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The Generous Spirit of a Pillar of Israeli Archaeology

October 21, 2008

By Thomas E. Levy, University of California, San Diego

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Professor Avraham Biran, the renowned Israeli archaeologist and former director of the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology, passed away on September 16, 2008, just one month shy of his 99th birthday. In 2002, Dr. Biran was awarded the State of Israel’s most distinguished honor, the Israel Prize, in recognition of his contributions to archaeological research in the Land of Israel.

Avraham Biran was a pillar of Israeli archaeology for more than 50 years. His life was interwoven with the early history of both the State of Israel and that of 20th-century archaeological exploration in the land. Born in 1909 to Aharon and Naomi Bergman (in 1949, with the declaration of the State of Israel, he changed his name to a Hebrew one, Biran, a practice followed by many other Jews in Israel at the time), Avraham was a third-generation southern Levantine Jew, whose great-grandfather helped establish the village of Rosh Pina in the Galilee during Ottoman rule in Palestine. Biran was eight years old in December 1917 when British Field Marshall Edmund Henry Hynman (“Bloody Bull”) Allenby conquered Jerusalem during World War I. Now under the British Mandate, as a former Turkish citizen, Biran became a Palestinian. Following the death of his father in 1919, although desperately poor, his mother insisted on sending Avraham and his sister to Haifa’s prestigious Reali high school, often referred to as the “Eton of Palestine.” Many of Brian’s classmates went on to become distinguished figures in Israeli society, including one former Israeli President, several of the Israel Defense Forces Chiefs of General Staff, Supreme Court judges and many other professionals. By the time Avraham was 13, he and his siblings had been orphaned. The adversity of losing his parents early in life propelled him to dream, to work extremely hard in his studies and to develop an amazing positive sense of humor.

During the 1920s and early 1930s Germany was the center of Biblical studies on the world scene. However, with Nazism growing in Germany at the time, as a Palestinian Jew, Biran decided to opt for university study in the United States. The U.S. was rapidly becoming a center for ancient Near Eastern studies at institutions such as the University of Chicago, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California at Berkeley and through international expeditions, excavations, research and museum building. Under these circumstances, Biran traveled by ocean liner in the early 1930s to pursue university studies in the United States. There he took his B.A. degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he studied under the great scholar William Foxwell Albright and became Albright’s first Ph.D. student.

At the time, Albright was a young, energetic professor and had already distinguished himself by serving as the Director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem (now called the W.F. Albright School of Archaeological Research). Albright was passionate about melding archaeological research with Biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies. He wanted to confront some of the assumptions that arose from the dominant 19th- and early 20th-century German scholar Julius Wellhausen’s “Documentary hypothesis,” which was the first to take a scientific approach to investigating the origins of the Torah (Five Books of Moses) and cast doubt on many of the historical elements previously assumed to be reflected in the text. Amongst other things, Albright believed that through careful archaeological excavation and historical and linguistic analyses, and using the new discipline that he called “Biblical Archaeology,” it was possible to correlate secular and biblical data to demonstrate that the Wellhausen school, which focused solely on the Biblical text, was incorrect in many ways. It was in this exciting period of a major paradigm shift in ancient Near Eastern studies championed by Albright that Avraham Biran was trained and grounded. To the end of his life, Biran acknowledged his great intellectual debt to Albright.

In 1934, while Biran was at Johns Hopkins, Albright invited Nelson Glueck to address his students. Glueck had recently returned from his desert explorations in Transjordan, and his inspiring lecture propelled Biran into archaeological fieldwork. It was fitting that some 40 years after that motivating lecture, Biran became the director of the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology, a part of Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem.

After earning his doctorate, Biran returned home to Palestine and was appointed Thayer Fellow at the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem (1935–1937). At this time, he served as Glueck’s driver on one of the school’s first visits to Tell el-Kheleifeh, near the Gulf of Aqaba, the site Glueck identified with Solomon’s tenth-century B.C.E. Red Sea port of Etzion-Geber. During his fellowship period, Albright encouraged Biran to conduct his first excavation. This was before the days of archaeological field schools, but with the help of an experienced foreman and some workers, he set out to tackle a Biblical archaeology problem set by Professor Albright. This involved the debate concerning the identification of the Biblical site of Anathoth. While another archaeologist, E.P. Blair, initiated soundings at Anata, which early historians, including Josephus and Eusebius (as well as the great 19th-century American Biblical historical geographer Edward Robinson) identified as Biblical Anathoth, Biran was set the task of excavating two probes at the nearby site of Ras el-Kharrubeh (“head of the Carob tree” in Arabic). Thanks to those probes, Biran concluded that he had located Anathoth.

The young archaeologist published his research in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (BASOR, 1936). The upshot of this work is that although Albright had encouraged Biran to publish his work, the master disagreed with the student and held to the earlier identification of the site (he did this by publishing a short article against Biran in the same issue of (BASOR). Today, however, as a result of the work done by Blair and Biran, the identification of Ras el-Kharrubeh with Anathoth is universally accepted among Israeli, European and American archaeologists. At about the same time, Biran acquired more excavation experience in Transjordan and Iraq. Equally important, Biran learned from Albright the importance of encouraging younger scholars—a quality he kept during his long life.

In 1936 Avraham married Ruth Frankel, an American woman he met while attending the Johns Hopkins University, shortly after she arrived by ship in Palestine. For family fiscal reasons as well as his Zionist aspirations, in 1937 Biran left archaeology for 24 years and began a new career in government administration. His first job was with the British Mandatory government in Palestine as the first District Officer in the Jezreel Valley (called “the Emeq” in Hebrew)—the main “breadbasket” for the Jewish community at the time. Biran enjoyed this job because he was an important official helping the Jewish community in Mandate Palestine. For Biran, “The Jewish settlements in the Emeq were the workshop of the new Israel.”

After Israel’s War for Independence, Biran served, from 1949 to 1955, in the Ministry of Interior as a representative of the Jerusalem district and as a member of the Armistice Mixed Commission with Jordan. Biran’s fluency in Arabic served him well throughout his life, whether in the field, library or as diplomat. From 1955 to 1958 he served as a very popular Consul General of Israel in Los Angeles. During this period he made many friends in the California Jewish community who would help fund many of his future archaeology expeditions in Israel.

In 1961, Dr. Biran decided to leave the foreign office and return to archaeology, his first love. He replaced the late Professor Shmuel Yeivin as director of Israel’s Department of Antiquities. From 1961 to 1974, he expanded and improved the department, encouraging the first major American archaeological expeditions at Israeli sites since World War II, including the Hebrew Union College’s work at Tel Gezer under Nelson Glueck, William G. Dever and Joe Seger; the Smithsonian Institution’s Tell Jemmeh team under Gus W. Van Beek, the Tell el-Hesi expedition under the American Schools of Oriental Research and its President G. Ernest Wright (Harvard University), and others. A true internationalist, Biran not only encouraged foreign research expeditions in Israel, he also had an enlightened liberal policy of sharing archaeological collections between the State of Israel and the local and international universities and research institutions that had carried out the work.

At the age of 65, Biran “retired” from the Department of Antiquities and took up the post of director of the Glueck School at the Hebrew Union College’s Jerusalem campus. Many people thought Biran’s appointment would be a temporary one, but he served with distinction until he fully retired at the age of 93.

Dr. Biran was 78 years old when I had the honor of serving as his assistant director for five years at the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology. With the exception of a few of his peers who were still alive, everyone referred to him as “Professor Biran,” but Dr. Biran’s senatorial voice radiated warmth that was always punctuated with hearty laughs and use of “darling” for the women and “Habibi” for the men (an Arabic word for “my beloved” of a male). I especially enjoyed sitting in his office smoking Cuban cigars together and secretly thought if he could smoke at 78 and all the subsequent years we worked together, well, smoking couldn’t be that bad for you (I have since quit). He also enjoyed a cigarette with his cup of instant coffee (he liked the cheap Israeli Elite brand) that Hanni Hirsh, the devoted secretary of the Nelson Glueck School, would prepare every afternoon at tea time. I relished each time Hanni would yell out to me in my office across from hers - “Dr. Biran would like to speak to you.”

I spent three summers as a field supervisor at Dr. Biran’s excavations at Tel Dan. Between 1966 and 1999 he excavated Dan for 33 seasons--perhaps the longest continually run excavation project in Israel. Dr. Biran’s excavations at Tel Dan have to date produced scores of scholarly articles, two major reports and his personal narrative of his excavations up to 1994 entitled Biblical Dan (Israel Exploration Society/Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, 1994). Biran’s successor as director of the Glueck School, David Ilan, is admirably spearheading efforts to bring the publication of the Dan excavations to fruition. Is Biran guilty of not publishing his excavation results in a timely manner? Absolutely, but virtually every senior archaeologist has a least one excavation publication skeleton in their closet. In his defense, Biran was very active in a number of distinguished organizations up until his retirement from the Glueck School. These include serving as the chairman of the Israel Exploration Society (a post he held well into his 90s), chairman of the Government Names Committee (which allots Hebrew place names to Arabic place names based on history, archaeology, linguistic and other fields so that both languages are used), President of the International Council on Monuments and Sites in Israel, and membership in the Government Coins Committee.

Professor Biran’s long-term excavations and discoveries at Tel Dan have established the site as a key locale for testing a variety of theories concerning Biblical as well as general ancient Near Eastern history. These include the “second urban revolution” during the Middle Bronze Age (c. 2,000—1600 B.C.E.), the problem of the settlement of the Israelite tribes in the Land of Israel, the rise of a national cult center in the northern Kingdom of Israel following the collapse of the United Monarchy, the historicity of the House of David, and many other issues.

It is ironic that at the height of the so-called Biblical minimalist debate in Biblical studies, coinciding with the publication of Philip Davies’s book In Search of “ancient Israel”—a scathing attack on the historicity of Solomon and David, Biran found one of the 20th century’s most important early inscriptions from the Holy Land. Discovered in a sealed archaeological context near an Iron Age II gate at Tel Dan, the “House of David” inscription (as it has become known) is written in an early Aramaic paleo-Hebrew Script and dates from the ninth century B.C.E., less than one hundred years after David’s reign and is the earliest extra-Biblical evidence supporting the existence of a Davidic dynasty. What a wonderful way to crown a life-time career dedicated to the study of the history of the Land of Israel!

Looking back to when I was a young scholar, I will always be indebted to Professor Biran for giving me the freedom to carry out extensive fieldwork in the Negev desert all the time I worked for him. He encouraged young scholars such as Avi Gopher, Rafi Greenberg, Rahel Ben Dov, David Ilan, me and many others with financial and logistic assistance to conduct our research. I was especially blessed in this regard. Aside from the month or so of time spent with him at Tel Dan, I was free to publish and do anything I liked at the Glueck School. It was Biran who suggested that I work with David Alon to start a Nelson Glueck School excavation project at Gilat—one of the few Chalcolithic (fifth millennium BCE) temples in Israel. Dr. Biran thought it was important to study the origins of the Biblical world, even if these were some 2,000 years before the age of the patriarchs and matriarchs.

One day in 1988 Professor Biran yelled out for me to join him in his office. “Oy vey,” he sighed, “I received a letter from a Mr. C. Paul Johnson, a Chicago banker who is on the cover of Business Week dressed like a cowboy, standing near an airplane holding a llama, and he says he isn’t interested in Biblical archaeology. You deal with him.” Dr. Biran went out of his way to foster a wonderful relationship for me with Paul Johnson, which led to his family foundation supporting my work for many years in Israel and more recently in Jordan.

Like Yigal Yadin, Professor Biran’s oratory skills helped forge vibrant public interest in Biblical archaeology, not only for the public in Israel but around the world. When he spoke about archaeology and the Bible in public gatherings, inevitably he would cast his eyes upward and humble himself as if he were a mere servant carrying out his allotted work of revealing the Biblical past. The power of this task was transmitted to his listeners. Avraham Biran’s enthusiasm for his life’s work in Biblical archaeology was infectious, and he will be deeply missed.