Major funding for "The Bible's Buried Secrets" is provided by The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, and the Righteous Persons Foundation.





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Transcript

NARRATOR: For over a hundred years, archaeologists have searched Jerusalem for evidence of the Kingdom of David, but excavating here is contentious because Jerusalem is sacred to today's three monotheistic religions.

JOAN R. BRANHAM (Providence College): For Christians, Jesus comes in his final week to worship at the Jerusalem temple. He's crucified, he's buried, he's resurrected in the city of Jerusalem. For Islam, it is the site where Mohammed comes in a sacred night journey; and, today, the Dome of the Rock marks that spot. In Judaism the stories of the Hebrew Bible, of Solomon, of David, of the temples of Jerusalem, all of these take place, of course, in Jerusalem. So Jerusalem is a symbol of sacred space today, important for all three traditions.

NARRATOR: Despite the difficulties, Israeli archaeologist Eilat Mazar went digging in the most ancient part of Jerusalem, today called the City of David.

EILAT MAZAR: We started excavations here, because we wanted to check and to examine the possibility that the remains of King David's palace are here.

NARRATOR: But because this area has been fought over, destroyed and rebuilt over thousands of years, it was a long shot that any biblical remains would survive. But then...

EILAT MAZAR: Large walls started to appear, three meter wide, five meter wide. And then we saw that it goes all directions. It goes from east, 30 meters to the west, and we don't see the end of it yet.

NARRATOR: Such huge walls can only be part of a massive building, and Mazar believes her excavations, to date, represent only 20 percent of its total size.

EILAT MAZAR: Such a huge structure shows centralization and capability of construction. It can be only royal structure.

NARRATOR: This huge complex may be evidence of a kingdom, but is it David's kingdom? For these walls to be David's palace, they would have to date to his lifetime, around 1000 B.C.

The problem is stone walls can never be dated on their own. Biblical archaeologists date ruins based on the pottery they find associated with those ruins. Pottery dating is based on two ideas: pottery styles evolve uniformly over time, and the further down you dig, the further back in time you go. If pottery style A comes from the lowest stratum, then it is earlier than pottery style B that comes from the stratum above it.

By analyzing pottery from well-stratified sites, excavators are able to create what they call a relative chronology. But this chronology is floating in time, without any fixed dates. To anchor this chronology William Foxwell Albright, considered the father of biblical archaeology, used events mentioned in both the Bible and Egyptian and Mesopotamian texts to assign dates to pottery styles.

Albright's chronology, slightly modified, is what Mazar uses to date her massive building and what most archaeologists use today.

EILAT MAZAR: What we found is a typical 10th century pottery, meaning bowls with hand burnish you can see from inside, together with an import, a beautiful black-on-red juglet. What is so important is that this is a 10th century typical juglet.

NARRATOR: So has Mazar discovered the Palace of David? She adds up the evidence. The building is huge, it is located in a prominent place in the oldest part of Jerusalem, and the pottery, according to Albright's chronology, dates to the 10th century B.C., the time of David. Mazar believes she has indeed found the Palace of David.

But that evidence and, indeed, the kingdom itself rest on the dates associated with fragments of pottery, and some critics argue the system for dating that pottery relies too heavily on the Bible.

ISRAEL FINKELSTEIN: Archaeologists in the past did not rely too heavily on the Bible, they relied only on the Bible. We have a problem in dating. How do you date in archaeology? You need an anchor from outside.

NARRATOR: Today, there is a more scientific method to anchor pottery to firm dates, radiocarbon dating. It is a specialty of Elisabetta Boaretto of the Weizmann Institute.

ELISABETTA BOARETTO (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel): The first step is, of course, in the field, which relates this sample material like olive pits or seeds or charcoal to the archaeological context.

NARRATOR: If an olive seed is found at the same layer as a piece of pottery, the carbon in the seed can be used to date the pottery.

When the seed dies, its radioactive carbon-14 decays at a consistent rate over time. By measuring the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12, Boaretto can determine the age of the olive seed, which, in turn, can be used to date the pottery.

Boaretto has meticulously collected and analyzed hundreds of samples from over 20 sites throughout Israel. Her carbon samples date the pottery that Albright and most archaeologists associate with the time of David and Solomon to around 75 years later.

For events so long ago, this may seem like a trivial difference, but if Boaretto is right, Mazar's Palace of David and Tappy's ancient Hebrew alphabet have to be re-dated. This places them in the time of the lesser-known kings Omri, Ahab, and his despised wife Jezebel, all worshippers of the Canaanite god Baal.

With no writing or monumental building, suddenly the Kingdom of David and Solomon is far less glorious than the Bible describes.

ISRAEL FINKELSTEIN: So David and Solomon did not rule over a big territory. It was a small chiefdom, if you wish, with just a few settlements, very poor, the population was limited, there was no manpower for big conquest, and so on and so forth.

NARRATOR: This would make David a petty warlord ruling over a chiefdom, and his royal capital, Jerusalem, nothing more than a cow town.

ISRAEL FINKELSTEIN: These are the results of the radiocarbon dating. He or she who decides to ignore these results, I treat them as if arguing that the world is flat, that the Earth is flat. And I cannot argue anymore.

NARRATOR: But it's not so simple. Other teams collected radiocarbon samples following the same meticulous methodology. According to their results, Mazar's palace and Tappy's alphabet can date to the 10th century, the time of David and Solomon.

How can this discrepancy be explained? The problem is that these radiocarbon dates have a margin of error of plus- or minus-30 years, about the difference between the two sides.