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High Interest. One of the first efforts to set up an accurate system for dating Holy Land ruins was made by Johns Hopkins Professor William Foxwell Albright, dean of Palestinian archaeology. As head of Palestine's American School of Oriental Research in the 1920s, Albright began the monumental task of classifying Palestinian potsherds, sorting them out by curvature, thickness, color, material—hundreds of different variations. Fragments found near coins or a rare bit of writing could be placed accurately in time. And with those bench marks other layers of a tell could be properly located in history.
Albright was well into his work in 1927 when Nelson Glueck arrived at the institute as a student. The young scholar seemed already engaged in a determined effort to escape the rabbinate for which he had been trained. He had entered Hebrew Union College at 14, earned a B.H.L. (Bachelor of Hebrew Literature), and gone on to get a B.A. from the University of Cincinnati. He was ordained in 1923, but instead of taking a pulpit he took off for Germany. Shifting from university to university in the continental manner, Glueck studied Eastern lore at Heidelberg and Berlin, got a Ph.D. at Jena with a formidable thesis entitled Das Wort Hesed im alttestamentlichen Sprachgebrauche (The Word Grace in Old Testament Usage). Then he returned to Berlin to study Assyrian and Ethiopic. He was already feeling that the archaeology of the Bible would be his life's high interest.
In Palestine, Glueck recognized at once the magic of Albright's system. For three years he served as his professor's pottery man, labeling, studying and endlessly discussing every potsherd from Albright's excavations. He acquired an uncanny feeling for these humble trifles. He could tell at a glance whether a fragment came from a Nabataean water bottle or a cooking pot from the days of Joshua. He still has this ability, and when he picks up a potsherd, he handles it as tenderly as a Chinese esthete caressing a piece of jade. "Pottery is man's most enduring material," he says with emotion. "Wood disappears, stone crumbles, glass decays, metal corrodes. Only pottery lasts forever."
Even while he was learning the pottery code, the young rabbi kept coming back to the historical cadences of the Hebrew Old Testament. He planned his first ambitious explorations in Moab, Edom, Ammon, and the wild desert haunts of the Kenites and Midianites.
Nothing could sway his purpose.
He went home in 1931 to marry Helen Ransohof Iglauer, a medical student at the University of Cincinnati who is now a professor of medicine there. Albright had made him head of the American School by then, but neither marriage nor administrative duties kept him from his project. He brought his bride to Jerusalem, parked her there, and in the summer of 1932 he set out for the East on camelback. He took one Arab companion and a Hebrew Bible.
Desert Etiquette. Those were wild years in Palestine, as the Jews and Arabs warmed up for full-scale war. Shots rang in the narrow streets of Jerusalem; machine guns chattered beyond the Judean hills. It was not time for an unarmed rabbi to go exploring in Arab country, but Glueck was never questioned about his religion. "That a Jew should wander by himself in Trans-Jordan," he says, "was so unheard of