Really Hershel, Really?

“I didn’t have any aspirations to become an icon of biblical archaeology, but it happened. We have nearly 150,000 subscribers and a quarter of a million readers.”

That’s just one of the things Hershel Shanks says about himself in an essay in the New York Times by Richard Bernstein. And it’s not so much an essay as a hagiography. If Bernstein is to be believed, Shanks single handedly brought ‘biblical archaeology’ to public view.

The essay commences

He’s not exactly a household name, but anybody who has been paying only intermittent attention to the tricky, contentious and occasionally litigious world of biblical archaeology will know that Hershel Shanks, who at the age of 80 has just published his autobiography, is the leading non-archaeologist in the field.

The leading non-archaeologist in the field. Isn’t that like lionizing the leading non-astronaut in the field or the leading non-heart doctor in the field? Is Bernstein absolutely bereft of friends who can point him to actual archaeologists?

He created a bridge between an ultraprofessionalized scholarly world and the public, and in this sense has been responsible for an enormous expansion of lay knowledge about the key archaeological and historical questions, like how much of the Bible’s tales, from the Exodus to the story of David to the life of Jesus, are historical, and how much are myth.

He’s the messiah! Let’s all hail the messiah of biblical archaeology. Without him, where would the poor besotted public be?

The evidence that poor Mr Bernstein doesn’t know the field at all and so has no business in exalting Shanks is found in one single paragraph-

Or, as Lawrence H. Schiffman, professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, put it in his book, “Qumran and Jerusalem: Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the History of Judaism”: “Shanks and his magazine have gained a kind of de facto control over the news media in the U. S. when it comes to biblical archaeology. They have effectively become the gate keeper for most major newspapers.”

Bernstein thinks that Schiffman is complimenting Shanks! That, however, is not the gist of what Schiffman says in his essay. He laments the fact that so many get their information from such a source!

Bernstein’s mancrush on Shanks rolls on throughout the entire essay. And it’s sickening. Shanks may have done some good in his magazine- but he has used it to spread more misinformation than information and his politics are always right on the surface, visible to any seeing eye.

I won’t be reading Shank’s autobiography. Self aggrandizement sickens me.  ‘Icon’?  No, idol.