In his review of Kamal Salibi's The Bible Came from Arabia (August 1990, Philip C. Hammond devotes over 75 percent of his writing to summarize the book. He then informs us that a proper review of it would subject the reader "to a volume far larger than the one being reviewed,"and thereby spares us any specific criticism. Instead, he proceeds to condemn the author's hypotheses and arguments for being "contrary to fact," "unscholarly in the extreme,"and "presumptuous," and laments the very publication of the book. For Salibi to assume, writes Hammond, "that similar, or even identical, place names are proof of 'identity' between two places is palpably absurd." What Salibi does argue is that in nearly all cases, the coordinates of the places that actually carry biblical names in Palestine do not conform to the coordinates given to the places by the same name in the Bible, although they do in Arabia.

I am writing not to defend Salibi's scholarship. Perhaps that is best done by the reviewer of another of Salibi's books: in the November 1990 issue of IJMES, we read of Kamal Salibi's "prowess as a historian," whose book on Lebanon is described as "one of the best books on the modern history of any Arab country." Nor is it my intention to defend the thesis of the book that Hammond has reviewed. Salibi would be the first to admit that his hypotheses still need to be substantiated by archaeological studies; he does not expect his arguments to be readily accepted. We owe it to ourselves as well as to him, however, to scrutinze his thesis and the mass of detailed evidence taht he has carefully gathered to defend it.

All that Salibi claims for The Bible Came from Arabia, in my opinion, is that -- like Martin Bernal in his controversial book Black Athena -- he has made for us "a case to be answered"; it has not been answered yet and certainly not by the IJMES review. In Black Athena, Professor Bernal charges that the evidence he has used was long suppressed and ignored "owing to residual racism, anti-Semitism, sheer scholarly inertia, and/or exaggerated respect for authority." Faced with this kind of challenge, by a professor from Cornell University, the editors of a classics journal were eventually led to devote a special issue to Black Athena (Arethusa, Fall 1989).

Salibi, faced with some hostile criticism, has refuted his critics, especially those who criticized the book before its publication. In a book published after the one under review, he charges that "Biblical scholars and historians of the ancient Near East have come to form a closed circle which resents unsolicited intrusion into the field. They have built an edifice based on foundations which are, in most cases, assumptions which they attempt to pass for facts, while refusing any radical re-examination of the subject matter." In scholarship, he argues, there is no orthodoxy and no heresy, but only a search involving reasoned conjecture tested against evidence.

Five years after the publication of this controversial book, perhaps MESA should devote a special issue its Bulletin, if not of IJMES, to an expert and fair evaluation of Kamal Salibi's arguments and approach. In the meantime, perhaps Hammond would enlighten those of us who do not have the expertise to judge for ourselves, but have students to teach and seminars to conduct, what at least some of the most "blatant" errors are that he seems to have found throughout the book and correct them. In his review, with the exception of the misrepresentation noted above, he has not identified any.

Franklin and Marshall College                                                                                                                   John Joseph