ABSTRACT
I had come over to Israel from Jordan, where I stayed, as I had on my earlier trip, at the American School of Oriental Research. I have always found the atmosphere there friendly and the conversation interesting. I had come to the Middle East in order to bring up to date this book on the Dead Sea scrolls and I had found that I could learn a good deal at the School, whose inmates are mostly archaeologists, historians or Biblical scholars. I was impressed by the passion for archaeology which had developed during the last few decades. The excavations of Jericho by Miss Kathleen Kenyon, of the QumrSn monastery by Pere de Vaux, and of Masada by Professor Yadin are the Palestinian feats that have been most in the news, but Jordan has been full of foreign excavators—the Arabs seem to take little interest in their past—and the Israelis have been equally busy, with the result that the world of the Bible, its palaces, temples and tombs, and all the textiles and food and utensils and ornaments of its daily life, is being brought thus before us in these terms of the concrete objects that have been disinterred in their ancient settings and that disengage this ancient past from the language of the King James Bible and the atmosphere of legend which it inevitably creates. Among the archaeologists at the 342School were a Dominican, a Jesuit and a nun—all, I should say, in their thirties. Most of the time they were away at "digs," and came back only on weekends or when the scrambling and exposure had made them ill. They were very agreeable company. When I had been at the School thirteen years ago, no one, I believe, except the Director, in his house, had ever offered me a drink, but now these youngish scholars would invite me to their common room, where I found them fortifying themselves against facing the dreary dinner—monotonous rice and lamb, accompanied by leathery Arab bread—with a couple of shots of whiskey. Sister Marie was in ordinary clothes, and her pretty brown hair was unshaved. She and the Jesuit told me that the cropping of nuns was in the United States today "a myth."
