Archaeological Views: Digging a Hole and Telling a Tale - The BAS Library
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Home > Magazines > BAR > January/February 2012

Archaeological Views: Digging a Hole and Telling a Tale

By Fredric R. Brandfon

In the July/August 2011 issue of BAR, Hershel Shanks’s First Person dealt with Ronny Reich’s new book, Excavating the City of David.a In Reich’s book he commented on Eilat Mazar’s excavations, also in the City of David, where she claims to have found King David’s palace.b Reich objected to Mazar predicting that she would find David’s palace and then conducting an excavation in which she claimed to have located exactly what she set out to find. The controversy between Reich and Mazar, while characterized by Shanks as one over scientific method, may be characterized from another point of view. […]

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Footnotes

1.

Hershel Shanks, First Person, “The Bible as a Source of Testable Hypotheses,” BAR 37:04.

2.

See Eilat Mazar, “Did I Find King David’s Palace?” BAR 32:01.

3.

However, a number of archaeologists, often characterized as minimalists, contest this. See Hershel Shanks, “Face to Face: Biblical Minimalists Meet Their Challengers,” BAR 23:04.

4.

A few archaeologists, however, consider the Jericho evidence as supportive of the Biblical account. See Bryant Wood, “Did the Israelites Conquer Jericho?” BAR 16:02, and Abraham Malamat, “How Inferior Israelite Forces Conquered Fortified Canaanite Cities,” BAR 16:02.