William Foxwell Albright
| William F. Albright | |
|---|---|
William F. Albright
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| Born |
William Foxwell Albright May 24, 1891 Coquimbo, Chile |
| Died | September 19, 1971 (aged 80) Baltimore, Maryland |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Upper Iowa University |
| Occupation | archaeologist |
William Foxwell Albright (May 24, 1891 – September 19, 1971) was an American archaeologist, biblical scholar, philologist, and expert on ceramics.
Albright was born in Coquimbo, Chile, the eldest of six children of American evangelical Methodist missionaries Wilbur Finley Albright and Cornish American Zephine Viola Foxwell. Albright was an alumnus of Upper Iowa University. He married Dr. Ruth Norton (1892–1979) in 1921 and had four sons. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, in 1916 and took a professorship there in 1927, remaining as W. W. Spence Professor of Semitic Languages from 1930 to his retirement in 1958. He was also the Director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, 1922–1929, 1933–1936, and did important archaeological work at sites in Israel such as Gibeah (Tell el-Fûl, 1922) and Tell Beit Mirsim (1933–1936).
Albright became known to the public for his role in the authentication of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948, but made his scholarly reputation as the leading theorist and practitioner of biblical archaeology, "that branch of archaeology that sheds light upon "the social and political structure, the religious concepts and practices and other human activities and relationships that are found in the Bible or pertain to peoples mentioned in the Bible." Albright was not, however, a biblical literalist; his Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan, for example, putting forward the view that the religion of the Israelites had evolved from polytheism to a monotheism that saw God acting in history—a view fully in accordance with the documentary hypothesis and the mainstream opinions of the preceding two centuries of biblical criticism.
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