Bible and Sword: England and Palestine From the Bronze Age to Balfour

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  *Scott felt obliged to explain in later editions that he was forced to let Ivanhoe marry Rowena rather than Rebecca for the sake of historic verisimilitude.

  *Balfour incidentally was among the undergraduates at Trinity College who met George Eliot on her visit to Cambridge in search of material for her studies of Deronda and his friends.

  CHAPTER XIII

  THE RUSH FOR THE HOLY LAND

  In 1862 the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, made a tour of the Holy Land, the first heir to the British throne to set foot in Palestine since the crusade of Edward I in 1270. He came in the same year that Moses Hess proclaimed that “the hour had struck” for the revival of the Jewish nation. The two events were of course totally unconnected, but they are evidence that history was propelling the convergence of the Exiles and the Intermediary Power. Edward’s tour, which included a visit to the Mosque at Hebron, where the Patriarchs’ tombs had been taken over as a Moslem holy place, broke the barrier against Christians’ entering the sanctuaries and “may be said to have opened the whole of Syria to Christian research.” These are the words of the prospectus issued by the Palestine Exploration Fund, which, founded three years after the Prince’s tour, opened the Holy Land both to modern archaeology and to modern mapping and surveying.

  Nothing could be more typically English than the dualism of the work of the Palestine Exploration Fund—undertaken for the sake of Biblical research, it was carried out by army officers designated by the War Office. Colonel Conder, the most notable of the field workers, was said to have contributed more to knowledge of the Bible than anyone since Tyndale translated it; his maps meanwhile were published by Army Ordnance — maps used by General Allenby, the victor of Jerusalem in 1918. Here are Bible and Sword working together unmistakably. In fact, Colonel Conder is a sort of epitome of British experience in Palestine, always a double thing composed of Biblical nostalgia and imperial thrust. It was like a print of a twice-exposed negative — two pictures discernible but impossible to separate.

  Inevitably the Palestine Exploration Fund field workers, as over years of search and excavation they gradually uncovered the true shape of Palestine’s highly civilized past, became themselves caught up in the prospects for the country’s future. Conder concluded rightly that little effort toward the revival of Palestine could be expected from the local Jews, who were “still bound by the iron chain of Talmudic law, a people … whose veneration for the past appears to preclude the possibility of progress or improvement in the present.” The urge and the man power would come from the Jews of Eastern Europe; if they could survive under the czars, he said, they could survive and prosper under the Sultan. His companion officer, Sir Charles Warren, veteran of many Exploration Fund expeditions, went further and proposed that Palestine be developed by the East India Company with “the avowed intention of gradually introducing the Jews pure and simple who would eventually occupy and govern the country.” He called his book The Land of Promise and maintained that with good government and increased commerce the population could increase tenfold, and “yet there is room.” Productiveness of the land, he predicted, “will increase in proportion to the labor bestowed upon the soil, until a population of fifteen million may be accommodated there.” Warren’s book appeared in 1875, while George Eliot was writing Daniel Deronda and in Vienna the Ha-Shahar group were calling for the rebirth of their nation.

  But the mainspring of England’s interest was still Biblical, though in a very different form from Shaftesbury’s; indeed, in direct opposition to it. “Saucy rationalism” had by now triumphed over Evangelicalism, but to the accompaniment of such furious controversy as made the Bible a fighting document and the Holy Land an arena as embattled as the Roman forum. The champions of rationalism, determined to prove the Bible as history, went charging out to the Holy Land both literally and figuratively, to uncover the necessary evidence. Since they rejected the Bible as revelation and therefore as infallible, they rejected prophecy, too; but the basis for the restoration of Israel was not carried away by this new wave, for in the course of their investigations into the past they rediscovered the Jews as a people and as a nation. An early herald of the Higher Criticism was the Reverend Henry Hart Milman’s History of the Jews (not, be it noted, history of the Hebrews or Israelites or “God’s ancient people”), and the howl that arose when he was found to have called Abraham a sheik was stupendous. Milman died as Dean of St. Paul’s, famous and respected, but when his book first appeared in 1829 it was regarded almost as a national insult.

  The recovered factual history of the Jews, Milman held, was not sacred ground, exempt from scientific treatment because of its connection with divine revelation: on the contrary, it was “part of the world’s history.” The functions that the Jews have performed, he said, in the progress of human development and civilization “are so important, so enduring” that it becomes the duty of the Christian historian to investigate their history as the only safe way to attain the highest religious truth. The ancient Hebrews were human beings, spoke with human voices, heard with human ears, and in short (to lead the reader at full tilt into the famous sentence) “Abraham, excepting in his worship and intercourse with the one true God, was a nomad sheik.” And hard upon that, another blow: the parting of the waters of the Red Sea was no more a miracle than the storm that came up in the Channel to destroy the Spanish Armada at precisely the right moment.

  Coleridge, in the same vein, had discovered Jesus to be a “platonic philosopher.” Fresh from his studies in Göttingen, where historical criticism of the Bible was marching sternly on with the heavy tread of German scholarship, he pronounced worship of Biblical infallibility to be “if possible still more extravagant than that of papal infallibility.” Through his essays and table talk he immensely stimulated the new spirit of investigation. Churchmen began to worry, and when in 1832 the First Reform Bill marked the triumph of Liberalism they became thoroughly frightened. A Liberal climate was not considered healthy for ecclesiastical authority. In response, the Oxford movement was launched in 1833 in a desperate effort to strengthen, by a renewed emphasis on faith, the defenses of revealed religion against the onrushing forces of rationalism. Keble preached his famous Assize sermon, and in the same year he and Newman and Pusey issued the first of the Tracts for the Times. What passion and erudition were poured out over such vexed questions as the authorship of the Pentateuch, the validity of the Book of Daniel, the moral attitude to be adopted toward the all too human behavior of David at his worst or Jacob at his most conniving! Newman regarded anyone who raised such questions as a heretic; Keble decided that only very wicked persons could engage in inquiries that undermined the divinity of Scripture; Pusey even went to Germany to study the historical method, the better to combat it, and on being appointed Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford gave nine lectures a week to teach divinity students a full idiomatic knowledge of the language of the Old Testament for the better understanding of God’s word.

  But in the long run it was all of no use. The Tractarians were essentially reactionary, against rather than for the times, and the times prevailed over the Tracts. Newman’s surrender to Catholicism in 1845 (followed by Manning’s) was the logical outcome. Infallible authority was to him necessary for faith, and when the Bible no longer possessed it Rome became the only refuge. Keble and Pusey struggled on, striving to keep adherents of the Oxford movement from following Newman over the edge. Even as late as 1860 two of the seven authors of Essays and Reviews, the famous counterblast of the rationalists, were actually tried for heresy. Their acquittal by the Privy Council in 1864, after years of fuming and fulminating on all sides, marked the doom of the old order—of the authority that had reigned with the Puritans, was revived by the Evangelicals, and uttered its swan song in the Oxford movement.

  Now the rationalists galloped with the bit in their teeth, and their road led to Palestine and to a new understanding of Judaism as the human source of Christianity. Dean Stanley, the leading liberal theolo
gian of his age, began his course in Church history at Oxford with “the call of Abraham.” Inevitably he sought out the spot itself, and after a two-year tour of the Holy Land he published his Sinai and Palestine (1857). Palestine, he wrote, was the “scene of the most important events in the history of mankind.” Here the word of God came directly to the Jewish people, and here alone could be studied the surroundings that formed the character “of the most remarkable nation which has appeared on earth.” Here where the traveler recognizes the wild broom of the desert as the shrub under which Elijah slept, where he stands on Pisgah and sees the view that Moses saw, where at every hand he finds the local features that “have become the household imagery of Christendom,” here indeed are to be found the evidences that prove the flesh-and-blood reality of the Bible.

  Dean Stanley returned to Palestine as chaplain and guide to Prince Edward during the royal tour in 1862. His passion for historic origins was rewarded when permission was at last arranged for the party to visit the Tomb of the Patriarchs at Hebron, which no European had entered since 1187. “There was a deep groan from the attendants when the shrine of Abraham was opened, redoubled at the shrine of Jacob and Joseph.* You may imagine my feelings when I thrust my arm down as far as I could reach into the rocky vault, and when I knelt down to ascertain how far the tomb of Abraham was part of the native mountain.” The Prince, on being thanked by Stanley for making the visit possible, replied: “Well, high station, you see, has, after all, some merits.”

  Three years later Stanley’s History of the Jewish Church explored and further uncovered the Jewish roots of Christianity; and the subject was pursued by W. R. Smith, who wrote the article on the Bible for the famous ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, of which he was the editor. He expanded the historical method in his books The Old Testament in the Jewish Church and The Prophets of Israel. Meantime Dean Stanley’s friend and Oxford colleague, the great Jowett, one of the contributors to Essays and Reviews, was also presenting the Jewish prophets as our civilization’s “schoolmasters.” “They taught men the true nature of God, that he was a God of love as well as of justice, the Father as well as the judge of mankind.” We owe our intellectual framework to the Greek philosophers, said Jowett, and our moral feelings to the Jewish prophets.

  If this sounds like Matthew Arnold, the likeness is not accidental. He too was a professor (of poetry) at Oxford in the exciting sixties; and here, with Jowett, Regius Professor of Greek, on his left and Pusey, Regius Professor of Hebrew, on his right and the air crackling with the feud between the two champions, it is no wonder that Arnold developed his thesis stated in “Hebraism and Hellenism,” the “two points between which our world turns.” He brought to the surface a conscious recognition of the Hebraic content in English culture and followed Milman and Stanley in treating Christianity as “modified Hebraism.” All of Victorian England’s religious obsession and the intellectual battle that it provoked are contained in Arnold’s books that followed one another rapidly in the next five years: St. Paul and Protestantism, Literature and Dogma (which he subtitled An Essay towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible); and lastly God and the Bible, in rebuttal to critics of the previous book.

  There was heard, too, the loud voice of that passionate apostle of rationalism, Lecky, whose hatred of dogmatic theology led him to admire all its victims, especially the Jews. Writing of the Inquisition, he says: “Certainly the heroism of every other creed fades into insignificance before this martyr people, who for thirteen centuries confronted all the evils that the fiercest fanaticism could devise, enduring the infliction of the most hideous sufferings rather than abandon their faith.… Persecution came to the Jewish nation in its most horrible forms … but above all this the genius of that wonderful people rose supreme.” Lecky’s prose rises to heights of enthusiasm as he portrays the Jews pursuing the path of knowledge, keeping alive the torch of Greek Learning through the Arabic conquest till it could be relit in Europe, while the intellect of Christendom was “grovelling in the darkness of besotted ignorance” and occupied with “juggling miracles and lying relics.” There was nothing palely “objective” about the great nineteenth-century historians; when they espoused a point of view they pulled no punches.

  Lecky’s History of Rationalism appeared in 1865, the same year as Stanley’s Jewish Church, and in that same year the Palestine Exploration Fund was founded, the direct outcome of the new flesh-and-blood approach to the Holy Land. Remember that, only the year before, the judges had decided in the heresy case that it was not penal under the law for a clergyman to affirm that authorship of the books of the Bible was human, not divine. The dikes were down. To recover the real past and the real people of the Book was the task the P.E.F. set itself. Not only Palestine’s archaeology, but also its topography, meteorology, botany, zoology, and every other -ology was to be, said the P.E.F.’s prospectus, within its scope. It sternly announced, in asking for funds, that it would be bound by three guiding principles: field work was to be carried out on scientific principles, the Fund was to abstain from religious controversy, and it was not to be conducted as a religious society. Oxford University, naturally, led the list of donors with £500, Cambridge £250, the Syria Improvement Committee £250, the Queen £150, and the Grand Lodge of Freemasons £105.

  Curiously enough, although the P.E.F. was founded in the spirit of rationalist investigation, its original impulse came from the evangelical Finns and their friends in Jerusalem. They had founded a Jerusalem Literary Society for the study of local “antiquities,” and it had rapidly become the center for all the Biblical historiographers who came in those years, like a pack of excited bird dogs, to flush the relics of the far-off time when “the documents of our faith were written.” Local members of the Society went on excavating trips and dug up enough artifacts to start a little museum. A library of a thousand volumes was collected. The Archbishop of Canterbury became a patron. The Prince Consort sent £25. Learned foreigners and distinguished archaeologists become corresponding members. Prominent visitors — Ernest Renan, Holman Hunt, Dean Stanley, de Lesseps, Layard the discoverer of Nineveh-came to its meetings.

  As a result of all this bustling and digging the true immensity of Palestine’s past and the size of the task necessary to uncover it began to be understood. Concerted and professional effort must replace the enthusiastic amateur.

  In 1864 the War Office was persuaded to appoint an officer of engineers (without however, paying his expenses) to begin a survey of Jerusalem and its vicinity. Sir Charles Wilson volunteered, and the results of his work (which included a plotting of the difference in levels between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea) constituted the first publication of the P.E.F., organized in the following year. Wilson went again to survey the Beirut and Hebron area, and many years later, after a military career that included command of the expedition that failed to rescue General Gordon in the Sudan, he returned to Palestine in 1899 and 1903 to locate the controversial sites of Golgotha and the Holy Sepulcher.

  After Wilson the P.E.F. sent out Sir Charles Warren, whose researches led him to the conclusion, already quoted from his Land of Promise, that Palestine could again be the productive land it had been of old. In 1872 the basic and most extensive work of surveying was begun by two officers of the Royal Engineers in their twenties, Lieutenant Claude Conder and one destined to greater world fame in another sphere, Lieutenant Kitchener. Kitchener surveyed Eastern Palestine; Conder took the territory west of the Jordan and in three years mapped an area of 4,700 square miles. He located the previously unknown sites of a hundred and fifty Biblical place names, plotted the boundaries of the Twelve Tribes, traced the routes of armies and migrations, and deciphered ancient inscriptions. For two years more, back in England, he and Kitchener worked together preparing their material for publication. The historical findings were issued in seven volumes of Memoirs by the P.E.F., beginning in 1880; the maps were printed by the Ordnance Survey Office. Conder published his own account, Tent Work in P
alestine, illustrated with his own drawings, and went back again and again to the Holy Land. The rest of his life, between tours of military duty in Egypt and South Africa, he devoted to bringing into the light the lost history of the land and its people. In 1882 he was chosen to guide Prince George, later George V, on a Holy Land tour, as Dean Stanley had guided Edward twenty years earlier.

  His erudition was enormous, his mind searching and original, his interests limitless, his prose lively. He could speak and write Hebrew and Arabic and was expert in ancient cuneiform. He translated the Tel-Amarna tablets, the primary source material for pre-Hebraic Palestine. He could trace the history of every place he visited from the Crusades back through to the Bible, peeling off Moslem, Byzantine, Roman, and Assyrian layers one by one. He could write with authority on geology, archaeology, philology, medicine, agriculture, art, architecture, literature, and theology. Unconcerned with proving or disproving doctrinal dogmas, he loved to dig down to the history beneath the religious façade. Instead of bowing before the Church of the Holy Sepulcher he called it that “grim and wicked old building,” cause of more human misery and spilling of blood than any other edifice in the world. Short of a whole chapter on Conder, the best résumé of his work can be gained just from listing the titles of some of his works: Judas Maccabaeus and the Jewish War of Independence (1879), Primer of Bible Geography (1883), Syrian Stone Lore (1886), The Canaanites (1887), Palestine (1891), The Bible in the East (1896), The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (1897), The Hittites and their Language (1898), The Hebrew Tragedy (1900), and The City of Jerusalem (1909) the year before he died.