“Archaeologists have been digging in Jerusalem for 150 years and no one shrinks from saying this is the palace of David, this is from one date or the other. But although carbon-14 dating has been around for a long time, almost no one applied this method here.”
—Yuval Gadot, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University and one of the leaders of “Setting the Clock in the City of David,” a four-year project that will accurately radiocarbon-date the complex layers of ancient Jerusalem and answer questions about the historicity of the biblical account - including the incendiary issue of whether an ancient Israelite united monarchy under David and Solomon really did exist. Skeptics say that in some cases the dating and interpretation of ancient sites may have been twisted to fit the biblical narrative by scholars eager to prove religious texts right.

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