Sheba

CHAPTER TWO
The Search for Evidence
Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation
on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the
same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago.
You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from
Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably
like the one that today advertises ice cream at the corner candy store.
Charles Krauthammer
(Columnist and former speechwriter to Vice President Walter Mondale)
The Weekly Standard (U.S.A.), May 11, 1998
I
slam had an understandable aversion to archaeology, seeing it as
desecration of the dead, an attitude shared by many Jews. However,
Jews who were prominent in the new sciences saw archaeology as
supportive of the Zionist cause. This attitude was shared by Christian
archaeologists and other professionals who perceived that if the Jews
fulfilled their divine mission of reclaiming the Promised Land, then other
related Holy Writ, namely, the New Testament, might also be fulfilled.
With the departure of the Muslim Turks, archaeology under the British
Mandate became possible. It was hardly coincidental that the first
archaeologists into Palestine were committed Christians.
William Foxwell Albright (1891-1971) is the father of biblical
archaeology. Born in Chile of Methodist missionaries, he took his doctorate
in Semitic languages at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland.
In 1919, he became Fellow of the American School of Oriental Research in
Jerusalem, and its director in the following year. When he finally retired in
1958 he had established himself as the leading authority on biblical