| "Burke
Long has written an uncommonly important and fascinating study in
'the history of the discipline' of Old Testament studies. . . . Long
has taught us much about our recent past and temptations to agonistic
scholarship. We may infer from his work a great deal more about our
common future in scholarship."-Walter Brueggemann, Theology Today
This book examines the social formation and ideological practices
of William Foxwell Albright, the gifted Johns Hopkins linguist and
archaeologist who, along with a fiercely loyal and organized group
of former students, exerted uncommon influence on the substance
and direction of mid-twentieth century biblical studies. Albright
and these devoted students (such as G. Ernest Wright, Frank Moore
Cross, Jr., David Noel Freedman, John Bright, George E. Mendenhall)
came to be known as the "Albright School." Burke Long here treats
the field of biblical studies, not as a repository of objective
knowledge, but as a culture created by like-minded people whose
knowledge is mediated through the ideologically charged give-and-take
of social interactions.
A first of its kind for biblical studies, Planting and Reaping
Albright draws on private letters, interviews, and published
work to expose ideological presuppositions and political machinations
embedded in historical knowledge about the Bible that this group
of scholars constructed and disseminated through its various activities.
Long investigates Albright's many assumptions about the "way things
really are" and the ways in which his students, describing themselves
as "sons of Albright," embarked on a crusade to secure political
and ideological dominance of the landscape of American biblical
scholarship.
The Albright School constituted a sociological phenomenon that
had lasting consequences for American intellectual history and scholarship.
Accordingly, this book suggests ways in which Albright, or a social
realization of Albright, was present in, and presented to, a culture
of generational and ideological solidarity. |
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