Large Stone Structure

A Building Looked for Before It Was Found

This excavation is unusual in that the interpretation preceded the dig. E. Mazar had argued in print, years earlier, that David's palace should lie at the northern top of the City of David ridge, and her reason was a verse. 2 Samuel 5:17 says that when the Philistines came up after David's anointing, David "went down to the stronghold" — down, she reasoned, from a residence that must therefore have stood above the fortified ridge, north of the Stepped Stone Structure. She went to that spot to look, and in February 2005, with sponsorship from the Shalem Center, she began digging on land held by Elad, the private foundation that runs the City of David site. She announced the find on 4 August 2005.

What came out were walls of large undressed stones. The first, in 2005, ran about thirty metres east to west and was up to three metres wide; a north-south wall exposed the following season was about six metres wide, and by 2007 walls up to seven metres thick had been reported. Pottery in the fills beneath was Iron Age I; pottery in the deposits above and against was Iron Age II. On that stratigraphic sandwich E. Mazar placed the construction at the transition between them — the eleventh or tenth century BC. A bone from the complex was radiocarbon dated by E. Boaretto at the Weizmann Institute to somewhere between about 1050 and 780 BC — a range of nearly three centuries, and worth pausing on, because it reaches down into the ninth and is therefore as consistent with the date the critics propose as with hers. It rules some things out; it does not settle this. Two Phoenician-style ivory inlays were also recovered, and a Black-on-Red vessel usually dated to the later tenth century, though Black-on-Red ware is itself one of the disputed hinges of the chronology this article is about.

Later material from the same area is not in dispute and is worth its own sentence. Two clay bullae found here name Jehucal son of Shelemiah and Gedaliah son of Pashhur — two royal officials whom Jeremiah 38:1 names together, as men who heard Jeremiah's words and moved against him. Whoever built the walls, the ground they stand on was in official use in Jerusalem's last generation before 586 BC.

What Would Have to Be True

2 Samuel 5:11 and 1 Chronicles 14:1 both report that Hiram of Tyre sent David cedar, carpenters and masons, and that they built David a house. Phoenician craftsmen building for a king in Jerusalem is precisely what those verses describe, and Phoenician-style ivories in a monumental building on the ridge are the kind of object those verses would predict. That is a real and interesting convergence, and it is why the claim was taken seriously rather than dismissed.

Four separate things have to hold before "David's palace" is established, and the clearest statement of them is M. Steiner's — one of the excavation's critics — who lists the evidence that would have to be provided: that the walls belong to one and the same building; that the building dates to the tenth century BC; that it functioned as a palace; and that it was David who put his throne there. It is a fair test, it is hers rather than this app's, and the argument turns on which of the four are in evidence.

E. Mazar's strongest argument is architectural rather than scriptural, and it belongs here because the rest of this article turns on it: she held that the Large Stone Structure and the Stepped Stone Structure below it are one integrated complex, the stepped terracing serving as the retaining substructure that carries the building above. That is a claim about stones, testable against stones, and it is the claim her critics and her defenders have actually argued about.

What the excavation did not produce is a name. Nothing found there names David, names a king, or says "palace" — no inscription, no throne room identified as such, no royal seal from the building phase. Beyond the structural argument, the identification rests on location, on date, on scale, and on a reading of 2 Samuel 5:17 that has to carry a great deal of weight for a single preposition.

The Case Against, Stated by the People Who Make It

I. Finkelstein, L. Singer-Avitz, Z. Herzog and D. Ussishkin published a joint response in Tel Aviv in 2007 under the title "Has King David's Palace in Jerusalem been Found?" Their answer is no, and their argument is mostly about the first of the four conditions above. They contend that the walls do not form a single structure; that the western walls align with later remains including a ritual bath they date to the Hasmonean period; and that on the published evidence "all one can safely say is that its various elements post-date the late Iron I/early Iron IIA and predate the Roman period" — a window of roughly eight hundred years. That sentence is often quoted on its own, and the one immediately after it in their conclusion narrows the window sharply: "Circumstantial evidence seems to suggest the dating of most elements to the late Hellenistic period." Their published abstract says the same, that the more elaborate walls "should possibly be dated to the Hellenistic period". They also argue, in as many words, that the biblical text rather than the stratigraphy drove the field operation: "The biblical text dominates this field operation, not archaeology."

M. Steiner, who published K. Kenyon's Jerusalem material and knows the earlier digs on this exact ground, made a related case in 2009. Her point is partly about the site's history: most of the area E. Mazar excavated had been dug before, by R. Macalister and J. Duncan in the 1920s and by K. Kenyon in the 1960s, which she argues makes it "almost impossible to establish a connection between the walls and to date the walls". She reads three separate wall complexes, assigns some of the northern remains to the Middle Bronze Age, and concludes: "Did Eilat Mazar find king David's palace? I would say not."

The case is not one-sided and should not be reported as if it were — but the support must not be overstated either, and its shape is easy to get wrong. A. Mazar, a leading Iron Age archaeologist, accepted a monumental Iron Age building here and offered a different identification: the Jebusite fortress of Zion, the stronghold David took rather than the palace he built. A. Faust arrived at much the same place from the other direction. In the Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins in 2010 he defended the structural half of E. Mazar's case — the Large Stone Structure and the Stepped Stone Structure are one complex, and the most impressive building of its period in the region — while dating that complex to Iron Age I and reading it as the Jebusite fortress rather than as David's palace. He agrees with her about the stones and disagrees with her about whose they were, and it would be a misuse of his paper to file him among her supporters. I. Finkelstein answered him in the same journal the following year. W. Dever has accepted a tenth-century date; J. Magness has argued the structure was built earlier still, in the twelfth century, and remained in use into the ninth.

Here is where the app stands. There is monumental construction of the Iron Age on the summit of the City of David; that much survives every critic. Whether the excavated walls are one building is genuinely unresolved and cannot be resolved from the published sections. And even the scholars most willing to accept a tenth-century date mostly do not accept "David's palace" — because a date is not an owner. The claim was announced with more confidence than the evidence carried, and repeating that confidence would be a disservice to a reader who will meet the Tel Aviv article sooner or later. The stones are real, the argument is live, and the honest sentence is that a monumental Iron Age building stood here and we do not know whose it was.

Scripture references

• 2 Samuel 5:11 — Hiram of Tyre sends carpenters and masons, "and they built David a house"
• 1 Chronicles 14:1 — The same report, with cedar, masons and carpenters
• 2 Samuel 5:17 — David "went down to the stronghold" — the verse the excavation was planned around
• Jeremiah 38:1 — Gedaliah son of Pashhur and Jucal son of Shelemiah — both named on bullae found here
• Jeremiah 37:3 — The same official, spelled Jehucal, sent by Zedekiah to Jeremiah

Sources

• ScholarshipI. Finkelstein, L. Singer-Avitz, Z. Herzog and D. Ussishkin, "Has King David's Palace in Jerusalem been Found?" — Israel Finkelstein, Lily Singer-Avitz, Ze'ev Herzog and David Ussishkin, Tel Aviv University · Tel Aviv 34:2 (September 2007), 142-164, doi:10.1179/tav.2007.2007.2.142. The principal published objection. The publisher's copy is behind a paywall and was not opened. The abstract was read in full at Tel Aviv University's own research record, cris.tau.ac.il, and the concluding paragraph quoted here was read where it is reproduced verbatim in a January 2008 post at bibleplaces.com; the two agree, and the abstract independently carries the Hellenistic dating. The quotations are given at that second hand rather than from the journal, and the sentence about circumstantial evidence is included because quoting only the eight-hundred-year window understates what these authors concluded · paywalledSupports: The argument that the walls are not one building, the eight-hundred-year window, and the late-Hellenistic dating the same paragraph proposes
• ScholarshipM. Steiner, "The 'Palace of David' Reconsidered in the Light of Earlier Excavations" — Margreet L. Steiner, publisher of K. Kenyon's Jerusalem excavation material · The Bible and Interpretation, University of Arizona, September 2009. Freely readable, and the source of the quotations in the third sectionSupports: The three-complexes reading and the difficulty created by the earlier excavations on the same ground
• ScholarshipE. Mazar, The Palace of King David: Excavations at the Summit of the City of David — Eilat Mazar, Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem · Preliminary report of the 2005-2007 seasons, Shoham Academic Research and Publication, Jerusalem and New York, 2009; her proposal was first put in Biblical Archaeology Review in 1997 and the find reported there in 2006. This is the excavator's own account, and it is the source of the pottery sequence, the wall dimensions, the radiocarbon result and the argument that the two structures are one complex. Print onlySupports: The excavator's case, in her own publication
• ScholarshipA. Faust, "The Large Stone Structure in the City of David: A Reexamination", with I. Finkelstein's reply — Avraham Faust, Bar-Ilan University; Israel Finkelstein, Tel Aviv University · Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 126 (2010), 116-130, and Finkelstein, "The 'Large Stone Structure' in Jerusalem: Reality versus Yearning", ZDPV 127 (2011), 1-10. Faust reads the two structures as one Iron Age I complex and identifies it as the Jebusite fortress, not David's palace. Print and subscription only; the article body could not be opened to a check, and the conclusion here is taken from the published abstract and the author's institutional record · paywalledSupports: What A. Faust actually concluded, and that it is not an endorsement of the palace identification
• Holding institutionIsrael Antiquities Authority — excavation licence and the City of David excavations — Israel Antiquities Authority · The licensing authority for excavation in the City of David. The Authority's own site refused automated retrieval, so no URL is given rather than an unchecked oneSupports: The regulatory context of the excavation
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Large Stone Structure

Further reading

• Wikipedia: Large Stone Structure
• M. Steiner, "The 'Palace of David' Reconsidered in the Light of Earlier Excavations" (Bible and Interpretation)

Reflect

An archaeologist read a verse, decided where to dig, and found something. That is either faith rewarded or a conclusion assumed — and telling the two apart is hard from the inside. Where might you be finding what you went looking for?