Eilat Mazar is not at her dig just south of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, where she has been exhuming the massive stone walls of what she believes to be the 10th-century remains of King David’s palace. Instead the 49-year-old widowed mother of four is at her office at the Shalem Center, a conservative social policy think tank in Jerusalem’s German Colony. Her short blonde hair bobs up and down as talks about the palace, possibly the most stunning archaeological discovery in Israel in decades. “It’s a huge structure built on the most important place that controls everything around it,” she says with excitement. “It must have been an important structure. We need to reveal more of it.”
Her office is filled with the kinds of items you might expect: 3000-year-old pots from her excavations of the ancient Phoenician settlements of Achziv on the northern coast of Israel and treasures from the Mazar family’s...
