First Person: In Defense of Eilat Mazar

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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 the archaeology of the Holy City.

No one would question her professional competence as an archaeologist. Her chief sin, however, is that she is interested in what archaeology can tell us about the Bible. But that is not the worst of it. She is willing to make suggestions that are plausible, even likely, but are nonetheless not 100 percent certain. (Few archaeological conclusions are.)

In 1997 Mazar wrote an article in BAR titled “Excavate King David’s Palace,” pointing to the precise place where it should be. The suggestion was based in considerable part on what she had learned from her grandfather about the subtle details of the Biblical text.

As a result of her article in BAR, funds were generated by a Jerusalem think tank to support an excavation of the site Mazar had identified. And, lo and behold, when she excavated she found a large building with some walls 16 feet thick and pottery indicating it dated to the time of King David.

Eilat Mazar had the temerity to suggest that this building might be King David’s palace.^a Her report in BAR considered various other possibilities and concluded that “The Biblical evidence, I submit, better explains the archaeology we have uncovered than any other hypothesis that has been put forward.”

Several high-toned, condescending scholars have been derisive— largely, I believe, because Eilat Mazar dares to address a matter that is so important and meaningful to lay persons all over the world, instead of something of special interest to a handful of scholars.

Anyway, Eilat Mazar was blessed with more— or should we say cursed. In 2006 she was called on to reinforce an ancient tower that was leaning against a wall of the palatial building probably to be identified as David’s palace. When she excavated under the tower, which had been previously associated with the Hasmonean period (second–first centuries B.C.), she found quantities of pottery, seal impressions and other artifacts several hundred years older, from the Persian period, when Nehemiah returned from the Babylonian exile. Nehemiah rebuilt the wall of Jerusalem that had been destroyed by the Babylonians when they conquered Jerusalem in 586 B.C. Not a potsherd under the tower was later. Therefore, she dated the tower, which had been excavated in the early part of the 20th century by J.G. Duncan and R.A.S. Macalister, to the Persian period, that is, to Nehemiah’s time.

According to the Bible, Nehemiah rebuilt Jerusalem’s city wall in a mere 52 days, assigning various parts of the project to different families and guilds like the smiths and the perfumers (Nehemiah 3). Since the tower leaned against a wall that was part of the palace, Mazar reasoned that the tower also served as the base of the city wall that Nehemiah restored. She announced this in a lecture at a scholarly conference last November.

In no time, bloggers were feverishly discussing the finding of Nehemiah’s wall. Then an item appeared on the widely read Web site of the National Geographic 082Society.² First, it quoted Professor Eric Cline of the George Washington University, whose book the National Geographic Society had just published and was heavily promoting; Professor Cline said, “Be wary of anyone with a Web site or multiple publications who claims to have been able to ‘solve’ more than one Biblical mystery or locate more than one of the missing Biblical objects or places.” No discussion of the evidence. No consideration of Mazar’s qualifications. Just the casting of an aspersion because she had made two important Biblical identifications. And no consideration of the fact that she was digging in the heart of Biblical Jerusalem, just where such Bible-related places and objects can be expected.

The National Geographic item then went on to quote one more authority, the well-known Biblical minimalist^b Philip Davies (misspelling his name, however):

“I would like to add to Eric Cline’s comment the observation that a number of ‘sensational’ Biblical discoveries are claimed by professional archaeologists who are funded by groups interested not in objective discovery but vindication of the Bible— such as recent claims about ‘David’s palace’ in Jerusalem.”

National Geographic itself then adopts this argument: “Dr. Mazar’s announcement may fall into this category since she is a professional archaeologist funded by the Shalem Center.”

The Shalem Center is a distinguished Jerusalem public policy organization. It is home, for example, to Michael B. Oren, who has just published to rave reviews a book titled Power, Faith and Fantasy— America’s Involvement in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present.³ The Shalem Center admittedly has a conservative bent, but nothing extreme. Almost all think tanks have a political inclination. Would an excavation funded by a liberal think tank elicit such a snide remark from National Geographic? I don’t think so. (By contrast, consider the case of the Mormon interest in Mayan archaeology. This interest is based on the Mormon belief that the Israelites came to America and founded pre-Columbian civilizations. Few would agree with this thesis, but the Mormons, everyone agrees, do excellent archaeology of Mayan sites.^c)

This was not the first time that a distinguished archaeologist had declared that she had found part of Nehemiah’s wall. Kathleen Kenyon, the great British archaeologist of an earlier generation, also claimed to have found a part of Nehemiah’s wall (“Our excavations have in fact identified a wall that can be attributed to Nehemiah,” Kenyon wrote⁴) not far from where Eilat Mazar contends she too has found it— but no ideological insults were hurled at Kenyon. Is it because Kenyon was a well-known anti-Zionist?^d Or is it just the difference between 1974 and 2007?

In any event, there is absolutely no evidence that Eilat Mazar has been influenced by the political bent of her funder. What she is guilty of is making a reasonable judgment about archaeological evidence as it relates to the Bible. In some scholarly circles, however, this is considered “unscholarly.” If the judgment she made related to something other than the Bible, no one would give it a second thought. Only a finding related to the Bible brings such obloquy down on the head of a leading archaeologist.

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 […]