Palestine Twilight: The Murder of Dr Glock and the Archaeology of the Holy Land. Edward Fox

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СКАЧАТЬ been established to care for the millions of Germans migrating to the United States in the nineteenth century. When Ernest Glock expressed a need to improve himself by getting an education, his aunt suggested a Lutheran seminary in California. He took the advice. Before his graduation from the seminary he was sent as a Missouri Synod vicar and schoolmaster to Lebeau, Texas, a small town so steeped in German culture that even the blacks spoke German.

      After graduating, Ernest Glock married a grocer’s daughter, Meta Matulle. Then he and his wife were sent to Gifford, Idaho, a rural, roadless place, surrounded by forest, where the congregation was again entirely German-speaking, and which is now within the borders of an Indian reservation (the Nez Percé tribe). ‘During my four and one half years as pastor I did not preach one English sermon,’ he wrote. Their house in Gifford had no indoor plumbing; their water supply was rainwater and snowmelt from the roof which drained into a brick cistern, and in the winter the thermometer could reach forty below zero. This is the house in which, in 1925, Albert Ernest Glock was born. A few months later, the family moved to Grangeville, a larger town not far away. They spent another three years in Idaho, before Ernest accepted a ‘call’ to a church in Washburn, Illinois, a small dot on the map north-east of Peoria, with a population of 900. This was where Albert and his two brothers grew up.

      It was a claustrophobic, confining upbringing for the three boys, who were each a little more than a year apart in age. As the preacher’s children, they were always on show, expected to be models of good behaviour. Their father maintained discipline with a rod. Like most clerical families, their social status was proportionately higher than their income, and the rigour of their upbringing was mirrored in the plainness of their material circumstances. The house was heated with wood in the winter, and they bought their groceries on credit. Every day, their mother served supper at five o’clock. The meal was preceded and concluded with prayers. Until they went to grade school at the age of six or seven they spoke only High German at home. Their mother effaced herself in the duties of a minister’s wife and said little. ‘But she was the really intelligent one,’ Albert Glock’s younger brother Delmer remembered.

      There was little in this upbringing to stimulate the minds of the three intelligent boys. The town itself – inhabited mostly by retired farmers, and surrounded by expanses of flat farmland – offered nothing. Their father, Ernest, was a practical man with few intellectual interests outside his vocation, and he disapproved of popular amusements like movies and dancing. His library was dominated by dry volumes of Lutheran theology.

      Temperamentally, the boys were not rebellious. They were hewn from the same rock as their parents. They were obedient sons because it was in their nature to be obedient. They knew that they would upset their father deeply if they told him that they didn’t believe the Pope was the Antichrist, as Missouri Synod doctrine held, so they didn’t. When Albert sought a means of escape from this restricted world he quietly found one for himself in the voracious reading of books.

      Delmer Glock was convinced that Albert’s interest in the archaeology of Palestine originated not in the text of the Bible but in the swashbuckling children’s adventure stories of Richard Halliburton, which were published in America in the 1920s and 1930s. In one of these books, Richard Halliburton’s Second Book of Marvels: The Orient, first published in 1938 when Albert was thirteen, one finds, after descriptions of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World, ‘Timbuctoo’, the discovery of Victoria Falls by Livingstone, a meeting with ‘Ibn Saud’ (King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz al-Sa’ud, the ruler of Saudi Arabia) in a tent outside Mecca, and visits to Petra and the Dead Sea, a swaggering account of an attempt to explore a ‘secret tunnel’ in the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This may have been the spark that ignited Albert’s curiosity, kindled on the dry wood of an already abundant knowledge of the Bible. Exploration of the Temple Mount, the seat of the biblical Temple, also known as the Haram al-Sharif in Arabic, was and remains the holy grail of biblical archaeology, its central mystery, its ultimate prize, and a subject so thickly encrusted with myth and legend that the facts about it are easily lost. The cult of exploration of the Temple Mount, of which Halliburton was giving a simplified children’s version, could turn the homely familiarity with the Bible that Albert Glock already had into a genuine adventure. Halliburton wrote:

      The more I heard about the caverns and tunnels and shaft, the more curious I became about them. How exciting it would be if someone could explore the entire passage, the passage lost all these centuries. If someone found the tunnel, it would lead – if the legend turned out to be true – right into the treasure-caverns from underneath. The reward of such an adventure might be the long-lost Ark of the Covenant, or the mummy of Israel’s greatest king.

      I resolved to be that someone myself … Was I about to make one of the greatest discoveries in Bible history?

      It may be a long shot to conclude that Albert Glock found the inspiration for his career as an archaeologist in the pages of the famous American adventure writer. But when he was still a teenager, he travelled on a freighter to Europe, just as Richard Halliburton had done, and years later he was excavating an ancient mound in Palestine, seeking to make discoveries in Bible history himself.

      Albert showed a determined independence of mind that was unusual in a place where few aspired to individualism. ‘He was always off doing something,’ his brother Richard recalled; ‘we were never sure what it was.’ He remembers being mystified by the sight of his older brother writing Sanskrit and cuneiform characters on a piece of paper. ‘I don’t know where he got it from.’

      At the age of thirteen, Albert told his father that he wanted to enrol at a residential pre-seminary high school for boys in Milwaukee, 200 miles away. The school was a German-style gymnasium where students learned Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Its purpose was to prepare boys for the Lutheran ministry. Albert’s parents could afford the fees, which were $200 per year, but not the cost of transportation, so from the age of thirteen, and for the next five years, Albert would hitchhike the 200 miles between Washburn and Milwaukee. Later, he announced that he wanted to specialize in the Old Testament, source of the legends of Solomon and the Temple and the ancient civilizations of the Near East.

      Albert Glock’s motive in going to school in Milwaukee was as much a dedication to the Lutheran ministry as a desire to get out of Washburn. Later, his younger brothers Delmer and Richard followed Albert along this path, to the Missouri Synod ministry via the gymnasium in Milwaukee. By the time they had reached their late teens, the three boys had hitchhiked to every state in the Union. By the time they had reached their mid-twenties, they were Lutheran ministers.

      Lutherans of the Missouri Synod subscribed unconditionally to the version of Christianity embodied in the classic works of Martin Luther, and were unimpressed with anything written later. Drinking from this pristine well of pure doctrine, based on a belief in the Bible as ‘the inspired, inerrant and infallible word of God’, Missourians saw themselves as forming ‘the only true visible church on earth’. Although it was the plan of the Missouri Synod leadership gradually to adopt English in church rites as soon as most of its members had acquired the language, and the work of translating the Lutheran classics could be completed (a process that began around the time of the First World War), the cultural and doctrinal conservatism of most members of the church were inseparable: to them, their native German tongue was the divine language of the Bible, as translated by the blessed Luther himself, and they only reluctantly gave it up completely in church services as late as the Second World War, spurred on by popular anti-German feeling in the United States.

      The Missourians remained apart and solitary in their righteousness: it was not until the 1960s that they would agree to join Christian organizations that included other denominations. This attitude was reinforced by their social and cultural homogeneity: they were almost all German-Americans (there was also a Scandinavian element), and they were in and of the agricultural Midwest: two-thirds of them lived within a 300-mile radius of Chicago. Their separateness and common identity were not just ethnic. Members of the church did not need to look outside for education: the Missouri СКАЧАТЬ