David Livingston

Overview

David Livingston (1925 to 2013) was an American biblical archaeologist who founded the Associates for Biblical Research in 1969 and directed it for much of his life. He is known for excavating Khirbet Nisya in the central hill country over more than twenty years in search of Joshua's Ai, and for the argument that the identification of Bethel on which the search for Ai depends had been placed at the wrong village. He is not the Victorian missionary explorer David Livingstone, whose name is spelled differently and who worked in Africa in the nineteenth century.

Academic Career

Livingston was an educator and missionary before turning to archaeology, and was studying in Jerusalem in 1966 when the mismatch between the biblical account of the capture of Ai and the excavated evidence set the direction of his later work. He founded the Associates for Biblical Research in 1969 to gather scholars who held that the Bible speaks authoritatively about history, and took his doctorate at Andrews University in 1989. He built the organisation's practice of self funded volunteer excavation teams, which it still uses, and maintained a working relationship with the Israel Antiquities Authority for more than thirty years.

The Bethel and Ai Argument

In 1970 Livingston argued in the Westminster Theological Journal that biblical Bethel is the town of el-Bireh rather than the village of Beitin, the identification W. F. Albright had established and which most scholars follow. Because the biblical account fixes Ai in relation to Bethel, moving one moves the other, and Livingston excavated at Khirbet Nisya from 1979 to 2002 on that basis. The argument was contested at once: Anson F. Rainey replied in the same journal in 1971 under the title "Bethel Is Still Beitin", and Livingston answered him in the following volume. The identification of Bethel remains disputed, and other scholars who hold the biblical account reliable, among them the excavators of Khirbet el-Maqatir, propose a different site for Ai again.

Legacy

The organisation Livingston founded continues to excavate at Tel Shiloh and to publish, and the scholars associated with it, among them Bryant G. Wood, who worked in the field at Khirbet Nisya before directing Khirbet el-Maqatir, carried his questions into later excavations. His identification of Ai at Khirbet Nisya did not win general acceptance, including among his own colleagues, but the question he raised about where Bethel stands is still open.