Federal Pork

John Stossel’s piece on the insanity of giving so much pork money to Washington is particularly true for our region [“A Hurricane Primer, Opinion, September 22, 2005]. New Jersey, for example, pays the highest price for federal pork in the nation. Considering how much money New Jerseyans send to Washington and how much they get back, the state would do about 50% better going it alone. And New York and Connecticut do only slightly better. In other words, the Northeast as a whole pays a very big premium for its pork while the South enjoys a substantial discount.

CHRIS WIGERT
Manhattan

Biblical Archaeology

Re: Hillel Halkin, “Old and Continuous,” Opinion, September 6, 2005.

Normally, I would treat such a news item by clipping it out and putting it away for future study. But this time, my curiosity was aroused at once, for the archaeologist named in the news item was called Eichmann. Eichmann?

A quick Internet search came up with the answer: Yep. Ricardo Eichmann, the youngest son of the infamous Adolf Eichmann; an archaeologist who specialized in the study of music in antiquity, dug in Jordan, and now announced at a prestigious archaeological international conference (held in Chicago in July) an important discovery he made in Saudi Arabia.

The discovery concerned the last king of Babylon, Nabuna’id (555-539 BCE). It was known from Mesopotamian records that he spent his last years in self-exile in Arabia; now, Dr. Eichmann announced that tale has been confirmed by his find at a site called Teima: An inscribed clay tablet that names Nabuna’id and, thereby, he said, confirms the stay there of the Babylonian king. A photograph of the tablet became the highlight of the conference’s proceedings.

As it happened, the report about the find concerning the last king of Babylon coincided with reports from Israel about a find concerning a Hebrew king of Judea: The discovery, in the area known as the “City of David” south of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, was an imprint on clay (a bulla) of the seal of Jehucal Ben (“son of”) Shelemiah, who is named twice in the Bible (Jeremiah 37:3 and 38:1) as an official in the court of King Jehoiakim (608 BCE-598 BCE).

The find reignited the debate among archaeologists about the value of the Hebrew Bible as a historical record – because the discoverer, Dr. Eilat Mazar, believes that the artifact was found in the ruins of King David’s palace, but the conventional wisdom among a group of Israeli archaeologists is that all the biblical tales were just propaganda – there was no King David, no King Solomon, no possessing of Canaan under the leadership of Joshua, no Exodus from Egypt. …

The New York Sun, to its credit, has touched on this lamentable situation both in columns and letters to the editor, but not enough was said of the extent of the problem. It has now gone so far as to question the authenticity of most of the archaeological objects dating to the time of the Judean kings and the First Temple, deeming even objects on exhibit in the Israel Museum and for which it paid hundreds of thousands of dollars as fakes!

Among those cherished items is an inscribed clay tablet that refers to the royal “House of David.” It is a partly broken tablet discovered at Tel Dan in the Galilee in 1993 in excavations by the Israeli archaeologist Avraham Biran. A commemorative tablet by a Canaanite king, it provided “independent confirmation” of the existence of a king named David and his dynasty, but now it’s declared a fake. …

So here is the irony: A find by the son of Adolf Eichmann – an inscription about a Babylonian king worshipping the god Nabu – is readily hailed as a confirmation of the Babylonian king’s tale, but finds by archaeologists named Avraham Biran or Eilat Mazar confirming Hebrew kings and prophets of Yahweh in Jerusalem are rejected as fake or archaeologically incompatible.

It seems that even in archaeology, the right name counts: Eichmann beats Biran; Babylon is a yes; Judea is a no-no. The reasons, one suspects, are rooted not in archaeology but in politics.

ZECHARIA SITCHIN
Manhattan
Mr. Sitchin is the author of “The Earth Chronicles Expeditions” and other books on ancient civilizations (www.sitchin.com).

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