Bs”d
What Israel’s Enemies Don’t Want You to Know
Archeology screams the truth about Jerusalem
and Israel
Some twenty
years ago I was walking from my home in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old
City to pray at the Kotel (the Western Wall), Judaism’s second holiest site,
second only to the Temple Mount itself that towers above it. On the steps to
the Kotel Plaza, I passed an Arab tour guide speaking in English to a large
group of European tourists. Pointing toward the Golden Dome and the Al Aqsa
Mosque on the Temple Mount, he said, “The Jews claim that their two temples
stood on this spot, but there is no proof whatsoever to that claim.”
I was
stunned. No proof? The gigantic, distinctive “Herodian stones” of the Western
Wall itself, the remnant of the retaining wall King Herod built around the
mountain when he enlarged the Second Temple, starting in 20 BCE, were
incontrovertible proof. And what about the numerous contemporary historical
descriptions of the Temple, including historian Josephus Flavius’s eye-witness
account of the Temple, written in the first century CE? Although an inveterate
debater, I stood there unable to utter a word of rebuttal because I was shocked
speechless by the boldfaced lie. It was as if an acknowledged scientist was
telling his students that the world is flat.
Only
recently, when reading Doron Spielman’s new book, When the Stones Speak, did
I become aware that that Arab tour guide was just a small part of a widespread,
carefully calculated campaign to deny the Jewish People’s historical claim to
Jerusalem and the land of Israel.
The
invective, “Colonialists!” being shouted against the Jewish State on university
campuses and in European capitals is based on the allegation that European Jews
came to Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th century
as foreign occupiers. In the wake of the Holocaust, according to this view, the
United Nations voted for a Jewish state, alongside an Arab state, in the small
piece of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, in order to
assuage their guilt. The implication of “colonialists” is that Jews have no
more rights to that patch of land than the British had to India.
An
inconvenient contradiction of that narrative is the Bible, which chronicles
over a thousand years of Jews (then called “Israelites”) living in that patch
of land. “The Bible should be put aside,” claimed Palestinian archaeologist,
Hani Nur el-Din, professor of archaeology at Al-Quds University. “It’s not a
history book.”
This
statement, writes Doron Spielman, “was part of the broader, long-standing trend
of denying Jewish history in Jerusalem that had persisted for decades.” In When
the Stones Speak, he provides hair-raising evidence of this campaign.
(Even the
name “Palestine” was an effort by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, after the Jewish
revolt of 132-135 CE, to sever the historical identification between the Jews
and their land, which had been called “Judea” for centuries. The term
“Palestina” derives from the Philistines, one of the ancient Sea Peoples who
had lived along the coast of Judea and disappeared from history with the
Babylonian conquest seven centuries before the Romans exiled the Jews.)
If you
can’t trust the Bible to legitimate the Jewish people’s historical claim to the
land, then perhaps archeological discoveries in the City of David, the original
Jerusalem which lies to the south of the walled Old City, can provide proof
that Jews lived there in antiquity. When the Stones Speak is the
riveting story of those archeological digs and what they revealed, as well as
the opposition that tried to stop them.
THE CRUSADE
TO DENY HISTORY
Excavating the City of David faced massive pushback from the
Palestinian leadership and the European NGOs that support them. Sheikh Ikrima
Sabri, the Mufti of the Temple Mount and one of the founders of Al Quds
University, told a reporter for the German Die Welt in 2001, “There is
not the smallest indication of the existence of a Jewish temple on this place
in the past. In the whole city, there is not even a single stone indicating
Jewish history…. It is the art of the Jews to deceive the world.”
Walid Awad, a Palestinian scholar in charge of publications
for the Palestinian Ministry of Information, asserted in 1996: “The fact of the
matter is that almost thirty years of excavations did not reveal anything
Jewish. ... Jerusalem is not a Jewish city, despite the biblical myth implanted
in some minds.”
Even as recently as May, 2023, Mahmoud Abbas, the President
of the Palestinian Authority, addressing the United Nations, claimed that there
was no proof whatsoever of Jewish ties to the al-Aqsa compound [the Temple
Mount]. He stated that Israel “dug under al-Aqsa. They dug everywhere and they
could not find anything.”
When the Stones Speak tells of astonishing finds in
the City of David that disprove the Palestinian lies. Dr. Eilat Mazar, a
courageous and independent archeologist, using the Bible as her guide,
discovered a monumental building, with walls twenty feet thick, which she
maintained was the palace of King David and subsequent kings of Judea. She
dated pottery she found within the ruins to the tenth century BCE, the time of
King David.
Archeologists from Tel Aviv University, who had made a
career of denying the Bible, jumped on Dr. Mazar and questioned the dating of
her pottery shards. They argued that the massive building, clearly belonging to
a ruler, was from two centuries before King David or three centuries after. In
those years, only organic matter could be conclusively dated. An olive pit
found deep in the structure was sent to the laboratories of Oxford University
for Carbon-14 dating. After weeks of tumulteous debate in the media about Dr.
Mazar's discovery, the results came back: the olive pit was from 1000 BCE, the
period of King David.
Even more electrifying was her discovery of a clay seal that
bore the name, written in paleo-Hebrew, of “Yehuchal the son of Shelemiah.” The
Bible relates that the prophet Jeremiah, who lived in the 6th century BCE,
prophesized that the mistreatment of orphans and widows would bring Divine
judgment against the kingdom. Four of King Zedekiah’s officers told the king
that Jeremiah was fomenting panic in Jerusalem. The Bible records the name of
one of those officers: Yehuchal the son of Shelemiah.
THE
PILGRIMAGE ROAD
Even more gripping is the story of discovering and
excavating “the Pilgrimage Road,” a 700-meter series of expertly chisselled
limestone steps that led from the Siloam Pool, a giant ritual bath discovered
at the southern tip of the City of David, directly to the Temple Mount. As Doron Spielman writes:
The road we had discovered wasn’t
just a Pilgrimage Road; it was the Hag Pilgrimage Road used by the ancient
Israelites who came to Jeusalem more than sixteen hundred years before Islam
was founded.
This
historical fact should have posed no challenge to Islam were it not for the
Palestinian leadership. But they had been teaching an entire generation of
their people the falsehood that there never was a Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount, and that the site was
first sanctified by Muhammed.
…
With the discovery of King David’s
Palace and the Pilgrimage Road, the City of David was transformed from a small
backwater excavation into a leading archaeological site.
And
with that transfomation came threats of violence against Israelis in general
and against our workers, and even an attempted assassination.
I never expected a book on archeology to be a page-turner,
but Doron Spielman is a master story-teller. As Vice-president of the City of
David for twenty years, he provides an eye-witness account of the drama and
suspence of using archeology to prove that the Jews are the indigenous people
of the tract of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterrean Sea. With a
cast of colorful characters from Elie Weisel to Congresswoman Elise Stefanik,
this is a must-read story.
As the author writes: “Grab almost any Israeli off the
streets in Israel today and they will likely tell you: We are here. We have
always been here. And we’re not going anywhere else.”
With the revelations narrated in this book, every Jew in the
world should be able to vouch: The Jews have always been in the land of
Israel. We are the indigenous people between the river and the sea.
To buy the book, click here:
https://www.amazon.com/When-Stones-Speak-Remarkable-Discovery/dp/1546009256
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