ALBRIGHT, WILLIAM FOXWELL

American archeologist and Orientalist; b. Coquimbo, Chile, May 24, 1891; d. Baltimore, Maryland, Sept. 19, 1971. Son of a self-supporting Methodist minister, his early education took place in American schools in Chile. He became interested in archeology in his childhood and pursued these interests through a major in classics at Upper Iowa University where he received his A.B. in 1912. He was admitted to the Oriental Seminary of the Johns Hopkins University in 1913 as a candidate for the doctorate of philosophy under Professor Paul Haupt. He received his doctorate in 1916 and for several years he continued his studies through grants and fellowships. In 1921 he was appointed director of the American Schools of Oriental Research in Jerusalem. He remained in that capacity until 1929, when he became professor of Semitic languages at Johns Hopkins. From 1933 to 1936 he served both as a professor and as director of the Jerusalem School. During this period he also completed major excavations at Tell Beit Mirsim in southern Palestine. He served as president of the American Oriental Society (1935–36) and the Society of Biblical Literature (1938–39). He was the recipient of an unparalleled series of honorary degrees and other awards from institutions around the world.

His major contribution to Palestinian archeology was The Excavations of Tell Beit Mirsim, which was completed by 1943. Other major works include Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (1942), The Archaeology of Palestine and the Bible (1949), and Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan (1968).

At roughly the midpoint of his scholarly career (1940), Albright wrote From the Stone Age to Christianity, in which he formulated his basic positions of a philosophical, historical, and philological nature. He believed there were two key developments in human culture in historic times: the religion of Israel and the philosophy of Greece. In Mosaic monotheism he saw a revolution that involved the repudiation of magic and myth and the multiplicity of competing gods in favor of the unity of God, and the description of the divine-human relationship in terms of an open covenant, morally conditioned and legally defined. Biblical religion has proved powerful enough to survive an age of mass superstition on the one hand and of equally pervasive skepticism on the other. Greek thought represented the second significant breakthrough in the history of human culture. The development of formal logic had the most profound effect on human thought and activity: it directly ushered in the scientific age and was a congener of an entirely new discipline, philosophy. Albright saw this powerful rational tool as the key to progress in the analysis and interpretation of data. Ultimately these two key developments would be indispensable ingredients in the reconstitution of a unified human culture. A universal society whose faith and practice were shaped by the biblical imperatives and whose letters, science, and arts were sustained by the standards and methods of Greek thought would be an appropriate goal for mankind and would lie at the end of the evolutionary trail.

Albright's place as a scholar in archeological history is assured. From 1920 to 1970 he produced a monumental amount of work in the field of ancient Near Eastern studies, reviewing current work, classifying and synthesizing available data, opening new areas of inquiry, refining applicable methods of the natural sciences, and shattering established configurations of an older scholarly consensus. During the half century after World War I, he steadily raised the standards of scholarly discussion in the field. He insisted on the highest possible accuracy in recording data and reasoning from them, his objective being to establish the multiple disciplines of Near Eastern studies on a solid scientific foundation, and then to assemble and organize all pertinent material into a large synthetic structure.

Bibliography: The Bible and the Ancient Near East, essays in honor of W. F. Albright, ed. g. e. wright (Garden City, 1961) bibliography of Albright, 1911–1955. Near Eastern Studies in Honor of William Foxwell Albright, ed. h. goedicke (Baltimore, 1971). f. m. cross in The Biblical Archaeologist, 36 (1973) 1–3, with picture of Albright. d. n. freedman in Bulletin of The American Schools of Oriental Research, 205 (1972) 3–13 (picture).

[d. n. freedman/

l. lederer]