East which is commonly used to evoke the historicity or truth of the Bible.
Rounding out the museum’s artifacts was a case full of lamps dating from the Hellenistic and Hasmonaean period to the Umayyad Period, a case with some Roman glass objects, and small vessels from the Roman period, and a case with artifacts from the 1st century CE, including the type of Jar the first Dead sea scrolls were found in. These cases were the vestiges of an exhibition the Tandy hosted several years ago after they acquired what was believed to be a Dead Sea Scrolls fragment. As the earliest known fragments of the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls are perhaps the jewel in the biblical archaeology crown and as such are valued around the world. These scrolls, along with those purchased by the Museum of the Bible and several other seminaries from the same dealer are now widely considered to be forgeries. When I approached the issue however, Dr. Mitchell told me that they were independently evaluating the authenticity of their scrolls.
The Future of Biblical Archaeology at Southwestern: The New as the Old
Though I was fascinated to see the Tandy’s collection, I will admit that more than anything I was interested in learning what the future of archaeology looked like at Southwestern and potentially getting a sense of how that could be used as a barometer for the field as a whole. From visiting the galleries, the sense I had gotten was that objects would now be used far more for elucidating the Bible’s stories and characters as opposed to general context and daily life. Talking with Dr. Mitchell after my visit, I learned that he had spent several summers excavating at sites in Israel including Megiddo, Hazor, and Gezer. Through Southwestern’s former program, he had also led a survey in the environs of Tel Gezer. Though not an archaeologist by training, by participating in several excavations and using archaeological finds to elucidate the Bible, Dr. Mitchell, assumed the role of the traditional biblical archaeologist. During the heyday of biblical archaeology, from the 1930s to the 1950s, most biblical archaeologists were biblical scholars who occasionally participated in archaeological excavation and used the findings of archaeology to better understand the biblical text, its stories, and its characters.
The former biblical archaeology program at Southwestern reflected a challenge made to this traditional paradigm in the 1970s, when several archaeologists, most prominently, William G. Dever, argued that for Biblical Archaeology to move forward as a discipline, it had to take on a more anthropological approach, asking a different set of questions than the historical and Bible based ones that had traditionally guided the field. The former archaeologists at Southwestern were students of Dever’s and though they still related their archaeological findings to the Bible, in many ways, they were archaeologists first, and Bible scholars second. While these changes have, I believe, changed biblical archaeology for the better, they also served to partially separate biblical archaeology from its seminary roots, and from the broader historical and biblical questions that direct popular and religious interest towards the field. The constituency for biblical archaeology, in the United States has not changed. Most who take an interest in the field are religious, with an interest stemming from the field’s connection to the Bible. The truth is that for most believers, archaeology is most useful for fleshing out the familiar stories and characters of the Bible, rather than providing information about an unfamiliar broader cultural context across a multi-thousand-year time period. Why pay for an expensive biblical archaeology program if one could simply pick and choose artifacts and excavation results from elsewhere and graft them onto the Bible as earlier biblical archaeologists had done?
Returning to my conversation with Dr. Mitchell. I remember him telling me that in his view, archaeology still had a role to play at the seminary, albeit its more traditional one. Dr. Mitchell explained that in his view, the importance of archaeology was to affirm the Bible, that is to assert the antiquity and context of the Bible against those who would claim it to be entirely fictitious or mythological. As a museum filled with artifacts that could flesh out the people of the Bible and offer believers contact with the past, the Tandy could become an apologetic instrument. Biblical Archaeology was founded in the early 20th century to fight back against German biblical scholars who attempted to deconstruct the Bible. As these early biblical archaeologists saw it, their discipline could historicize the Bible and ground it in science, thus increasing its reputability. The reversion of the Tandy Museum to an apologetic instrument suggests that even after 100 years of academic discourse, for the religious public and conservative scholarship, the field is where it should be, exactly where it started.