First Person: In Defense of Eilat Mazar - The BAS Library
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First Person: In Defense of Eilat Mazar

By Hershel Shanks

Eilat Mazar is a leading Jerusalem archaeologist. She comes by it rightly. She is the granddaughter of Benjamin Mazar, who was himself a leading archaeologist as well as president of The Hebrew University and who, for ten years after 1967, led an enormous excavation south of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Benjamin Mazar died in 1995, and a committee of scholars was assembled to choose someone to complete the unfinished excavation report left by the elder Mazar. The committee chose Eilat Mazar, who is also affiliated with The Hebrew University.1 While she has dug at sites outside Jerusalem, her passion remains […]

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Footnotes

1.

See Eilat Mazar, “Did I Excavate King David’s Palace?” BAR, January/February 2006.

2.

Biblical minimalists are scholars who deny the essential historicity of the Bible.

3.

See Howard W. Goodkind, “Lord Kingsborough Lost His Fortune Trying to Prove the Maya Were Descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes,” BAR, September/October 1985.

4.

See Hershel Shanks, “Kathleen Kenyon’s Anti-Zionist Politics— Does It Affect Her Work?” BAR, September 1975.

Endnotes

1.

The third volume has just appeared: Eilat Mazar, The Temple Mount Excavations in Jerusalem 1968–1978 Directed by Benjamin Mazar, Final Reports, Volume III, The Byzantine Period, Qedem, vol. 46 (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2007). The first two volumes of the final report were published as Qedem 29 and Qedem 43.

2.

Stones, Bones ’n Things, “Nehemiah’s Tower: A Test Case,” National Geographic Magazine, November 13, 2007, http://ngm.typepad.com/stones_bones_things/2007/11/nehemiahs-tower.html.

3.

(New York: Norton, 2007).

4.

Kathleen Kenyon, Digging Up Jerusalem (New York: Praeger, 1974), p.183.