G. Ernest Wright

G. Ernest Wright (1909-1974) was an American biblical scholar and archaeologist who later joined the faculty of Harvard. His name is tied to the book God Who Acts and the biblical theology movement, to the excavations at Shechem, to the journal The Biblical Archaeologist and to the Westminster Historical Atlas to the Bible. William G. Dever, in a 1980 appreciation in the Harvard Theological Review, called him "the only American scholar who was a leading theoretician in both the fields of biblical theology and biblical archaeology".

Biblical Theology

In his 1952 book God Who Acts, Wright argued that "biblical theology is first and foremost a theology of recital", in which the worshipper hears the recital and shares through "historical memory and identification" in the original events. The book presents God as making himself known by acting in history, and it counts Israel's rescue in the Exodus, the Sinai covenant and the gift of the promised land as the Old Testament's basic acts.

Archaeology and the Bible's History

In the same book Wright stressed the "greater confidence in the basic reliability of Biblical history" that recent critical and archaeological research had brought. He founded the journal The Biblical Archaeologist, and the timeline of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) records that he launched it as its editor in 1938. With Floyd V. Filson he prepared The Westminster Historical Atlas to the Bible, published in Philadelphia in 1945. His book Biblical Archaeology was published in Philadelphia in 1957.

Shechem and Gezer

From 1956 to 1964 Wright directed the American excavations at Tell Balata, the site of Shechem, which the Drew-McCormick expedition began in 1956 with ASOR; the site lies east of modern Nablus, in the pass between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim. There a mighty temple-fortress had stood on an artificial mound. Judges records that Abimelech was given seventy shekels of silver from the temple of Baal-berith, "Lord of the Covenant" (Judges 9:4), and that he burned the inner chamber of the temple of El-berith over the leaders of the tower of Shechem, about a thousand men and women (Judges 9:46-49). Eugene D. Stockton, writing in the Australian Journal of Biblical Archaeology in 1968, reports that Wright pointed out that the temple of Baal-berith fits the archaeological evidence at Shechem. Wright's book Shechem: The Biography of a Biblical City appeared in 1965.

In 1964 Wright directed the Hebrew Union College excavation at Gezer. Gezer is the city that Pharaoh captured and gave as a dowry to his daughter, the wife of Solomon, and that Solomon rebuilt (1 Kings 9:16-17).

His Critics

Langdon B. Gilkey of the University of Chicago, in "Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language" (Journal of Religion, 1961), examined "the intelligibility of some of the concepts" of biblical theology, naming Wright as one of "two distinguished American representatives" of the "biblical viewpoint". Brevard S. Childs, in Biblical Theology in Crisis (1970), spoke of "the collapse" of the biblical theology movement, which had been a dominant force in American theology. Dever judged Childs right to observe that the 1950s style of biblical theology had passed. In later works Wright softened his argument, speaking of "historical symbols" rather than of God's "action in history".