ALBRIGHT, WILLIAM FOXWELL°

ALBRIGHT, WILLIAM FOXWELL ° (1891–1971), U.S. biblical archaeologist and Semitics scholar. The son of Methodist missionaries, Albright studied at Johns Hopkins University, earning his doctorate under Paul Haupt. In 1929, he became professor of Semitic languages at Hopkins. He directed the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, 1920–29 and 1933–36. Albright's excavations in Ereẓ Israel include Gibeath-Shaul (Tell al-Fūl), 1922–23, 1933; Adar and Bāb al-Dhrāʿ in Moab in 1924 and 1933; *Beth-El in 1927 and 1934; and Petra in 1935. His main achievement in field work was the excavation of Tell Beit Mirsim (the biblical Debir?), which he directed in 1926, 1928, 1930, and 1932. He also participated in the University of California expedition to Sinai (1947–48) and was chief archaeologist of expeditions of the American Foundation for the Study of Man at Wadi Bayḥān (Beihan), Hajar Bin Humayd, and Timnaʿ in Arabia (1950–51). His main publications (apart from over 1,500 articles) are From the Stone Age to Christianity (1940; 1946²); Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (1942); The Archaeology of Palestine (1949); and The Excavation of Tell Beit Mirsim (1932–43). In this last work, Albright laid the foundations for the scientific ceramic chronology of the Canaanite and Israelite periods in Ereẓ Israel: his philological and topographical studies solved some of the most difficult problems in Egyptian and Semitic philology and in the identification of places. In his approach to biblical history (The Biblical Period from Abram to Ezra (1949), New Horizons in Biblical Research (1966), and Archaeology, Historical Analogy, and Early Biblical Tradition (1966)), Albright was a theologically conservative scholar, dating the Patriarchs to the first half of the second millennium on the basis of his intensive study of the Near Eastern background of the period; similarly he assigned the composition of the historical books of the Bible known as the "Former Prophets" to the 13^th–10^th centuries b.c.e. and most of the Psalms to the pre-Exilic period. Albright was one of the first scholars to authenticate the *Dead Sea Scrolls. His students include most of the prominent archaeologists of the later 20^th and early 21^st century in the United States and Israel, among them G.E. Wright, N. Glueck, and B. Maisler (Mazar). He also trained such eminent biblicists and Semiticists as J. Bright, F.M. Cross, D.N. Freedman, and W. Moran. Albright was the foremost biblical archaeologist of modern times, combining a devotion to evangelical Christianity with a scientific approach to the problems of archaeology and the Bible. While many of his broad syntheses of the Bible with archaeology came under criticism beginning in the 1970s, Albright must be credited for providing the very framework within which such criticism could occur. Likewise, his work on many aspects of Semitic philology remains invaluable.

bibliography:

H.M. Orlinsky, An Indexed Bibliography of the Writings of William Foxwell Albright (1941); L. Finkelstein (ed.), American Spiritual Autobiographies (1948), 156–81; G.E. Wright (ed.), The Bible and the Ancient Near East (1961), includes bibliography up to 1958; A. Malamat (ed.), in: Eretz Israel, 9 (1969). add. bibliography: L.G. Running, in: dbi 1, 22–23.

[Michael Avi-Yonah]