With Monica Fatigue setting in, one craved sanity and soothing perspective–or at least some lawyer who wasn’t gabbing on any of 38 television shows titled, “Crisis in the White House.”
It was time Friday to check in with Hershel Shanks, a Washington attorney embroiled in disputes whose mudslinging rivals that between the White House and Kenneth Starr.
“Things have gotten more intensely antagonistic. Some of the attacks people are making are really unbelievable,” he said. Of course, Shanks was talking about nasty claims that evidence of King David’s and King Solomon’s glorious reigns in the 10th Century B.C. is dubious and even that the two may not have existed.
Then there are claims that Jerusalem itself didn’t exist during a supposedly glorious period around the Late Bronze Age.
Then there is the backstabbing over whether there is truly a link between a famous settlement at Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 11 nearby caves.
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Among other unpleasantries.
Shanks, 68, is a Harvard Law School graduate and onetime appeals lawyer at the Justice Department who turned a personal interest in archeology and the Bible into a cottage industry of related lively magazines, notably the Biblical Archaeology Review (circulation: 200,000), Bible Review (50,000), Moment (65,000) and a new one, Archaeology Odyssey (35,000).
They’re aimed at the thoughtful layman and, with Shanks’ supervision and own contributions, generally avoid the jargon of the scholarly worlds they cover.
Their founder himself has become a big player, rankling many with claims such as one that the work of a famous British archeologist was tarnished by her anti-Zionist views and his repeated arguing that a small band of scholars unfairly had garnered a monopoly over access to the Dead Sea Scrolls, arguably the century’s greatest archeological discovery.
For instance, nothing is hotter in his world these days than the dispute involving David and Solomon, his son, with nothing less than “their glory and majesty at stake,” Shanks said.
It may be hard for history-challenged Americans to comprehend, but there are few bigger matters for biblical scholars than the 10th Century B.C.
In large measure, that’s because it was the period of David and Solomon and when ancient Israel was briefly united under one monarch as the two men brought together the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
But a leading Israeli archeologist, Israel Finkelstein, has called into question the most basic assumptions with his claims that the evidence of their reigns must be dated to the 9th Century, not the 10th Century as long assumed.
He relies on his analysis of certain archeological strata; in fact, the same ones analyzed long ago by a prominent University of Chicago team.
Meanwhile, a Dutch scholar, Margaret Steiner, claims that the city of Jerusalem didn’t even exist at the time. That would mean it could not have been conquered by David, as most assume.
There wasn’t even a dinky town on that location, she contends, though a pair of American and Israeli scholars come to the totally opposite conclusion based on the same evidence.
Together, most of these spats are part of a larger argument over how reliable the Bible is and to what extent we can look to it as history.
There are warring schools of so-called maximalists and minimalists, while certain people of faith say the Bible is literally true.
Some of this gets truly arcane with fervent disputation over, for instance, a particular inscription on a hunk of a black stone monument from either the 8th or 9th Century B.C. that mentions the dynasty of David.
“The attacks being made on that inscription are unbelievable!” Shanks said.
Then there’s the matter of Qumran, the settlement near where the scrolls were found. This fracas plays into the critical question of who actually wrote the scrolls. Were they Essenes? And just what sort of settlement was there at Qumran? What type of people lived there?
“We thought we had an answer, but new evidence makes this very debatable,” Shanks said. “We can’t pin down who wrote them and whether they had anything to do with the adjacent site.”
Maybe one shouldn’t be surprised that the most prominent professional groups in this field can’t get along. The traditional joint annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Schools of Oriental Research has been rent asunder by the withdrawal of the academy, the top American group of archeologists.
So when the annual meeting was held this year in San Francisco, the academy met separately in Napa, two hours away.
Then, what Shanks terms “vitriolic negotiations” to fashion a reconciliation prompted the academy to tentatively arrange to hold its gathering next year in Memphis, while the traditional joint meeting would be in Orlando.
“Oh, gosh, that’s a terrible one (dispute),” Shanks said, clearly chagrined, though noting the academy made a subsequent, somewhat conciliatory move. It will go to Orlando, but convene the week before everybody else.
To read Shanks’ glossy, catchy and well-edited publications is to be engagingly immersed in another world. The current issue, for example, has this story: “BAD TIMING–What Time is It When the Qumran Sundial Reads 15 O’Clock?”
This tale involves a stone disk that surfaced during a 1950s excavation at Qumran.
For 40 years, the 8-inch-wide piece of limestone sat in storerooms of Jerusalem’s Rockefeller Museum, until rediscovered last year during inventory and identified as a sundial.
“The identification displays a sorry failure to understand ancient science and technology, as well as the literature regarding sundials,” writes Abraham Levy, an independent scholar, who says it’s not configured to tell time and doesn’t look like an ancient sundial. Gotcha archeology.
Now, as far as Washington’s Monica obsession, Shanks offered obvious precedent, though fretting that he was scooping one of his yet-to-be-published articles.
“We find the same thing in ancient times,” he said. “Archeologists have uncovered cuneiform tablets that tell the story of the chief of the town of Nuzi in Mesopotamia around 1400 B.C. who was charged with illicit sex.
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“And he gave the equivalent of a deposition denying this. There was a trial. Unfortunately, the tablet with the result of the trial hasn’t been found. So we don’t know how it came out.
“Which, I guess, is about the same position as we are in with President Clinton today.”
Oops, Mr. Lasorda
Here’s why the lord gave us newspaper copy editors: not just to correct mistakes of errant columnists but those of pontificating former baseball managers.
Last week, I repeated testimony by former Los Angeles Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda before a Senate committee.
The subject was a constitutional amendment against flag burning. Lasorda was citing great moments in American history and included this:
“Like during the 1977 World Series, Reggie Jackson hit four towering home runs on four consecutive pitches to lead the enemy Yankees past my Dodgers for the world championship.”
The flag burning campaign is a slick one, with guidance from the public relations giant Burson-Marsteller. But somebody goofed here, as Tribune copy editor Rich Lorenz discerned.
In fact, Jackson hit a homer in his last at-bat in the fifth game that year, then hit three home runs in the sixth game (the final one). But in between he walked, in his first plate appearance in the last game.
Thus, Lasorda blew the details of the event to which he was a very intimate spectator. Maybe he’s suffering from Flagheimer’s disease.