Cities of God: The Bible and archaeology in
nineteenth-century Britain
David Gange and Michael Ledger-Lomas,
editors
Cambridge University Press £65
(978-1-107-00424-5)
Church Times Bookshop £58.50 (Use code
CT477 )
PRESENT-DAY travellers to the Holy Land and to neighbouring
countries who are willing to fork out £65 for a copy of this book,
or who can borrow it from a library, will certainly be able to
broaden their knowledge. For the book's essential message is the
connection between nine archaeological sites in the Middle East and
their counterparts among the cities of the West.
The volume is made up of articles by academics expert in their
field and is not an easy read for the non-specialist. But its
subject was certainly worth exploring. The nine sites chosen are
those of Troy, Jerusalem, Nineveh, Pithom, Babylon, Sodom,
Bethlehem, Ephesus, and Rome. The book is the outcome of work
undertaken by the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group. The editors
are both lecturers in history: David Gange at Birmingham University
and Michael Ledger-Lomas at King's College, London.
The objects of the book are set out in a 38-page editorial
introduction. Its related themes are to explore the presence of the
biblical city in 19th-century British culture; to spotlight the
connection between the ancient city and understandings of biblical
authority; to describe the crucial contribution made by scientific
travellers and archaeologists to the "apologetic discourse"; and to
draw attention to the reli-gious and urban context in which these
debates took place. This last theme, the editors say, is the one
that distinguishes their book from existing surveys of biblical
archaeology.
Simon Goldhill's essay on Jerusalem will perhaps attract the
most interest, not least because the city houses "holy places"
belonging to three world religions within its context. But the tiny
size of the old city often came as a surprise: it could have fitted
easily into Hyde Park, and its walls could be walked round in only
an hour. British philanthropists, however, installed drains in
Jerusalem and planned suburbs in an effort to create the sort of
city for which they yearned at home - and which had led Ephesus to
be christened the "Liverpool of Asia".
The modest "store city" of Pithom in Egypt will be the least
familiar to most British readers. But it proved as influential and
evocative, Gange says in an essay of his own, as better-known sites
such as Memphis or Thebes. Back in 1883, it was the site that
opened Egyptology to a broad new public, and estab-lished the
biblical tone of mainstream British Egyptology for the remainder of
the century.
Much attention will inevitably be devoted to Astrid Swenson's
essay on Sodom. Few biblical cities, she says, had such an
evocative power as Sodom and Gomorrah. Many a place in the West was
identified as a modern "city of the plain" deserving destruction by
"fire and brimstone".
Even good Queen Victoria equated Paris with Sodom and Gomorrah,
while London became "Sodom-on-Thames" in the time of Oscar Wilde,
and humble Barking in Essex was castigated by Hensley Henson as
another Sodom. Admittedly, Henson's attack was greeted with
laughter; he might fittingly have been dismissed as a "poor sod".
The word was (and, of course, still is) a constant presence in the
language.
Dr Bernard Palmer is a former editor of the
Church Times.