>People familiar with excavations in Jerusalem know of the controversy that has arisen with the involvement of the Elad Foundation in sponsoring archaeologists in excavating the city in order to recover “the remnants of a glorious Jewish past.”

A recent article on the controversy reveals how politics, religion, and archeology influence excavations in Jerusalem. The following is an excerpt from the article:

Doron Spielman, the Elad Foundation’s international director of development said, “We do not deny we have a Zionist dream — to reveal the ancient city beneath the ground and create a thriving Jewish neighborhood above the ground.”

More than 160 feet under Silwan on a recent afternoon, a visitor walked for half an hour in darkness and knee-deep water through Hezekiah’s tunnel, the stillness disturbed only by a party of South American tourists bellowing the theme song from the “Indiana Jones” movies.

The Old Testament books of Kings and Chronicles recount the tunnel’s origins: Hezekiah, king of Judea, dug it to channel water inside the city walls ahead of a siege by Assyrian armies.

Measuring 1,750 feet long — about a third of a mile — the tunnel was dug around 700 B.C. by two teams that started from each end and met in the middle, an engineering feat brought to life by their chisel marks, still visible on the walls, and recounted in an inscription they mounted on the wall.

“The City of David shows us the history and archaeology of Jerusalem since the day it was founded. Jerusalem’s foundations are here,” said archaeologist Eli Shukrun, standing near the entrance to another tunnel — a long, dank-smelling Roman-era sewer through which Jews fled Jerusalem as it was torched by Rome’s legions in 70 A.D.

The sewer ran beneath a road that led up to the Second Temple, the center of the Jewish faith, destroyed in the same Roman assault.

Roni Reich of Haifa University, another City of David archaeologist, gives voice to the history pulsing through Jerusalem, reeling off the names of history’s giants associated with the city — David, Jesus, the Roman Emperor Constantine, the Muslim ruler Saladin.

“It’s hard to list another city similar to this one,” he said.””And this hill is where it all started.”

The dig regularly yields important and colorful finds such as 2,500-year-old pins used to hold robes closed, and seals stamped with the names of Yehochal ben Shlemiyahu and Gemaryahu ben Shafan, two figures mentioned in the biblical book of Jeremiah.

Archaeologists not connected to the City of David digs don’t dispute their importance.

Amihai Mazar, a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said the site has already revealed important details of Jerusalem’s history. He mentioned the discovery of massive Canaanite fo.jpgications 3,700 years old and of thousands of fish bones indicating the diet favored in this landlocked city on the desert’s edge.

“This site doesn’t stop surprising us,” Mazar said.

The archaeologists at the site say their work has nothing to do with politics. But others charge their colleagues with complicity in Elad’s agenda of moving Jews to the Arab neighborhood.

The City of David dig””is connected by its umbilical cord to politics,” said Rafi Greenberg, an Israeli archaeologist from Tel Aviv University who dug at the site in the 1970s and 1980s, before Elad was involved.

“No amount of dealing with ceramics and rocks can obscure the fact that the work is being done to establish facts in the present,” he said. He rejected his colleagues’ claim to academic neutrality, saying:””They are being compensated for their cooperation with findings and money.”

Reich said the people paying for the dig haven’t interfered in his work. “I can divide the political from the archaeological,” he said.””The people from Elad have never affected our archaeological judgment.”

When politics and archeology join hands to recover “the remnants of a glorious Jewish past,” the results can lead to conclusions that may not reflect the realities of the past. Archaeologists cannot allow donors to influence how the past is interpreted. The danger is that money and politics can become the prism by which archaeologists look at the past. Let us hope that this does not happens in the excavations of the City of David.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Archaeology, Jerusalem