The evidence she found is remarkable. It includes a section of massive wall running about 100 feet (30 meters) from west to east along the length of the excavation, and ending with a right-angle corner that turns south and implies a very large building.

Within the dirt fill between the stones of the great wall were found pottery shards dating to the 11th Century B.C.E.; this is the earliest possible date for the walls’ construction.

Two additional walls, also large, running perpendicular to the first, contain pottery dating to the 10th Century B.C.E. - meaning that further additions were made after the time of David and Solomon or during their reign, suggesting that the building continued to be used and improved over a period of centuries.

The structure is built directly on bedrock along the city’s northern edge, with no archeological layers beneath it - a sign that this structure, built two millennia after the city’s founding, constituted a new, northward expansion of the city’s northern limit. And it is located at what was then the very summit of the mountain - a reasonable place indeed for the palace from which David “descended.”

This immediate evidence fits well with other archeological finds from the site, as well. In 1963, the renowned archeologist Kathleen Kenyon reported finding a Phoenician “proto-Aeolic capital,” or decorative stone column head dating to the same period, at the bottom of the cliff atop which the new excavation has taken place.

Kenyon wrote that this capital, along with other cut stones she found there, were “typical of the best period of Israelite building, during which the use of Phoenician craftsman was responsible for an exotic flowering of Palestinian architecture. It would seem, therefore, that during the period of monarchic Jerusalem, a building of some considerable pretensions stood on top of the scarp.”

Clay signet

In the early 1980s, Hebrew University’s Yigael Shiloh uncovered the enormous “stepped-stone” support structure which now appears to be part of the same complex of buildings.

And in the new excavation, Mazar has discovered a remarkable clay bulla, or signet impression, bearing the name of Yehuchal Ben Shelemiah, a noble of Judea from the time of King Zedekiah who is mentioned by name in Jeremiah 37:3, evidence suggesting that four centuries after David, the site was still an important seat of Judean royalty.

This matches the biblical account according to which the palace was in more or less continuous use from its construction until the destruction of Judea by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E.

So, is it David’s palace? It is extremely difficult to say with certainty; indeed, no plaque has been found that says on it, “David’s Palace”; nor is it likely that such definitive evidence will ever be found.

And yet, the evidence seems to fit surprisingly well with the claim, and there are no finds that suggest the contrary, such as the idolatrous statuettes or ritual crematoria found in contemporary Phoenician settlements.

The location, size, style, and dating are all right, and it appears in a part of the ancient world where such constructions were extremely rare and represented the greatest sort of public works.

Could it be something else? Of course. Has a better explanation been offered to match the data - data which includes not only archeological finds, but the text itself? No.

There will be no shortage of well-meaning skeptics, including serious archeologists, who, having been trained in a scholarly world weary of exuberant romantics and religious enthusiasts prone to making sensational, irresponsible claims about having found Noah’s Ark, will be extremely reluctant to identify any new archeological find with particulars found in the Bible.

Others, driven by a concatenation of interests, ideologies, or political agendas, will seize on any shred of uncertainty in the building’s identification to distract attention from the momentousness of the find. Both groups will invoke professionalism and objectivity to pooh-pooh the proposition that this is David’s palace.

Don't be swayed

They will raise the bar of what kind of proofs are required to say what it was to a standard that no archeological find could ever meet. Or they will simply dismiss it all as wishful thinking in the service of religious or Zionist motives.

There are two good reasons not to be swayed by such claims. The first is that even if this is not in fact David’s palace, there is no doubt that we are still talking about an archeological find of enormous moment. Whether it is a citadel, someone else’s palace, or a temple, it is the first-ever discovery of a major construction from the early Israelite period in Jerusalem to date.

This alone is enough to overturn the hypothesis of Finkelstein and others that Jerusalem at the time of David was a “poor village” incapable of being the capital of an Israelite kingdom.

No longer is it reasonable to claim, as did Tel Aviv University’s Ze’ev Herzog writing in Haaretz in 1999, basing his claim entirely on the absence of just this kind of evidence, that “the great unified monarchy was an imaginary historiosophic creation, invented at the end of the Judean period, at the very earliest.”

On the contrary: Now we have a major Israelite compound dating to the time of the unified monarchy, firmly establishing Jerusalem as a major city of its time.

For this reason, important voices in the archeological world have already begun declaring the find to be of great importance, even as they reserve judgment as to its identification as David’s palace.

“Due to all the possible historical implications, we need to look carefully at the pottery and to further excavate the area,” Seymour Gitin, director of archeology of W.F. Albright Institute in Jerusalem, told a nespaper. Yet he adds, “this is an extremely impressive find, and the first of its kind which can be associated with the 10th Century (B.C.E.).”

The normally reserved Amihai Mazar of Hebrew University, one of the most esteemed scholars in the field of biblical archaeology and author of the standard textbook, "Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000–586 B.C.E., has described the discovery as “something of a miracle.”

Yet beyond this, there also are good reasons to identify this building, at least provisionally, as the very palace described in the book of Samuel. This is methodologically sound, so long as we are willing to admit that future evidence could emerge, or a better theory be proposed, that might prompt a different conclusion.

 Burden of proof

Right now we have before us two things: We have a biblical text describing in detail the creation of a Phoenician-style palace by David high up on a particular mountain, around the end of the 11th or beginning of the 10 Century B.C.E. And we have a grand structure of the Phoenician style dating from the same time, on the summit of that very mountain, located with assistance from the text and previous archeological discoveries.

This was not stumbled upon, moreover, but carefully hypothesized, and the current dig was proposed as the test. The likelihood of this happening by chance is extremely small.

Is this absolute proof? No. But it is enough to shift the burden of proof.

 “You can never be sure about this sort of thing,” Mazar says. “But it seems that the theory that suggests this to be the very palace described in the book of Samuel as having been built by David is thus far the best explanation for the data. Anyone who wants to say otherwise ought to come up with a better theory.”

This is neither wishful thinking nor an imagined past, but good science.

Excerpted from the current issue of Azure, quarterly journal of the Shalem Center