Rivers in the Desert: A History of the Negev: Being an Illustrated Account of Discoveries in a Frontierland of Civilization
(The Negev, the desert that comprises the southern half of...)
The Negev, the desert that comprises the southern half of Israel, is a bridgehead between East and West, and has been the site of trade routes and civilizations since the 4th millennium B.C. For six years Nelson Glueck has been doing archaeological work in the Negev, and he has been able to restore to the map a whole series of civilizations that flourished and died over the centuries. This book, in popular fashion, shows the tremendous importance of the Negev as a passageway between continents. The Patriarchs, commencing with Abraham, knew it well, and the Israelites of the Exodus experienced bitter defeat in their attempt to enter the Promised Land directly through it from Sinai. The author emphasizes also the spiritual importance of the Negev in connection with the insights into the nature of God's moral imperatives achieved there by human beings.
(This new and attractively printed and illustrated edition...)
This new and attractively printed and illustrated edition of "The Other Side of the Jordan" serves to portray one of the greatest single-handed archaeological achievements of the century. The desert and the sown land - what special fascination this gives to the study of the Near East! In between them to this day are a floating population. Sometimes they settled and built towns. More often they roamed with their flocks, home-base being where they grew one crop a year on marginal land. Many are the theories to explain them, who they are and what they have accomplished. Yet what are the facts? What actually can one find out by travel on foot, horseback, or camel, living among present Bedouin to search the hills and valleys for evidence of a past they have long forgotten? Here is the story of what one man found out about this mystery in a search of many years, between 1932 and 1947. Its main conclusions are today still true - an important new chapter in the ancient story of man.
Nelson Glueck was an American rabbi, academic and archaeologist.
Background
Glueck was born on June 4, 1900, in Cincinnati, Ohio, one of seven children of Morris Glueck, a merchant, and Anna Rubin. Glueck's parents instilled in him a profound devotion to his Jewish heritage, which would later inform his archaeological pursuits. He traced his fascination with artifacts to childhood explorations of a fossil site and an Indian burial ground in and around Cincinnati.
Education
Glueck attended public high school, then entered Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati at the age of fifteen, taking a degree in Hebrew literature in 1918. He received a B. A. from the University of Cincinnati in 1920 and, complying with his parents' wishes, returned to Hebrew Union College for rabbinical training. After his ordination in 1923, Glueck traveled on a fellowship to Germany, studying Eastern lore, Assyrian, and Ethiopic at the University of Berlin and Heidelberg University. He received his Ph. D. in biblical studies from the University of Jena, Germany, in 1927. Glueck's dissertation, which was published in 1967 under the title Hesed in the Bible, marked his promise as a scholar of biblical ideas.
Career
In 1927, Glueck took a study trip to the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem to pursue a growing interest in Palestinian archaeology. The school was then headed by American archaeologist William F. Albright, who had devised one of the first systems for dating ruins of the ancient Near East. Albright trained Glueck in this system, which relied on the classification of Palestinian potsherds, or pottery fragments, according to hundreds of variations. Intermittently during the period 1927-1932, Glueck traveled on foot to all of Albright's excavations, becoming an expert in ceramic chronology while at the same time experiencing the biblical resonances of the Holy Land. During his training under Albright, Glueck decided against the rabbinical pulpit for which he had been trained in favor of. He saw the south Transjordanian desert and the Negev as a vast terra incognita that required exploration square mile by square mile; Glueck's topographical survey of these regions, undertaken between 1932 and 1967, resulted in the discovery of approximately 1, 500 ancient sites and established him as one of the foremost Palestinian archaeologists of the twentieth century. Glueck alternated his nomadic wanderings through Palestine with his career as an educator and administrator. His contributions to archaeology were made during numerous leaves of absence from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, where he had become an instructor in 1928. Glueck advanced through the ranks to become professor of the Bible and biblical archaeology in 1936, a position he held until his death. His teaching career included a stint as lecturer in biblical literature at the University of Cincinnati in the 1935-1936 academic year. Glueck also served as director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem from 1932 to 1933 and 1936 to 1940. He was annual professor at the American School of Oriental Research in Baghdad, Iraq (1933-1934) and used his position as field director there (1942-1947) to gather military intelligence for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. In March 1948, Glueck was appointed president of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati; shortly after that institution merged with the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York in July 1948, Glueck became the first president of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, a post that designated him as the leader of Reform Judaism in the United States. As such, Glueck gave the benediction at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961. Under Glueck, the college opened a Los Angeles campus in 1950 and in 1960 founded the Hebrew Union College Biblical and Archaeological School in Jerusalem (later the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology), a postdoctoral research and excavation center. Glueck made it a requirement for rabbinical students of the American college to spend one year studying at the center in Israel, in order to facilitate their learning of Hebrew. Glueck called himself a biblical archaeologist because he grounded his archaeological excavations on his reading of the Old Testament. Using the Old Testament as his guide, Glueck mapped out the biblical kingdoms of Edom, Moab, and Ammon, providing the first scientific insight into the dating of the biblical patriarchs. He uncovered historical evidence of the Nabataeans, an early Arab people. His most celebrated finding came in 1934, when he discovered Khirbet Nahas, a ruin he identified as King Solomon's mines. Glueck wrote several books popularizing biblical archaeology, namely, The Other Side of the Jordan (1940), The River Jordan (1946), Rivers of the Desert: A History of the Negev (1959), and Deities and Dolphins: The Story of the Nabataeans (1965). He contributed numerous popular articles on his findings to National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine. His technical reports were published in Explorations in Eastern Palestine, the annual journal of the American School of Oriental Research. Glueck died of cancer in Cincinnati on February 12, 1971.
On March 26, 1931, Glueck married Helen Ransohoff Iglauer, a medical student at the University of Cincinnati who went on to become a professor of medicine there. They had one child.