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

Lying open on the tiled floor in the hall was a partially unpacked suitcase containing a stack of papers: Glock’s correspondence, diaries, published and unpublished articles, the available documentation of his life, his work and his death. On a trip to the United States six months earlier, my first step in investigating the shooting, I had been to see Glock’s widow, Lois, and she had let me copy the papers and computer disks in her late husband’s enormous personal archive.

The documents conjured up the ghost of the murdered archaeologist. I read and re-read the material, and my virtual acquaintance with Albert Glock deepened. Sometimes I would forget that I never knew him, that five years separated our experience of this weary little town. I came to see him in my mind’s eye like the memory of an old friend. His life was an enigma, not least because his work as an archaeologist never reached completion. To me, he existed as a holographic image in a swarm of facts, but within this mass of data one pattern stood out clearly, like stars forming a constellation: a trajectory of purpose, vivid and irresistible. Glock’s life had been a mission. He had obeyed the severe demands of his conscience, and put the fulfilment of its imperatives before anything else in his life, and he had followed it unswervingly to the extreme and solitary point where a violent death closed in on him.

In the evenings I would sit on the balcony, eating grilled chicken from the restaurant across the road, looking out over the activity in the street below, and think that I was attempting the impossible, to know the unknowable, to capture the atoms of a moment that had passed five years ago. All societies have secrets that an outsider will never penetrate, and this was one held by no more than a handful of people, who would not tell me even if I could find them. The headlights of passing cars – the Mercedes taxis and battered pickup trucks – would illuminate me for a moment where I sat. The town looked peaceful enough, yet just down the road, outside the post office where I bought my first Yasir Arafat postage stamps, there were terrible scenes during the intifada, of people of all ages confronting the military force of the dominant Israelis, getting beaten and shot and tear-gassed. Now in the same place, four years after the Oslo Agreement had introduced limited Palestinian self-rule in the Occupied Territories, the precarious truce between Israel and Palestine was symbolized by groups of young Palestinian Authority policemen, strolling about with nothing better to do than check the licences of the taxis that plied the two kilometres to the Birzeit campus. The moment of the murder was lost and buried; it was now ancient history.

I had a copy of the autopsy in my suitcase. After Glock was shot, his body was taken to the Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir, outside Tel Aviv, and kept on ice overnight. The pathologist noted that the body was dressed in grey trousers, blue underwear, brown shoes and dark blue socks. One lens of his glasses was missing, and his stomach contained a porridgy material: the ka’ak simsim Glock had partly eaten earlier that day. The body showed the wear and tear that would be expected of a man of Glock’s age. His heart was in good condition. His lungs were a bit grey from smoking.

One bullet entered the back through the right shoulder, passed through the right lung, the heart and the liver, and exited through the lower ribs on the left-hand side. Another bullet entered under the right cheekbone (‘zygomatic bone’), passed through the skull and the brain and came out on the left-hand side of the neck. The paths of both bullets sloped downwards, which indicated that the gunman had fired from a position higher than his victim. This made sense: Glock was walking down a slope at the time, and the gunman fired from the top of the slope. A third bullet entered his right shoulder from the front and emerged at the back of the body. This third bullet was fired from below to above, indicating it was shot at a different angle, that the body was in a different position when this bullet entered. The entry and exit wounds were clean – ‘no marks of powder burn, soot and/or fire effect’ – which shows that the gunman was not using hollow-pointed bullets. Hollow-pointed bullets expand on impact and leave messy wounds as they pass through. They tend to be used by police officers because they bring the victim down quickly. The absence of these markings suggests that a military-type weapon was used: military weapons fire solid bullets, which leave clean exit and entry wounds.

It is hard to tell for sure which bullet was fired first, but the gunman may have fired first at Glock’s back, as he was walking down the concrete slope. This shot – which entered the right shoulder – then turned him around slightly, so that the bullet fired the next instant hit his right cheek. Glock fell forwards, onto his face, onto the concrete, wounding his nose and forehead. Then – and this depends on how much time elapsed between the first two shots and the last – Glock turned over where he lay, with his feet towards the gunman, and his head away from him, and the killer fired a final bullet into Glock’s right shoulder before he made his escape in the waiting car. Either he turned over in a spasm, or the gunman got close enough to turn him over, and then fired a last shot. The first alternative seems more likely. Glock was found lying on his back, with grazes on his face.

The pathologist estimated that the bullets were fired from a distance of about one metre.

THREE

NOT MANY PEOPLE at Birzeit knew it, but besides being an archaeologist Albert Glock was also a Lutheran minister and a missionary. It was a fact that he preferred not to draw attention to. Being a minister was an aspect of himself that he had been gradually shedding in the last years of his life. He didn’t like people to know that while he was teaching archaeology at Birzeit his salary was being paid by his church back in the United States, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. The word missionary oppressed him like a nightmare.

He could no longer believe what he used to believe. In his dedication to Birzeit, where he had taught for sixteen years and established the university’s archaeology programme, the first at a Palestinian university, he had developed a heretical personal theology from which faith and hope had been eliminated, and all that remained was an austere, angry and self-sacrificing Christian love. His decades of living in the land of the Bible had turned him into a dissident against the biblical God his Lutheran education had given him, whose interventions in human affairs the Bible traditionally described: for he had discovered that what he had thought of in his younger days as the land of the Bible was in reality the land of the Arab–Israeli conflict, the scene of a century of hatred, injustice and bloodshed. Over the years, he had turned his back on the discipline he had first come to Palestine to practise – biblical archaeology – and undergone a profound personal transformation into a totally different kind of scholar: still an archaeologist, but one who applied his skill to uncovering an alternative history of Palestine, a history derived from archaeological facts, rather than from the biblical narrative. This meant, in effect, a history not of ancient Israel but of the Palestinians. It was a view that set him against many of his former professional colleagues in archaeology, and against his own background.

It was a lonely position, and one in which in order to function from one day to the next, he was forced to rely, with little respite, on his own inner reserves of moral fortitude. He seemed to draw strength from the sheer difficulty of living in the midst of conflict, under military occupation, like the salamander of ancient belief, the creature that lives in fire. Yet the effort of will taxed him severely. In his last years, a dark current of emotional turmoil and depression flowed beneath the mental activity of his professional life.

This made him appear, to casual acquaintances, a formidable figure. He had little time for small talk, and little patience for anyone who did not appear to be living at a comparable pitch of intensity. For those he knew well, there was a dry sense of humour. The rest saw a man who looked sternly at the world through large square-rimmed glasses, and rarely smiled.

At sixty-seven, he looked younger than his years. His hair was grey, but still thick, with a fringe that swept off his forehead. His prominent, slightly cloven chin gave his features an air of fixity of purpose. It was the craggy face of a Midwestern farmer, one that had seen hard winters and stony ground. A preference for dressing in Bible black added to the severity of his appearance.

There was much in the way human beings relate to each other that he was simply too preoccupied to notice. In the delicate daily negotiations of academic life, he was gruff and undiplomatic: he often trod on toes, especially in an Arab society where a circumspect courtesy is an indispensable element of any transaction. He had a reputation as a poor listener: a conversation with Albert Glock tended to be a monologue in which Albert Glock spoke, compulsively and at length about whatever he was interested in, and the person to whom he was delivering it listened.

He didn’t seek popularity, or the role of the charismatic campus guru. He was little noticed on the Birzeit site, and preferred to keep as low a profile as possible, a tactic that enabled him to go about his work with the minimum of disturbance. It was the archaeology that mattered above all: everything else was secondary. Lois would often be disturbed by her husband waking up at two o’clock in the morning, his sleep cut into by a nagging need to look something up in a book. He would dash into his study and work until sunrise.

For his family, there was a heavy cost to bear in this exclusive concentration on archaeology. Albert Glock was an absentee father to his children – three sons and a daughter – for long periods of time, busy at Birzeit while the rest of the family was in America. As children, they had grown up with Middle Bronze Age potsherds strewn over the dining-room floor. In later years, they lost him entirely to archaeology, when it became clear that he would never return to America. All of this was quietly, loyally and patiently borne by Lois, who assumed the role of her husband’s archaeological assistant and grew to share her husband’s fervent belief in Palestinian archaeology and the larger Palestinian struggle.

Despite his position on the other side of the cultural divide that separates Israel and Palestine, he had a few friends among Israeli archaeologists, relations with whom had to be conducted virtually in secret, since Birzeit had and still has a policy forbidding co-operation with Israeli academic institutions, but the view of him among Israeli archaeologists who didn’t know him was that he was a misfit who had burned his bridges with the respectable mainstream and thrown in his lot with the enemy. ‘Why do you want to write about failure?’ a prominent Israeli archaeologist said to me in dismay, when I told him I was researching Glock’s life. ‘What books did he write? What did he publish? Where are the articles? Where are the students he trained? Where is the legacy? Where is the institution? Where is the lab?’

Yet the same person who was regarded as an alien in Israel was also regarded with suspicion by many Palestinians. ‘He was a difficult man, a controversial figure,’ a Palestinian archaeologist told me, one who saw Glock’s ghost casting a long dark shadow over Palestinian archaeology. And then, to prove his point, he said with a deliberate air of grave confidentiality, ‘I happen to know that he was trading illegally in antiquities.’

Determining who Albert Glock was, and why someone would want to kill him, was like archaeology itself. An archaeologist digs at a chosen spot, and in the course of excavation finds the rim and the handle of a pottery jug, a cooking utensil and a coin, and from those scant tokens of evidence creates a picture of who lived at the site and when. Another archaeologist finding the same objects might construct an entirely different picture. There is no final authority to appeal to. The archaeologist’s hypothesis is the best account there is until it is disproved, and he must change it if new evidence emerges.

The other unsettling fact about archaeology is that however convincing the picture one has formed may be, it will always be 99 per cent incomplete, because the breath of life is missing from it. However much we know of the world that produced that jug handle, rim, cooking utensil and coin, we will never feel the texture of everyday life that was felt when those objects were in use. In the same way, most of what could be known about the killing of Albert Glock is lost. Only a tiny fraction of the available data is retrievable, and what is retrievable is ambiguous. Yet to understand his murder would be to understand a whole society, and the conjunction of massive cultural forces. This was what I was hoping to do.

The Glock papers were my primary trove of artefacts. Among them was an illuminating autobiographical essay (twenty-nine pages, duplicated) written by Albert Glock’s father, Ernest Glock, in 1968. Ernest Glock was also a Lutheran minister, as were Albert Glock’s two brothers, Delmer and Richard, and his second son, Peter. The essay describes the austere environment into which Albert Glock was born, and tells of the formation of the determined, solitary, earnest adventurer that Albert Glock was to become.

Ernest Glock was born in Nevada in 1894, literally in a log cabin. His father (Albert Glock’s grandfather) came from the Franco-German province of Alsace-Lorraine, his mother from Switzerland. Ernest Glock’s parents were German-speaking Catholics who had emigrated to America, where they met in Carson City, Nevada, and married in 1892. Seven children were born and then the father disappeared, sending the family into penury. The youngest children were sent to an orphanage.

As a teenager, Ernest worked as a farm hand for room and board. He records the hardships he endured as a youth, sleeping in a freezing barn, milking cows, feeding hogs, and later herding sheep, which required camping alone for a week at a time. He would cook his supper on a sagebrush fire, sleeping with one ear cocked for the sound of a predatory bobcat or wolf. After a few years of herding sheep he got a job hauling cordwood. In this job he had to rise at 4 a.m. to drive a team of horses and mules.

Later he was taken in by an aunt and her husband. She was a convert to the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, a St Louis-based organization that had 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 Synod had institutions that provided both. LCMS pastors were trained at an LCMS seminary – Concordia Theological Seminary, St Louis – and the children of LCMS members attended LCMS elementary schools, whose teachers were trained at an LCMS teachers’ college. As late as the 1930s, lectures in theology at Concordia Seminary were in Latin.

In 1932, they published a synopsis of their beliefs, bearing the plain title A Brief Statement of the Doctrinal Position of the Missouri Synod, which articulates everything a Missouri Lutheran believes or ought to believe. It completes the edifice of the all-encompassing Missouri world view with a Lutheran cosmology. This proposes a universe that came into being in exactly six twenty-four-hour days. ‘Since no man was present when it pleased God to create the world,’ it argues, ‘we must look for a reliable account of creation to God’s own record, found in God’s own book, the Bible.’ They reject any scientific explanation of the origins of man and the universe that contradicts the biblical account, whatever intellectual difficulties this may cause.