Milton C. Fisher<\/b><\/p>\n
Sir Charles Warren, from a carton in Punch commending
his effectiveness as London\u2019s Commissioner of Police.<\/b><\/p>\n
Outfoxing the Ottoman bureaucracy of Palestine was then \u2018Lieutenant\u2019 Charles Warren\u2019s constant preoccupation during his explorations of 1867\u201370. He had been sent there by the Palestine Exploration Fund to carry on where his fellow officer of the Royal Engineers, Charles Wilson, had left off the year before. Every time the local Turkish officials halted his digging at one point {mostly along the Temple Mount wall}, he began again at another. He thus accomplished a good deal more actual digging than had Wilson, While the more topographically-oriented Wilson went down in history for his discovery of \u201cWilson\u2019s Arch,\u201d Warren, the persistent excavator, is immortalized by \u201cWarren\u2019s Shaft,\u201d ancient Jerusalem\u2019s \u201cwater works,\u2019 only recently opened to public inspection.<\/p>\n
No surprise that the Turkish government was hesitant about Englishmen snooping about in their bailiwick. Conversely, the British Army was quite willing to lend Wilson and Warren to the Palestine Exploration Fund, and later Conder and Kitchener, being anxious to have detailed topography of land along strategic routes to Britain\u2019s eastern empire. Most of these men went on to high military and diplomatic achievement and were knighted \u201cSir\u201d and \u201cLord.\u201d Archaeological excavation can indeed call up the best in a person; the fame of discovery tends to enhancement of reputation and<\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 2:3 (Summer 1989) p. 67<\/p>\n
placement.<\/p>\n
As for Warren, in the fall of 1882 he led an expedition into the Sinai peninsula to determine the fate of British orientalist Edward H. Palmer. The worst fears were confirmed, but Warren\u2019s investigation led to the arrest, trial, and execution of Palmer\u2019s five murderers. After establishing Britain\u2019s claim to Bechuanaland, South Africa, he served for a time as Governor of the Red Sea Littoral. From there he was recalled to re-energize a demoralized police force, as Chief Commissioner of Metropolitan Police of London. Further military duty found him in Singapore for five years; ultimately commander of a division in the South African Boer War, 1899\u20131902.<\/p>\n
For all the variety and color of his career, it could be said of Sir Charles Warren upon death (in 1927), at the age of eighty-seven, \u201cthe interest he acquired in Pales-fine and its Biblical archaeological problems during the early days when he worked there remained with him throughout his life.\u201d (from the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly,<\/i> 1927)<\/p>\n
Warren\u2019s most valuable discoveries related to the Temple enclosure and the adjacent City of David, to the south. These he accomplished by extensive tunneling, an engineering skill acquired on previous assignment on Gibraltar. He\u2019d sink a vertical shaft, then carve out horizontal galleries to his objective. Two factors demanded this approach: (1) the presence of modern structures on or near the site, and (2) restrictions aimed at discouraging him – that he dig no closer than forty feet from the walls of Haram esh-Sharif, the Temple Mount. To the amazement of all, Warren\u2019s efforts showed that Herod\u2019s massive retainer walls rest on bedrock at depths as great as 50 to 125 feet below the present surface.<\/p>\n
There is good news and bad news about the excavations of this determined young officer and his team. First the bad. His tunneling procedure was both destructive and arbitrary. Once he had hauled out debris, though he did record any \u201cfinds\u201d more carefully than those ahead of him, there was no way to relate them to surrounding structures. And pottery dating by classification was yet unknown. Second the good. His careful collecting of artifacts provided modern research with the first discovery of lmlk<\/i> (\u2018for the king\u201d} seals stamped into jar handles.<\/p>\n
While Warren\u2019 systematic notes have been extremely valuable to scholars, he made errors in identification, both at Jerusalem and nearby Tel el-Ful (Gibeah of Saul). In Jerusalem he ascribed the great retaining walls of the Temple area to Solomon whereas they are actually from Herod\u2019s time (Moshe Pearlman, Digging Up the Bible,<\/i> 1980, p. 115]. At Tel el-Ful he thought the ruins of a citadel were Crusader whereas W.F. Albright found they dated to 1400 years earlier (\/bid.). Archaeology was yet in its infancy, so he had no means of identification, no criteria for dating. He did locate pools and watercourses, including the famous Hezekiah tunnel (2 Kings 20:20), which conducted precious water from the Virgin\u2019s Spring underground to the Siloam Pool inside<\/i> the ancient city walls. His exploration of that (then much silted) tunnel was at great difficulty and hazard. Had the intermittent spring surged at the wrong time, they could have been drowned as they inched their way along on their backs at some points – pencil and notebook held aloft and lit candle clenched between their teeth!<\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 2:3 (Summer 1989) p. 68<\/p>\n
The great statue of Nebuchadnezzar\u2019s dream described in Daniel 2 represents world powers following Babylon. It makes Daniel a prophetic, not a historical, book. (See also Daniel 7.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Milton C. Fisher Sir Charles Warren, from a carton in Punch commending his effectiveness as London\u2019s Commissioner of Police. Outfoxing the Ottoman bureaucracy of Palestine was then \u2018Lieutenant\u2019 Charles Warren\u2019s constant preoccupation during his explorations of 1867\u201370. He had been sent there by the Palestine Exploration Fund to carry on where his fellow officer of … Continue reading “SIR
\nCHARLES WARREN [1840-1927]”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15038\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}