Dinner with Eli and Batya – Thoughts on the Bible Lands Museum, Jerusalem
- Geoffrey Clarfield
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Every year, I spend time in Israel. This year, I am here as a film producer and writer for two documentary films and two books that will be based on these documentaries, all on Jewish themes of one sort or another.
And every year my wife Mira and I visit the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem. It is a marvelous place dedicated to exploring the relationship of the Bible to its wider Egyptian and Mesopotamian (as well as classical) cultural context.
The artifacts are artfully displayed, and it is always a joy to contemplate the past in this well-designed, well-lit and quiet facility. As a former museum conservator I take my hat off to the management. The Museum contents were once the private collection of the late Eli and the still active Batya Borovski. They donated them to the Municipality of Jerusalem and the Israeli public. The Museum attracts thousands of visitors each year.
Many years ago Mira and I had the privilege of being the dinner guests of Eli and Batya at their house in Toronto, Canada. The food was good and the conversation stimulating.
We had been introduced to each other through a common friend. He had told Eli that I was a student of ethnomusicology interested in the then and still fraught academic argument about the relationship between the music of the ancient near east and that of the medieval middle east.
Had there been a total break in musical cultures with the rise of Islam in the area that had once been the Roman Mediterranean or, was there some sort of still to be discovered continuity? The debate is still open.
Eli asked me about my research on the matter. I explained to him that I recently had done a year of ethnomusicological fieldwork among the Sinai Bedouin who still wandered its eastern wastes near what was once the Biblical oasis of Kadesh Barnea. At the time I was writing up my results which I later shared at an international conference on ethnology in Montreal.
Having first consulted every then living Israeli expert on Bedouin culture and society (including the late great Hebrew University based scholar of all things Bedouin, Clinton Bailey) I simply wanted to see if the traditional repertoire of Bedouin music was changing and in what way.
And so, I based myself in the beautiful Negev desert town of Mitspe Ramon and once a month would hitch hike across the border to the tent of Sheikh Salim of the Azazma Sarakhin tribe, who hosted me as a guest for more than a week each month over a year. I watched, listened, took pictures, took notes and recorded music.
During a visit to a family of former African slaves from a neighboring tribe, I met a young musician who had taken up the Simsimiyya, a Red Sea kind of harp that is remarkably similar in form to the “harp” of King David, that is the Kinnor and to the lyres of ancient Greece, whose prototypes can be seen in the Royal tombs of Ur excavated by British archaeologist Leonard Wooley in the newly created mandate of Iraq, just after WWI. You can see the originals in the British Museum in London, England.
Among these former slaves I found out that increasingly Sinai Bedouin, across the peninsula were taking up the Simsimiyya and its repertoire of songs and adding them to the ancient melodies of the Bedouin. It sounds simple, but it took a long time to find out, and as is often the case with things ethnomusicological, this insight did not emerge during one conversation.
Although I could not show a direct melodic or rhythmic connection between this 20th century phenomenon and the music of the ancient world (although it occurred within a context of very ancient and conservative cultural traditions) at least I saw an organalogical continuity (organology-the study of musical instruments) which suggested that the Psalms of David draw on an ancient, perhaps both popular and elitist tradition of lyre players with a pedigree in ancient Mesopotamia.
Think of King David as a Biblical, bronze age or early iron age bard like Homer, and hopefully, you will get the gist of what I am trying to convey.
Eli was a soft spoken, erudite, Swiss trained expert and PhD in Biblical archaeology who survived WWII to become a successful businessperson in post war reconstruction Europe. There he fulfilled his passion as a collector of ancient Near Eastern, Biblical and Classical antiquities which were being sold all over the market, as the Nazis had made a mess of anthropology, archaeology and Museums and people desperate for cash were also desperate for buyers.
Eli was not an antiquities dealer but a collector. There is a major distinction here. He was not collecting for profit but out of interest. He could be called someone who was “salvaging” the past at the time.
Years later he has been heavily criticized by Israeli and other archaeologists who have argued that the trade in ancient antiquities fuels tomb robbing and robs history of the provenance and context which modern scientific excavations use to help us reveal the past across many dimensions. There is merit in this argument but in the late 1940s this approach to Mediterranean archaeology was recent and not yet the order of the day.
After dinner Eli and Batya took us on a personal tour of his collection, from ancient near eastern seals to classical Athenian pottery. We were overwhelmed by the quality and quantity of the collection and by Eli’s detailed knowledge of the cultural context of the artifacts. The guiding theme of his commentary was that Israel and the Bible, although a distinct and unique entity, emerged from a common Egyptian/Mesopotamian culture and the parallels were obvious to those who looked.
Over coffee, we asked them what their plans for the collection were. Eli told me there is a certain pleasure in living with such a remarkable collection as each item triggers a memory or an aspect of ancient and Biblical culture in the mind of the informed observer, but it was their comfortable desire to share it with the public that touched me at the time.
Over the years I lost touch with Eli and Batya but was delighted to discover that their wish came true and they built their museum beside the Israel Museum here in Jerusalem. Eli’s emphasis on parallels between the ancient and Biblical world, and the possibility of musical parallels between the ancient and medieval world continue to maintain my interest.
And so during the last year I have delved into some of the recent scholarship on “parallels” which is informative yet always tantalizing. Are these parallels independent developments? Who influenced who? Or, were they all drawing on ancient common sources like the Epic of Gilgamesh? (King David may have read it or heard it as cuneiform versions have been excavated here in Israel.)
There are a growing number of studies of these parallels between the literature of the ancient near east and the Bible. My favorite is Old Testament Parallels Laws and Stories from the Ancient near East, by Victor H. Mathews and Don. C. Benjamin, published in 2023.
There is also the disciplined but out of the box thinking of Professor Cyrus Gordon who was an expert in the literature of the ancient near east as well as the Homeric world which is explored in his timeless 1998 edition of The Bible and the Ancient Near East Revised.
Two things struck me when reading this stream of academic study. The story of Sargon the Akkadian Emperor which is like the story of Moses and the ancient Iraqi creation story Enuma Elish which is like that of Genesis. The search for immortality and the flood reported in Gilgamesh reminds us of the story of Noah. These are not accidental parallels.
For those of us who have yet to discover that the Bible is and was embedded in the thought world of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, The Bible Lands Museum is the place to go. I feel honored that I was once the dinner guest of the two people who made it happen.
