Wiegand’s campaign produced a meticulously presented and illustrated series
of volumes (Lullies & Schiering 1988). Parallel to the German excavations, the
French, represented by the Orientalist George Contenau (b. 1877), excavated
in Sidon.
ARCHAEOLOGY, BIBLICAL LITERARY CRITICISM,
AND THE CONSERVATIVE REACTIONWhy expend such energy in this far away, inhospitable, dangerous land? Why this
costly ransacking of this millennia-old rubbish heap, all the way down to water level,
when there is no gold or silver to be found? Why this international competition to
secure as many as possible of these desolate mounds for excavation?... To these
questions, there is but one answer, if not an exhaustive one; the major motivation
and goal [of these endeavours] isthe Bible.
(Delitzsch, ‘Babel and Bible’, 1902: 1 in Marchand 1996b: 330).A century before these words were written, the Bible was still indisputably
considered a major source—for some the main or even the only source—of
intellectual and religious life in the Judeo-Christian world. However, contem-
porary intellectual trends were already threatening the unique position held
by the Holy Book. The historicist impetus that had caused many to enquire
about the past of Rome and Greece, as well as the national past, could not but
aVect the way in which the Bible was comprehended. Was the Bible an
exclusively religious book or should it also be seen as a historical source?
The text-based historical analysis, which complemented the philological and
epigraphical sources that had been applied to the study of the classical authors
by Niebuhr and the modern sources used by Ranke (Chapter 11), was also
adopted by European scholars specializing in other disciplines such as the-
ology and Oriental languages. However, the critical analysis of the Bible was
not something completely novel in the nineteenth century. It had precedents
going back to the Reformation. In the sixteenth century, the wish to clarify the
scriptures had led to aWrst inquest into the nature of the Bible led by religious
men like Luther (1483–1546), an impetus further reinforced during the
rationalist era in the eighteenth century. The linguistic analysis of parts of
the Bible such as Genesis had been begun by authors such as the Dutch Jew
and rationalist Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza (1632–1677) and the French-
man Jean Astruc (1684–1766). The former began a translation of the Hebrew
Bible and was one of theWrst to raise questions of higher criticism. The work
of the latter, Astruc, was not widely read or believed, but it unveiled the fact
160 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism