There was a lot for Albright to learn from this episode about how to present scholarship, how to present scholarship related to the Bible, and how to present scholarship related to the Bible in the American context. Now despite the comparatively large department dealing with the ancient Near East, despite the long-standing involvement in that area, and finally, despite Hilprecht’s specific involvement with the Gilgamesh epic, the subject mentioned in Albright’s letter to his father, it is easy to see why Albright in 1913 would have crossed off the University of Pennsylvania from the small list of potential graduate schools for him now that its popularizer of biblical scholarship and Gilgamesh expert was gone. Under slightly different circumstances, one can easily imagine Albright pursuing his interests in the Flood story, Genesis 14, and the Bible at the University of Pennsylvania, but in the tumultuous circumstances at the time when Albright was in college himself, this was one school to scratch off his list.Oh well. He did okay anyway.
For those unfamiliar with William Foxwell Albright's background, he went to Johns Hopkins for his PhD and studied under Paul Haupt. Albright went on to be the twentieth century's "dean of biblical archaeologists."
That aside, this essay is a fascinating account of biblical and Assyriological scholarly politics in the early part of the twentieth century. It is the third in a series of four. I noted the first two here and here.
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