Can an Archaeological Dig Change the Future of Jerusalem? The City of David – Mount Zion

• What this article does not state plainly is the REAL significance. The City of David is believed by some researchers as the real site of Solomon’s temple and not the currently mis-identified “temple” mount (where the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa Mosque are). The current “temple” mount is really the Roman fort Antonio. See documentaries at end of video.
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• Can an Archaeological Dig Change the Future of Jerusalem?
  by Bari Weiss, https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion/sunday
  JERUSALEM — I want to tell you about a piece of clay the size of my pinkie fingernail and the color of ash. It is called a bulla, and it is what the people of the ancient Near East used before the invention of rubber bands or paper clips. They would roll up their papyrus, wrap cords around the bundle and secure it all with a bit of clay. The clay would then be stamped with a seal — the primitive version of a John Hancock.
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  This particular bulla was dug out of the ground in October by an archaeologist named Yuval Gadot. In the many years he’s been spading the earth in this city, Dr. Gadot, a professor at Tel Aviv University, has found several bullas. This one is special. “This bulla connects to a whole context, a whole world, that we have been uncovering in this spot,” Dr. Gadot explained.
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  The spot he’s talking about is the City of David — the mound of ancient Jerusalem — which archaeologists have been trying to uncover for 150 years.
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  When most people think of Jerusalem they think of the walled Old City: the place that contains the Western Wall and the Aqsa Mosque and the Via Dolorosa and inspires more religious fervor than perhaps anywhere else on earth. But the Jerusalem of the Bible is a modest, narrow ridge just outside the walls. Yuval Baruch, the Jerusalem regional archaeologist of the Israel Antiquities Authority, described it this way: “Jerusalem was the capital of Judean kings and that capital was located in what we call today the City of David.”
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  Archaeologists have been engaged in a ferocious debate about whether a king named David literally built his palace here. Dr. Gadot, who belongs to the school of archaeology known as biblical minimalism, is skeptical. But almost all agree on the big picture, which is that the 11-acre mound is the seat of the Davidic dynasty, which begot what we now call Jewish civilization.
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  The official City of David Foundation story is that the acquisition of the land for the dig was all kosher. The people who work for the group will show you photographs from the 1910s and 1930s in which the ridge looks sparsely populated. They will tell you that the Palestinians who live there now are squatters. They will say that much of the land was bought in the 1920s by the philanthropist Baron Edmond de Rothschild and that the foundation reclaimed lands that were rightly his.
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