Thread by @MichaelDPress

Not sure the world needs yet another rehash of the debate about David and Solomon in Israeli archaeology, but if you're interested this one is well-written at least.

Some observations . . .
newyorker.com/magazine/2020/…

David may be an important figure, but for what religious or cultural group is he "the most central thing in the Bible"? (maybe for earlier Zionists?)
Moses, Jesus, clearly not important.

We literally have better evidence (from Assyrian and Babylonian inscriptions) for the existence of a dozen kings of Israel and Judah, so I'm not sure where this comes from.
(Not to mention the switching between "Bible" and "Old Testament" without comment.)

This reads like a joke: How many scribes does it take to make a potsherd?
The answer of course is zero.

I think this is actually a reference to recent Tel Aviv University research on how many scribes are responsible for the Samaria ostraca -- not the pottery but the writing, not a single sherd but an entire group.
timesofisrael.com/illiterate-isr…

This passage is good -- as opposed to Albright's own attempt later in his career to claim that the started out as a liberal, until he got to Palestine and the reality of the land & its archaeology convinced him of the truth of the Bible.

Yadin didn't find that gate, it was discovered by the Megiddo Expedition of Chicago's Oriental Institute decades earlier.

No, Eilat Mazar's (largely-mocked) declaration that she had found the David's palace was not much of a blow to anything.

You'd think Finkelstein's description of maximalist archaeologists here is reductio ad absurdum, a few potsherds will completely undermine decades of scholarship . . .

. . . But the author makes sure to show Yosef Garfinkel living up to the description almost literally!

The article ends by updating the debate to include the newer ideas of Tel Aviv U's Erez Ben Yosef, for whom absence of evidence is no longer merely *not* evidence of absence, but is in itself proof of his own theory (that David led a nomadic kingdom w/no monumental architecture)

For more on Ben-Yosef's post-evidence archaeology, see here:

https://twitter.com/MichaelDPress/status/1184912426132787202

Also worth noting that Ben-Yosef spent years misleading the public about how he might have found "King Solomon's famous mines" as if they were a famous biblical thing when he himself admitted they're nowhere in the Bible.

https://twitter.com/MichaelDPress/status/915745401030025216

For me, the most consequential aspect of all of this is the political one.
The piece doesn't ignore how politics & archaeology are related . . .

. . . but the only mention of international law is Israel Finkelstein's dismissal of its relevance to digging in East Jerusalem!

East Jerusalem was annexed by Israel, but the rest of the world doesn't recognize that annexation to be legitimate.

I think this might be relevant, especially hundreds of thousands of Palestinians live in East Jerusalem and these excavations directly impact their lives.

It's bad enough when short news stories on archaeology fail to discuss international law, but at least they have the excuse of limited space.

There's no reason a longform piece in the New Yorker shouldn't explain to readers what the relevant law is and how it's being violated.

So here we would conclude that the only obstacle to digging on the Temple Mount is *Israeli* law (& the "serious violence" after "any attempt to disrupt the site's intricate security arrangements")

Of course, this *is* the standard Israeli view -- int'l law doesn't matter!

But maybe worst of all is Yuval Gadot, a Tel Aviv University archaeologist who has directed Elad-sponsored excavations in East Jerusalem:

The idea that remains of the distant past matter more than people's lives today...& that it's preposterous to think otherwise!

Invoking the Acropolis is also ironically appropriate, since decades of demolition and excavation in the 19th century were part of a flawed attempt to reconstruct the "original" glory of the 5th-century BCE Acropolis . . . in a form that had never actually existed.

I'll end with part of Yehuda Amichai's famous poem "Tourists".
Clearly Gadot, like many others, needs to learn this lesson . . . one that is especially relevant to archaeology in Jerusalem & how it's used against Palestinians.
famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/yehuda_a…

Seems like this moderately conservative piece on the archaeology of David & Solomon really touched a nerve with those for whom the historicity of the United Monarchy is important.

Breaking Israel News quotes a handful of conservative figures -- other than Eilat Mazar, none a central figure for the archaeology of David -- & one appears in the comments to point out he didn't realize he was being interviewed for an article.
breakingisraelnews.com/153739/not-jus…

Case closed -- BIN interviewed a "Bible-believing Christian" analyst for CAMERA who wrote a grad school paper on Jericho & proved that the biblical account is true.