By Jonathan S. Tobin
For those who hate Israel, one of the most dangerous things a Jew can do in Jerusalem is start digging.
The more you dig there, the worse it gets for those who would pretend that Israelis are alien colonists imposing their rule on “indigenous people.”
That’s why archeology has always been a key factor in the century-long struggle to recreate and maintain Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel.
You might think arguments that Jews were alien to the place are limited to the nonsensical propaganda from the Islamic world. But though few outside of academia have noticed, in recent decades, a new front in the war on Israel opened in intellectual journals and classrooms.
A new school of historians since the 1970s builds on the work of deconstructionists, who have turned the study of literature into a morass of moral relativism and intellectual cant that seeks to undermine the very idea of historic truth.
Within this school, a growing number of academics and intellectuals are seeking to discredit the Bible’s accounts of ancient Israel, and to debunk the idea that the United Kingdom of David ever existed.
These thinkers challenge not only the veracity of the Bible, but also the very idea that modern Jewish nationhood has roots in the distant past.
As professor Jonathan Rosenbaum, president of Gratz College in Philadelphia and himself an authority on Ancient Near East studies, said: “If you can upend the idea that King David was a historic figure and that ancient Israel was real, then you can delegitimize modern Israel.”
And in the spirit of the post-Zionist fashion that has swept over Israel in the last decade, some Israeli archeologists have also embraced these ideas.
Most prominently, Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University has written that the idea of the Davidic kingdom is not based on fact, and that David’s Jerusalem was nothing but a “poor village.”
Massive construction
But recently, debunkers of Jewish history got some bad news. And all it took was for a dedicated archeologist to start digging.
Dr. Eilat Mazar is senior fellow of the Jerusalem-based Shalem Center’s Institute for the Archaeology of the Jewish People.
A few weeks ago, she made public the results of the dig she had been conducting since February in an area south of Jerusalem’s Old City, now the village of Silwan, where scholars believe the city of David existed.
Mazar uncovered the ruins of the building she’s sure was the palace of David — the same structure that was built, according to the Bible, by King Hiram of Tyre around 1000 BCE for Israel’s greatest king.
“It was obvious from the first glance that we are not speaking about a private house,” said Mazar via phone from Jerusalem. “The walls are huge. The construction involved was massive.”
Directly underneath the structure were “masses of pottery” dating to the 11th and 12th centuries BCE, Iron Age I, which predates the era of David.
By its position in the site, this pottery makes it clear that “Iron I was over or almost over by the time the building was started,” said Mazar.
Mazar, 48, is the granddaughter of pioneering Israeli archaeologist Benjamin Mazar. She had talked with him before his death 10 years ago about the possibility of this project.
By reading a crucial verse in the book of II Samuel (5:17), she decided that if David had gone down from where he was to his fortress, then Silwan was where David’s abode might be found.
The dig was sponsored by the Hebrew University and Shalem, financed by American investor Roger Hertog and carried out with the help of the Ir David Foundation, which owns the land.
For those who contend that what she found was more likely the Jebusite fort David conquered or something else that predates his kingdom, Mazar said that the placement of the Iron I pottery right underneath it makes such a conclusion “problematic.”
And she calls the building a “big, obvious answer to those who say Jerusalem was an unimportant settlement.”
Just as telling was an artifact one centimeter long, uncovered from a slightly later period. It was an impression of an ancient seal, or “bullah,” which bore the name of Jehucal son of Shelemiah.
And he was nothing less than a minister of the Kingdom of Judah in its last days before the Babylonian destruction of the city in 586 BCE. We know of him because he is mentioned in the book of Jeremiah (37:3, 38:1). The bullah proves his existence isn’t a literary flight of fancy.
The find shows again, as many other archeological discoveries have also proven, that the Hebrew Bible is a credible historic source.
“Layer by layer, we must take the Bible much, much more seriously than was ever thought, and treat it as a most important historic document that contains a lot of realistic descriptions,” said Mazar.
While Mazar and the Shalem Center have tried to steer discussion of the find away from politics, she knows that contemporary struggles are never far away from the study of Israel’s past. She also knows some people will assault her work for nonscientific reasons.
As Rosenbaum noted, many modern scholars now seem to think that if you have an argument between those who claim the earth is flat and those who see it as round, “both are equally legitimate.”
Thus, it can be asserted, despite the archeological evidence of the Bible’s historicity, “there is no such thing as biblical history and no such thing as ancient Israelites.”
But by uncovering the remains of David’s palace, Mazar has helped make clear just how deep the Jewish roots of this place run.
Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia.
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