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Documents versus Monuments: Captain Conder, A.H. Sayce and W. Robertson Smith

By 1887, William Robertson Smith was busily but successfully combining his new post of University Librarian at Cambridge[1] with that of Editor-in-chief of the Encyclopaedia Britannica[2]. Meantime, Alexander Bain, his old teacher of Logic at Aberdeen University, had written Smith in March of that year, inviting him to present the next series of Burnett Lectures there, a somewhat unexpected gesture which was to prove the genesis of Robertson Smith’s most celebrated and seminal work, The Religion of the Semites.[3] Amidst all those demands and preoccupations, he was nevertheless provoked into writing for the June issue of the Contemporary Review an indignant article, entitled “Captain Conder and modern critics”,[4] in rebuttal of a paper published in the Review’s March number,[5] wherein the author had made a direct attack upon the proponents of the new “higher criticism” and had in particular impugned the academic arguments of Smith’s German friend and mentor, Julius Wellhausen.

Claude Reignier Conder, an officer in the Royal Engineers and grandson of the non-conformist hymn writer, Josiah Conder, was two years older than Smith and had achieved some well-merited fame through his leadership of the survey of Western Palestine from 1872, conducted under the auspices of the Palestine Exploration Fund, originally set up in 1865 by a group of notable establishment figures, both lay and ecclesiastical, to promote the study of Palestinian archaeology, geology, geography and natural history.[6] As its prospectus indicated, the work was to be carried out on “scientific principles” and was to avoid having “religious overtones”: nevertheless, it was confidently anticipated by the founders of the Fund that the outcomes would serve to “illustrate the sacred text” and thus be of interest and value to all branches of Christendom as well as to the Jewish people themselves. Moreover, the duties of exploration, survey and excavation were to be entrusted to the Royal Engineers, whose services were granted at nominal cost to the P.E.F by the War Office. That the whole enterprise had certain covert political and potentially military objectives is perfectly clear in retrospect, but those aspects were successfully camouflaged at the time by the careful and doubtlessly sincere emphasis laid upon its overt archaeological, topographical and antiquarian interests. Palestine formed part of the Ottoman Empire towards which Britain had maintained a broadly favourable political stance ever since the conclusion of the Crimean War, with the strategic aims of preserving a balance of power in the Middle East, maintaining British overland routes to imperial India and curbing territorial pretensions on the part of Russia, Germany and France alike.

From 1875, Conder was assisted by the young Lieutenant H. H. Kitchener – destined for much greater fame than his colleague – and together they conducted a thorough survey of Palestine west of the Jordan, the resulting one inch to a mile maps being published under the auspices of the P.E.F. in 1880. Conder meanwhile had written a semi-popular two-volume account of the work under the title Tent Work in Palestine, in which he zealously attempted to identify Biblical place names with their modern counterparts, relying quite uncritically on local tradition while lacking the necessary philological knowledge to validate his assertions. With little more than the support of his own self-confidence, Conder claimed to have discovered where Saul encountered the Witch of Endor; where the Shunanite woman rode (II Kings 4:24); and the precise location of Elijah’s sacrifice on Mount Carmel. Characteristic samples of his rash deductions were that the existence of Jacob’s well on its traditional site could “only be explained on the assumption that it was necessary for the Patriarch to have water within his own land, surrounded as he was by strangers who may naturally be supposed to have guarded jealously their rights to the springs”;[7] and that “our Lord’s tomb must have been one with a loculus or grave parallel to the side of the chamber, because two angels are described as sitting, ‘the one at the head, the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain (John 20:12)’”.[8]

In offering these decidedly precarious identifications, Conder was nevertheless meeting the expectations of his P.E.F. sponsors and also of the wider educated public in England, whose thirst for scientific corroboration of the Bible was intense. Typical of his time, Conder’s attitude towards both the indigenous people of Palestine and their Turkish overlords was both dismissive and patronising, ranging from mildly amusing examples of racial and sexual prejudice to more extreme instances of stereotyping. Of the Ashkenazi worshippers at the Wailing Wall, for example, he writes: “. . . their faces all stamped with that subtle likeness which betrays the Jew in any country”;[9] and, discussing the unreliability of Josephus as a historian: “. . . one cannot fail to notice how exaggerated is his description . . . and how the ingrained conceit of the Semitic mind appears in the account of his own doing”.[10]

Robertson Smith’s review in 1879[11] of Julius Wellhausen’s Geschichte Israels signalled his readiness to champion the cause of a German theologian whose views so closely matched those for which Smith himself was then being pilloried by the Free Church of Scotland; that was quickly followed (certainly at Smith’s prompting) by Wellhausen’s article “Israel” for volume XIII of the Encyclopaedia Britannica[12] and, in 1885, by the English translation of Wellhausen’s history, entitled Prolegomena to the History of Israel, with a preface by Smith himself. Conder’s bold riposte had taken the form of a lengthy article in the Contemporary Review for 1887, “The Old Testament: ancient monuments and modern Critics”, which opened grandiloquently with the precept: “In seeking Truth we ought to be ready to give up cherished illusions and every dead tradition, if so be that we may thereby see her better”.[13] Conder in fact made a number of valid points (with regard, for example, to the essential homogeneity of the Semitic nations and to the long co-existence of superstition with “exalted religion”) but his attacks on Wellhausen were based on very tenuous evidence which Robertson Smith found little difficulty in demolishing.[14] Smith’s decision to respond, he explained, was taken “not without hesitation” and the remark probably reflects some genuine reluctance to waste ammunition on such a slight opponent:

A man may be an excellent surveyor without being a Biblical scholar, and an accomplished Engineer officer without knowing Hebrew and the cognate dialects. Nor is it reasonable to expect that one who has not been trained to exact linguistic, historical and critical knowledge shall acquire such scholarship by living for some years in Palestine and going up and down the country with a theodolite.[15]

In Smith’s eyes then, Captain Conder was an enthusiastic but misguided amateur who had ventured well out of his depth and made pretentious claims which were both mischievous and futile. Robertson Smith proceeded to itemise Conder’s basic errors in Hebrew grammar, his persistent misquotation of Wellhausen and his false charge that the German scholar in question knew nothing of Assyriology. In a word, “It is no desire to mislead, but sheer ignorance and incapacity, that are the source of Captain Conder’s strange misrepresentation of Wellhausen”.[16]

Archibald Henry Sayce, Smith’s other leading archaeological opponent in the matter of the higher criticism, required much more diplomatic handling, if only because he had been a fellow member, with Smith, of the Old Testament Revision Committee from 1874 to 1884, and thus one of that eminent group of English ecclesiastical scholars whose generally supportive and decidedly influential acquaintance Smith had made during the most difficult decade of his life.[17] Born in 1845, Sayce was a year older than Robertson Smith: both had been delicate children and were beset by illness throughout their unmarried lives – but there the resemblance ends, for Sayce was to outlive the younger man by thirty-seven years. In his Reminiscences, [18] Sayce entertainingly and quite unashamedly parades his numerous prejudices – not least his animus towards Gladstonian liberalism, his distaste for all things Germanic and his frank dislike of the Bedouin tribesmen whom he had encountered in his travels. Though quite accustomed to delivering occasional pulpit sermons, Sayce was no theological scholar and admitted that, despite having been formally ordained as a deacon of the Anglican church, he was only “side-tracked” into theology after writing (in the span of three weeks during the summer of 1883) a popular book on the archaeology of the Holy Land entitled Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments.[19] 

The book had been commissioned by the Religious Tract Society in order to inform the public at large “on the bearing of  archaeological discovery upon the Old Testament” and proved to be unexpectedly successful – a decided compensation for the humiliating disappointment suffered by Sayce in 1883 on the appointment of S.R. Driver to the Regius Chair of  Hebrew at Oxford, following the death of E.B. Pusey who had held the professorship for sixty years. According to Sayce in his Reminiscences, Pusey had “assumed that I should be his successor, and had more than once told me so”. Gladstone eventually concluded, however, that he was “unsafe”.[20] Driver, of course, was to become a leading proponent of the higher criticism[21] and Sayce was undoubtedly motivated in part by this to set himself up in opposition as a champion of traditional values and beliefs:

Little did either Gladstone or myself then foresee that the time would come when Driver would be the protagonist of “German” higher criticism, and I should be regarded as champion of orthodoxy, or that in the nineties Gladstone would be my associate in writing an introduction to an American illustrated Bible, and express his regret that he had “listened to” other “counsels,” and had not given me the Oxford Chair of Hebrew.[22]

Like Conder, Sayce accepted virtually all of the Old Testament chronology at face value and spent much of his long life defending the Hebrew Bible’s historical veracity against the onslaughts of the higher critics.[23] Fascinated from childhood by cuneiform script, Sayce gradually built up a reputation as the leading British exponent of Assyriology, being accorded a personal chair in the subject at Oxford in 1891, its duties being sufficiently light to permit him to maintain his relaxed and decidedly dilettante lifestyle abroad. His fascination with archaeology was genuine but his approach was that of the wealthy amateur and, to his personal frustration, he was repeatedly fated to follow where others had made the initial discoveries – notably those of the Moabite Stone (1869), the Siloam Tunnel inscription (1880) and the Tel el-Amarna letters (1886).

Of the Moabite Stone, Sayce wrote:

The whole inscription reads like a chapter from one of the historical books of the Old Testament. Not only are the phrases and words the same, but the words and grammatical forms are, with one or two exceptions, all found in Scriptural Hebrew. We learn that the language of Moab differed less from that of the Israelites than does one English dialect from another. . .  The covenant name of the God of Israel itself occurs in the inscription, spelt in exactly the same way as in the Old Testament.[24]

Sayce concluded that the Siloam tunnel inscription was “in the purest Hebrew”[25] and was “certainly as old as the time of Isaiah, and may be older still”.[26] A few pages later, he inferred, on palaeographic grounds, that it “cannot be very much later in age than the Moabite Stone”. As for the Tel el-Amarna letters, they “have proved [next to the historical books of the Old Testament] to be the most valuable record which the ancient civilised world has bequeathed to us”.[27] For Sayce, the Amarna letters were proof of the early use of writing for literary purposes:

It was henceforth plain that the assumption of the late date of literary writing was false, and that already in the Mosaic age education was widespread and literary works were being produced and an active epistolary correspondence carried on to an even greater extent than in the Middle Ages. . . After 1888, it was no longer possible, except for the ignorant, to maintain that literary works such as we find in the Old Testament could not have existed in the Mosaic era. The main support of the so-called literary analysis and criticism had disappeared. Henceforward the character and credibility of a Hebrew document must be settled, not by the assumptions and subjective fantasies or ignorance of the critic, but by archaeological research.[28]

And, when the first Hittite inscriptions were identified in 1879, Sayce raced incautiously to decipher these, incurring widespread and justified criticism on the grounds both of philological inaccuracy and highly dubious historical dating.[29] He was regularly tempted to draw sweeping conclusions on the basis of quite insufficient evidence and, as one biographical note delicately observes, his writings “showed forth an original mind and an active imagination”.[30]

Plainly there was to be no marriage of minds between Sayce and William Robertson Smith, and when the latter’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites were first published in 1888, Sayce was prompt to review it in the pages of The Academy. He begins with the customary expressions of polite commendation for the author’s “learning, clearness, ingenuity, and suggestiveness”[31] but quickly proceeds to note that Smith’s theories “. . . are likely to be expressed with a positiveness which carries conviction in the minds of some and excites antagonism in the minds of others” – and it is soon evident that Sayce belongs to the latter camp, for he continues with rather ponderous equivocation:

Prof. Robertson Smith deliberately excludes the religion of Assyria and Babylonia from his enquiry into the traditional religion of the Semitic people. I believe he is right in so doing. It is dangerous for one who is not an Assyriologist to meddle with the cuneiform material.[32]

To seek evidence about early Semitic religion from Arabia, however, as Smith had done, was in Sayce’s eyes manifestly unjustifiable–

But Prof. Robertson Smith can still fall back upon the nomad Bedouin, who even at the present day stand but little above the grade of savages. But is he sure they represent the primitive Semite? May they not be degenerate specimens of the race whose mode of life has reduced them to a lower level than that of their remote ancestors? . . . In fact, Prof. Smith has really derived his theories from the anthropological material supplied by the comparative study of modern savages or barbarous communities . . . I must enter a protest against the assumption that what holds good of Kaffirs or Australians held good also of the primitive Semite.[33]

Sayce quite unashamedly uncovers his prejudices here as elsewhere and in mitigation it can only be admitted that such racial stereotyping was relatively commonplace in Victorian England – and indeed much later. Smith responded immediately in the Academy of December 7, rebutting Sayce’s allegations point by point and remarking (correctly) that “Prof. Sayce does not seem conscious of the gravity of the charge which he brings against me.” After challenging Sayce’s numerous misreadings and misquotations, Smith adds:

These are trifling matters, which do not touch my arguments, but are instructive as showing that a very positive statement by Prof. Sayce may, after all, be no more than the expression of a personal opinion, which has not received the assent of his brother Assyriologists. . . The Tel el-Amarna tablets have [says Sayce] proved that Schrader was quite right in maintaining that Asherah was a goddess, the higher critics of the Old Testament notwithstanding.[34]

This conclusion, Smith rightly observed, was at variance with the authorities, including Schrader, as well as impugning his own carefully expressed views on ’asherim as set out in Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. “I am quite prepared,” Smith concluded, “to deal with Prof. Sayce’s sneer against the higher critics of the Old Testament as soon as he will do me the courtesy to examine my arguments, instead of adducing against me, as something new, the very evidence which I have discussed in my book”.[35]

Sayce however (as the Academy’s editor commented in a footnote) was by then wintering in Egypt; and, apart from some further light skirmishes in the Academy, the full counter-attack was delayed until 1894, the year of Robertson Smith’s death, when Sayce published a further volume entitled, The “Higher Criticism” and the Verdict of the Monuments (hereafter THC), which Sayce had completed, according to the book’s prefatory subscription, in October, 1893. The book emerged under the imprint of the S.P.C.K., but that body’s Tract Committee was careful to incorporate its own disclaimer distancing the Society from the opinions expressed, albeit by “one of the most distinguished Archaeologists of the day, whose views founded on the evidence of monumental inscriptions, must carry great weight, though possibly they may be hereafter modified, as he [the author] himself observes.”

Beginning with the assertion that his close friend Heinrich Schliemann had proved the historicity of Troy (and thus of the Trojan War and all of Homer), Sayce claimed a similar triumph of verification by archaeology for the biblical account of Abraham and the Old Testament generally:

Biblical history followed in the wake of classical history. Criticism had rejected the larger part of the earlier history of the Old Testament; indeed . . . it had gone further, and declared that before the Babylonian Exile there was little of it which could be believed. But meanwhile discoveries were being made in the Biblical lands of the East, which enable us to test the conclusions of the “higher criticism” and see how far the scepticism embodied in them can be justified. Discovery has been crowding on discovery, each more marvellous than the last, and bearing more or less directly on the Old Testament records.[36]

No wonder, commented Sayce, that the “higher critic” had been unable to keep up with the archaeologists’ revelations.

The tenuous basis of Sayce’s argument lay in the vast amount of cuneiform tablets which had indeed been discovered by this time and which bore testimony to the antiquity of literacy in the Semitic nations. We find the same stance being taken well into the mid-twentieth century by W. F. Albright, whose vastly popular writings during his lifetime follow directly in the Sayce tradition, employ the same confidently authoritative tone, and similarly betray the writer’s presuppositions as to the more or less complete authenticity of the Hebrew Bible and the God-given dominance of the Israelites.[37] And like Sayce in his suspicion of anthropological evidence, Albright writes, “Is the modern savage degenerate or simply stagnant?”[38]

Sayce concluded his onslaught on the Higher Criticism thus:

Our task is done. The records of the Old Testament have been confronted with the monuments of the ancient oriental world, wherever this was possible, and their historical accuracy and trustworthiness has been tested by a comparison with the latest results of archaeological research.[39]

In fact, Sayce’s “test” was essentially worthless. He was able to demonstrate certainly that the vast amount of cuneiform writings by then available did demonstrate the widespread use of writing and illuminated certain aspects of the Hebrew Bible by providing independent confirmation of the names of rulers and nations mentioned in the scriptural text, but that is all – and Sayce concedes: “The record fails us just where we need it most, the links are broken just where the chain ought to be strongest”.[40]

Controversy between the two men continued, even while Smith was gravely ill. In a letter to the Academy in 1890, Smith challenged Sayce’s translation of a passage from the Tel el-Amarna tablets, alleging that his archaeological combatant had confused two Assyrian words.[41] And later that year, Smith complained that Sayce had misread the wording on a recently discovered haematite weight.[42] In his rejoinders, Sayce became unpleasantly acrimonious, referring to “the ex cathedra assertion of those who claim a monopoly of the ‘critical method’”.[43] And so the rather unedifying squabbles persisted until Robertson Smith’s death in March, 1894. Sayce continued his crusade, however, to the close of the century, his final book on the topic being Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations,[44] again written in a decidedly non-scholarly style and marred by much circular argument coupled with an exaggerated evaluation of the archaeological testimony.

Israel, wrote Sayce, was, “the battleground of the ancient empires of the world . . . the mother-land of the religion of civilised man”;[45] Jerusalem was, “the Athens of the Eastern world”; and “critical scepticism played havoc with the historical narratives.”[46] In the field of archaeology, on the other hand, “discovery has followed discovery, each more marvellous than the last, re-establishing the truth of some historical narrative in which we had been called upon to disbelieve.”[47] The Tel el-Amarna letters alone, asserted Sayce, “have made it impossible to return to the old critical point of view; the probabilities henceforth are in favour of the early date and historical truth of the Old Testament narratives and not against them.”[48] As before, Sayce treats Abraham and the Patriarchs as indisputably historical and the Exodus story is confirmed (with some aid from Manetho!)  by the discovery of the Merneptah stele.

All this polemic represents a rather sorry example of the academic jealousies that were as common in the Victorian era as perhaps they remain today. Such rivalries become most acute when different disciplines collide – in this instance archaeology and the “higher criticism” – and a fortiori when the issues at stake are not examined objectively but become emotionally charged because of their implications for religious or philosophical belief. Modern biblical criticism and archaeology alike date their origins from the late eighteenth century but it was only after the mid-nineteenth century that such strong hostilities as we have seen developed. Curiously, it fell to archaeology to champion the literal historicity of the Hebrew Bible but it is not hard to see why this should have occurred. German theology had led the way in terms of critical scepticism; hence feelings of national pride and prestige were at stake. In the Napoleonic era, France had led the way in archaeological discovery within Egypt and scholarly rivalry continued long after international military encounters ceased. In theology, of course, the advanced – and to most Englishmen – quite reprehensible views of the Tübingen school were anathema, cutting as they did to the heart of Christian belief in the Bible. It is hardly surprising therefore that the writings of men such as Condor and Sayce were uncritically imbibed, both by the public at large and also by the conservative wings of the various denominations. Archaeology, moreover, seemed to carry (as indeed it should) the guarantee of scientific objectivity; yet what these far-off battles illustrate for us today above all is that scientific evidence is worthless unless its data are analysed with scrupulous integrity, uncontaminated by sectarian bias or prior suppositions.