Near the beginning of this century, the Israeli archaeologist Eilat Mazar hypothesized that the remains of King David’s palace were likely located in the area of Jerusalem known as the City of David, adjacent to the Temple Mount. Eventually, despite the skepticism of her colleagues in the field, she began dig. She died last May at the age of sixty-four, having changed scholars’ understanding of Iron Age Jerusalem. Roger Hertog writes:

Some archaeologists have argued that David and his predecessor, Saul, were merely “tribal chieftains” with hilltop strongholds rather than kingdoms, thus relegating the Jews of that era to the status of just one of several nomadic groups in the region. . . . Eilat . . . never engaged in a real conflict with any of them. She would only say “Let the stones speak for themselves.” Time and scholarship will tell the story.

She was convinced that a passage in the book of Samuel contained clues to a palace in the northern part of Jerusalem’s oldest area. She was also inspired by the work of the British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, who in the 1960s discovered in that area what she believed to be a wall built by King Solomon, dating to the 10th century BCE.

Eilat’s enthusiasm was contagious. Sure enough, her team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she was a professor, quickly began to unearth treasures. I recall the first excited call in which she reported artifacts from the 4th to 7th centuries BCE, including one bearing the name of Yehukhal, a figure mentioned in the biblical book of Jeremiah.

In August of 2005, Eilat announced her belief that what would come to be called the Large Stone Structure, in close proximity to the Stepped Stone Structure excavated by Kenyon decades earlier, was part of King David’s palace. She argued that the two sites were once part of a single complex, and that it made sense that the palace might be outside the protective walls of Jerusalem due to the city’s increasing expansion.

Contributing to the Jewish state’s current controversy over efforts to reform its judicial system, observes Peter Berkowitz, is its lack of a written constitution. Berkowitz encourages Israelis to seek a way out of the present crisis by looking to the founding document they do have: the Declaration of Independence.

The document does not explicitly mention “democracy.” But it commits Israel to democratic institutions not only by insisting on the equality of rights for all citizens and the establishment of representative government but also by stressing that Arab inhabitants would enjoy “full and equal citizenship.”

The Israeli Declaration of Independence no more provides a constitution for Israel than does the U.S. Declaration of Independence furnish a constitution for America. Both documents, however, announced a universal standard. In 1859, as civil war loomed, Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter, “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Something similar could be said about Ben Gurion’s . . . affirmation that Israel would be based on, ensure, and guarantee basic rights and fundamental freedoms because they are inseparable from our humanity.

Perhaps reconsideration of the precious inheritance enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence could assist both sides in assuaging the rage roiling the country. Bold and conciliatory, the nation’s founding document promises not merely a Jewish state, or a free state, or a democratic state, but that Israel will combine and reconcile its diverse elements to form a Jewish and free and democratic state.