From the Stone Age to Christianity: Monotheism and the Historical Process

by William Foxwell Albright

Book Overview

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.This work is in the public domain in the United States of America,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0007EO9XS
• Release Date: January 1957
• Publisher: Doubleday Anchor Book
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Good, But Only If You're Serious

Archeologists first studied the holy land with "a shovel in one hand and a Bible in the other," but this method caused problems. Jerico didn't turn out to have walls when they supposedly came tumbling down. No evidence was found of several hundred thousand ex-slaves camping out in the Sinai desert for 40 years after the Exodus from Egypt. Albright's book marked the official recognition of doing it the scientific way - taking the archeological evidence at face value, like you would at any other excavation site. In every regard, Albright tries to present his case scientifically, but it's not just about archeology. Chapter I: Discussion of scientific archeological methods, history of written and oral history, linguistic issues. Chapter II: Discussion of various important philosophers and historians important to the western religious history, especially Hegel, Toynbee, & Sorokin. Chapter III: Religion, mythology, and culture from 25,000 to 1600 BCE. Chapter IV: Political, religious, philosophical, cultural, geographical, and ethnic issues in ancient Israel, 1600 - 1200 BCE. Chapter V: The United Monarchy, the Divided Monarchy, the exile, and beyond; 1200 - 300 BCE. Chapter VI: Israel in the Hellenistic Age, leading to and including Jesus's life and his religion. This book is extremely academic and covers a lot of parallel disciplines - philology, linguistics, anthropology, archeology, paleontology, and history - to the point that if one is not already conversant in that subject, it can be quite tedious. I had trouble with parts of every chapter except the last one - which I knew more about. His viewpoints are completely Christian - he is a devout believer - but he believes firmly in evolution. He does not feel that he has to take the Bible literally, but he criticizes those who doubt its general historical accuracy. At the same time, when evidence strongly disputes the Bible, he goes with the evidence. He acknowledges Wellhausen's Documentary Hypothesis (J, E, P, D, & redactor[s]) and refers frequently to it, but is generally skeptical of its value. He believes in Q, the general scholarly timeline for the writing of the books of the NT, and recognizes they were not necessarily written by the disciple the book is named after. Despite my complaints, the book consistently added to my scope of knowledge, and the last chapter was superb. That the earlier chapters weren't as inspiring says more about my knowledge base than about the book's deficits. Originally written in 1939, some of the discussion reflects the times tainted by WWII. Despite being consistently impressed, I can recommend it in its entirety only to those with a scholarly interest in many fields of study in ancient western history and religion. The book that prompted me to buy Albright's book was Silberman & Finkelstein's "The Bible Unearthed." That book gets right down to the issues of archeology in the holy land and might be the next landmark book aft