Programme
The workshop Museums and the Bible is concerned with museums around the world especially Western national museums and the biblical artifacts they have acquired. Concomitant with the emergence of biblical archaeology in the nineteenth century was the expansion of departments of antiquities at various national museums particularly in the West. This workshop examines these expansionary moments of Western national museums, focusing not only on obvious imperial agents of these museums, but also on non-Western agents native to the areas from whence these museums had extracted its biblical artifacts. A key site of analysis is the process of orientalizing museum artifacts in biblical studies in general and in ancient Near Eastern studies and related subfields in particular. Guiding this pursuit is an ethical audit of orientalizing and other racializing discourses within the museum-Bible nexus and how they contribute to colonizing projects. Underneath national museums’ constructed world of the Bible lies the lived experiences of expendable laborers who climb cliffs, shovel dirt, chisel stone, and heave rocks. In some instances, surrounding their labor are the fresh remnants of a war zone—reminding us that for some their employment stems from economic need and material scarcity. Despite the contradictory nature of this reality in which biblical knowledge
supersedes the well-being of the human Other, the enterprise of collecting artifacts remains persistent.
Keywords:
Biblical archaeology, National Museums, Empire, Orientalism, Decolonization