Re-Writing the Past

Do We Have A Second Dismal Science?

The world of Middle Eastern archaeology is reported to be all agog at the apparent discovery of David's ancient palace in Jerusalem. Archaeological finds of this magnitude (that is, discoveries made by professional, academic archaeologists, not--let it be noted--the touting of some fake artefact in a backyard Baghdad bazaar) are not common.

Our view is that they may corroborate a biblical account, but they certainly do not establish the credibility and trustworthiness of the Bible. The trustworthiness of the Bible is for those to whom the Spirit of God has opened their hearts to receive it as the very word of God. The ground of its veracity is God Himself, not speculations or ratiocinations from the minds of fallen man.

That is not to say, of course, that there is not an abundance of archaeological data and findings consistent with Biblical history. But archaeology comes with the inevitable "a priori" precommitments of researchers. The more scarce the data on any particular dig, the more a priori frameworks influence the "findings" or the outcome. Human speculation rushes in to fill up gaps in the data.

In any event, according to a recent report,

Dr. Eilat Mazar, world authority on Jerusalem's past, has taken King David out of the pages of the Bible and put him back into living history. Mazar's latest excavation in the City of David, in the southern shadow of the Temple Mount, has shaken up the archaeological world. For lying undisturbed for over 3,000 years is a massive building which Mazar believes is King David's palace.

For Mazar, 48, one of the world's leading authorities on the archaeology of ancient Jerusalem and head archaeologist of the Shalem Center Institute of Archaeology, the discovery was the culmination of years of effort and solid speculation. From the time she was a teenager, she had her nose in archaeology literature, and worked closely with her grandfather, renowned archaeologist Benjamin Mazar, who conducted the southern wall excavations next to the Western Wall. She holds a doctorate in archaeology from Hebrew University, is author of The Complete Guide to the Temple Mount Excavations, and in the 1970s and '80s worked on the digs supervised by Yigal Shilo in the City of David. The significant discoveries made then, including a huge wall called the "stepped-stone structure" -- which Shilo believed was a retaining wall for David's royal palace or part of the Jebusite fortress he conquered -- ignited Mazar to continue to look for the prize: David's palace itself.

To put this discovery in contexte, we need to understand that biblical archaeology has now been effectively captured by idealogues. In no particular order, we cite first the "Islamic school". This is populated by a bunch of Islamic academics and fellow travellers who seek to disabuse the world of any notion that historical Judaism even existed. They are the archaeological version of holocaust deniers.

For a growing number of academics and intellectuals, King David and his united kingdom of Judah and Israel, which has served for 3,000 years as an integral symbol of the Jewish nation, is simply a piece of fiction. The biblical account of history has been dismissed as unreliable by a cadre of scholars, some of whom have an overtly political agenda, arguing that the traditional account was resurrected by the Zionists to justify dispossessing Palestinian Arabs. The most outspoken of these is Keith Whitelam of the Copenhagen School which promotes an agenda of "biblical minimalism," whose best-known work is The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History.

Even in Israel, this new school has found its voice. Israel Finkelstein, chairman of Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology, began championing a theory several years ago that the biblical accounts of Jerusalem as the seat of a powerful, unified monarchy under the rule of David and Solomon are essentially false. The scientific methods for his assumptions, called a "lower dating" which essentially pushes archaeological evidence into a later century and thus erases all evidence of a Davidic monarchy, were laughed off by traditional archaeologists. But his book, The Bible Unearthed, wound up on the New York Times' best-seller list and he became the darling of a sympathetic media. He concluded that David and Solomon, if they existed at all, were merely "hill-country chieftains" and Jerusalem a poor, small tribal village. He claims that the myth of King David was the creation of a cult of priests trying to create for themselves a glorious history.

A second "critical" school had proposed that David's palace would have been inside the walls of historical Zion, the fortified Jebusite city which David conquered. But since this was only around nine acres in size, it would never have been large enough to accommodate David's palace. The "critical" school assumes that the Bible's history is a collection of myths and human constructions about the past. The non-existence of David's palace within the walls of historical Zion was offered as corroboration of the critical view.

Mazat, however, claims to have unearthed David's palace outside the walls of the Jebusite city which would be entirely consistent with a time of power, prosperity, and active construction effort. One would expect that the ancient city would have expanded considerably when David made it his capital--and Mt Zion became the most holy place in all Israel. One presumes that King David did not have to contend with the Resource Management Act.

But Mazar always suspected that the palace was outside the original city, and cites the Bible to prove it. When the Philistines heard that David had been anointed, they went on the attack to apprehend him. This occurred after he conquered the Fortress of Zion, which was the actual nucleus of the city, and built his palace. The Bible says that David heard about it and "descended to the fortress," (2-Samuel 5:17), implying that he went down from his palace, which was higher up on the mountain than the citadel/city.

"I always asked myself: Down from where? It must have been from his palace on top of the hill, outside the original Jebusite city."

Mazar says she was confident in her assessment of where the palace would be. What she discovered was a section of massive wall running about 100 feet from west to east along the length of the excavation (underneath what until this summer was the Ir David Visitors Center), and ending with a right-angle corner that turns south and implies a very large building.

Within the dirt fill between the stones were found pottery shards dating to the 11th century BCE, the time when David established his monarchy. Based on biblical text and historic evidence, Mazar assumed that David would have built his palace outside the walls of the fortified but cramped Jebusite city which existed up to 2,000 years before; and in fact, the structure is built on the summit of the mountain, directly on bedrock along the city's northern edge, with no archaeological layers beneath it -- a sign that the structure constituted a new, northward expansion of the city's northern limit.

What most amazed Mazar was how close the building is to the surface -- just one to two meters underground. "The cynics kept saying, 'there will be so many layers, so many remnants of other cultures, it's not worth digging, it's too far down.' I was shocked at how easy it was to uncover it, and how well-preserved it was, as if it were just waiting 3,000 years for us to find it," Mazar said.

It took Mazar years to find a backer to fund the dig. The reason: the project was too politically incorrect.

Despite her sound hypothesis and impeccable credentials, she couldn't find any financial backers, as if no one in the academic world really wanted to find David's palace. It would just be too politically complicated. It's no wonder, when even mainstream archaeologists are inclined to play down finds which might be considered too highly charged with biblical or historical accuracy.

There is now apparently a widespread academic prejudice against any archaeological effort or discoveries that would even hint at the accuracy of the biblical historical record. Scholars don't want to be tagged as "unsophisticated messianic fanatics." An example is the case of Adam Zertal,

who in 1983 discovered an enormous sacrificial altar on Mount Eval, on the very mountain where Joshua was described in the Bible as having built an altar after the Jews crossed the Jordan River. The altar he found contained tools dating to the12 th century BCE, the time the Jewish people entered the Land, and its construction matched the descriptions of Joshua's altar in both biblical and rabbinic texts. But instead of the expected excitement accompanying such a monumental find, Zertal's academic colleagues ignored him and his discovery. The more vocal accused Zertal, a secular Jew raised on a kibbutz, of being politically motivated to support Jewish settlements in the area around Shechem (Nablus), where Mount Eval is located.

If economics had been dubbed the dismal science, the deplorable politicisation of middle east archaeology must run it a very close second. So much for academic integrity.