The Review of Biblical Literature for this month contains a review of the published form of my dissertation. It was published last year under the title The Campaign of Pharaoh Shoshenq I into Palestine by Mohr Siebeck in the FAT series. The review is in French, having been done by Youri Volokhine at the Université de Genève in Switzerland.
Overall it is a good review. He critiques me in a few places for things he would like to have seen covered, although several of them are things I purposefully chose not to cover because it was primarily a textual study of the campaign. One of the issues that he wanted to see discussed was the issue of the archaeology of the campaign, since some, such as Israel Finkelstein, have called into question the assignment of destruction layers to Shoshenq. I had discussed this issue with Finkelstein a bit and he had seen the paper I had delivered at the SBL in 2000. But because the issue was so up in the air and I am not a research archaeologist, I decided to leave that question for others.
Volokhine also notices that I passed over the scenario of Shoshenq taking the ark of the covenant back to Tanis as proposed by the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. I agree with him that the idea is a phantom, which is why I only included it in a footnote. Volokhine also picks a few nits, especially when he notes that I made a few orthographic mistakes in the French works in the bibliography. Oh, well. C’est la vie!
Volokhine concludes by saying,
[L]’étude de Kevin A. Wilson offre l’étude de référence que l’on attendait sur cet épisode de l’histoire du Proche-Orient ancien. Il est acquis désormais que la campagne en Palestine du pharaon libyen demeure une affaire essentiellement biblique, et que la documentation pharaonique, qui confirme l’expédition, ne permet pas d’en tirer plus au clair ni les circonstances ni le déroulement. Cette étude confirme donc le bien fondé de la prudente réserve que certains égyptologues avaient adoptée.
For those who don’t read French, it says,
[The] study offered by Kevin A. Wilson provides the study of reference that has been awaited on this episode in the history of the ancient Middle East. From now on it must be recognized that the campaign in Palestine of the Libyan pharaoh is essentially a biblical affair, and that the pharaonic documentation that confirms the expedition does not shed further light on either its circumstances or its sequence. This study confirms therefore the well founded and prudent reserve that some have adopted.