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Feb. 27, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:05
SPEAKING THROUGH THE STONES Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep525
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This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walser, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth.
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Coming up, a special episode.
I'm joined by Zev Ornstein, the International Affairs Director at the City of David Foundation in Jerusalem.
The City of David Foundation is directly involved in archaeological digs That are finding astonishing confirmation of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.
We're going to talk about how, remarkably, as the West moves away from our Judeo-Christian heritage, God is speaking back through ancient seals, inscriptions, and stones.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Guys, we're doing a special podcast today and it's because we have a special guest who's in town.
In fact, someone that Debbie and I met in Israel in December, a great guy.
His name is Zev Ornstein and he's the International Affairs Director of the City of David Foundation, which is based in Jerusalem.
We're going to be talking about We're also going to be talking about biblical archaeology, all kinds of amazing stuff.
And Zev, it's really a pleasure to have you.
I want to actually show people a picture that Debbie took in Jerusalem.
And this is Zev right here.
And he's standing against a backdrop, which you can see is kind of dark.
Well, as it turns out, this is a scene of the pilgrimage road in...
In Jerusalem, the ancient road on which pilgrims walked.
And it's being excavated right now, and the excavation is ongoing.
This part I don't believe is even open to the public.
Zev, talk a little bit about, I want to talk a little bit more about your story, but before we do that, talk about this scene here with all this black, ashy-looking substance and what's going on.
I think it's a good way to just sort of dive into our subject for today.
So that picture right there is a time capsule.
When we're standing there back in December, we're about 60 feet beneath the surface.
Normally, archaeology is top-down.
You start at the most modern, you go down to the bottom.
The challenge in the city of David, the place where Jerusalem began, is that you have a modern-day mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhood there.
Now, it's one of the most significant heritage sites on the planet.
Not to millions, but to billions of people.
Now, if this was the United States of America, what would you do?
Two words. Eminent domain.
You clear everyone out. Here's some money.
See you later. And now, excavate the whole thing.
But Jerusalem is not America.
And there are many challenges to applying eminent domain in the city of David.
Were Israel to do that, the headline the next day would be ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem.
So, no one's going anywhere.
And so the challenge is you want to respect the modern-day neighborhood in the city of David, of the Jews and Arabs who live there, and at the same time uncover the heritage that has significance not to millions, but to billions of people around the world.
And so where we were standing, 60 feet beneath the surface, you see the arches that are supporting the neighborhood above our heads.
And as you mentioned, when we were standing there, in the earth that is waiting to be excavated along the pilgrimage road excavation, which we'll speak a little bit more about in a little bit, In that earth that is waiting to be excavated, there are pockets of black, of soot.
And we pulled it out.
And what is this black material?
Well, before we go to what it is, you have it.
You brought a bottle of it.
That's right. And give me a little in my hand.
I actually want to...
So this here, we...
You can see. You hold that up.
Yep. So we have to take a look at this.
It's a crusty, black substance.
And you're going to be blown away by what it is.
What is it? So this is ash from the year 70.
70 CE. When the Romans destroyed Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, this is the remnants of the ash that was left behind.
So they burned the place. They burned Jerusalem down.
They burned the temple.
The temple going back to the time of Jesus.
And they burned all of Jerusalem. And this is the remnants of that destruction, not simply as a matter of faith, but as a matter of fact.
And you can go to Rome today.
You could see the Arch of Titus celebrating the Roman destruction of Jerusalem where they see the temple treasures being led out of Jerusalem.
We have a coin that the Romans are so proud of their victory over Jerusalem.
That actually, they mint a coin to celebrate that victory that we have over here.
Here is the Roman Emperor Vespasian.
And on the coin, you have a Roman legionnaire towering above, a Jewish woman on her knees crying.
And it says on it, Judea Kapta.
Judea has been captured or defeated.
Judea was the name of the country.
Jerusalem was its capital. The reason why Jews are called Jews is Jews come from Judea.
And that was, you know, the destruction of Jerusalem.
And this is the actual coin.
Actual coin from the year 71.
This is unbelievable.
And it was a, you see a triumphant soldier and a kind of a cowering or a bending subordinate.
I guess it's intended to show the Jews are submitting to the Romans.
That's right. But of course, there's sort of a final irony to this, isn't there?
What's that? The amazing thing is, there's a story told about six decades after the destruction of Jerusalem, where three sages, they're walking to Jerusalem.
They get to Mount Scopus, just north of the Temple Mount, and they see the temple in ruins.
And two of the sages begin to cry, and one begins to laugh.
And the two sages that are crying turn to the one who's laughing and say, WTH, what's wrong with you?
How could you laugh at a time like this?
And he turns to them and says, I don't understand.
Why are you crying? And he says, why are we crying?
The temple destroyed the Holy of Holies.
You have foxes running through it.
How could we not be crying?
And he says, well, that's why I'm laughing.
He says, we don't understand. He says, until I saw the prophecies of the destruction of Jerusalem coming true with my own eyes, I never knew for certain that the prophecies of redemption would also come true.
And now that I've seen the destruction, I know that the redemption will also come.
And we're living in a time, whether in the United States, here, in Israel, where there are many challenges in our societies, But it's also important to maintain perspective.
And just because there are challenges today, that does not mean it has to be the final chapter of the story.
And with some faith, hard work, and some good fortune, the Roman Empire is gone.
Jerusalem is still standing 2,000 years later.
I mean, the point being, in 70 AD, you know, if you were to survey the world, Rome was king, right?
Rome had a massive empire stretching from Asia down into northern Africa, over all of Europe, and no one would have predicted that That the Jews would last and come back to their ancestral homeland and the Roman Empire would be gone.
And in fact, that idea that Rome was triumphant persisted for several hundred years before the fall of Rome around the 4th and 5th century.
So, I mean, what a stunning irony is that you are, you know, you are in a, you're 43 years old, you are an American born in New Jersey, and you now find yourself in a kind of remarkable place in Israel where you're representing the city of David to America.
Talk a little bit about your own life.
How did an American Jew end up in this?
Let's take a pause.
When we come back, we want to hear the story of Zev Ornstein.
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We're back with Zev Ornstein, Director of International Affairs at the City of David Foundation, based in Jerusalem.
By the way, you can follow him on Twitter, Zev, Z-E-E-V, Ornstein, O-R-E-N, S-T-E-I-N. And Zev, great to have you.
I thought it'd be great for people to hear how an American Jew born in New Jersey ends up being a representative, a key representative of the City of David Foundation, doing archaeological excavations as we speak.
but talk a little bit about your story.
So I grew up in New Jersey in a traditional Jewish family.
I went to Jewish day school, but one of the things that wasn't focused on in the school was the significance of Israel and the modern Jewish state of Israel.
And so I grew up and knew a lot about the Bible and faith and things like that, but Israel not so much.
After high school, I go for a gap year to study in Israel.
And during a weekend, a Sabbath in Israel, we spent it in the old city of Jerusalem.
And one of our teachers, Rabbi Mori Rubel, he gets up and he starts speaking about his experiences growing up in the 1967 Six-Day War.
Now, leading up to this war, you have the Arab nations surrounding Israel speaking very openly in Arabic, in English, in every language.
We are going to destroy Israel.
This is 19 years after Israel's reestablishment, about two decades after the Holocaust.
And they're openly saying, we will destroy Israel.
In Israel, they were preparing parks to be future mass graves, expecting horrific casualties.
The American Jewish community in 1967 was begging Israel to send the children to America so that in the event that Israel is destroyed, there will be a surviving remnant.
And yet, not only does that not end up happening, but in six days, Israel nearly quadruples in size, returning to Jerusalem, to the Temple Mount, to the City of David, to the Old City, to the Mount of Olives, to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Stations of the Cross, places like Bethel, Bethlehem, Shechem, Shiloh, Hebron, all the places that are biblically significant.
In six days, Israel returns to all of these places and so many others.
And I'm sitting there listening.
And I'm getting more and more disturbed because I'm trying to figure out how is it that my parents spent a lot of money that they did not have to give me a good Jewish education.
And yet, I did not know anything about what this teacher was talking about.
I didn't know anything about the ingathering of the exiles, making the desert bloom, the miraculous military victories, the re-establishment of Hebrew as a modern-day spoken language, and just re-establishing sovereignty in our ancient homeland, something that, historically speaking, does not happen.
When a people, historically, has been exiled from their homeland, you don't come back.
And yet here we were 2,000 years later.
Look at the other people in the Bible, right?
There are innumerable tribes, the Canaanites and so on.
Where are the Canaanites? Where are the Jebusites?
That's right. So the Jews are distinctive in having re-established their homeland.
Okay, so you're like, I don't know anything about this.
So how do I have a next?
So I went up to this teacher. I said, I want to know more about what you're talking about.
And he recommends a book, O Jerusalem, Who wrote that book?
Collins and Lapierre.
Oh, that's right. Of course. And I read this book.
I track it down before Amazon. I somehow find it in a used bookstore.
And I take off the next three days to read this book.
And for the first time in my life, after reading this book, I said, wow.
There really is a God. Now you might say, well, what does that mean there really is a God?
You grew up in a traditional Jewish family.
You keep the Sabbath. You eat kosher.
What does that mean? Of course there's a God.
Now I would have said to you, well, you know, if I would have been born in Saudi Arabia, I would have probably been a good Muslim.
And if I'd been born in the South, I would have been a good Christian.
And I have to be born into a Jewish family in New Jersey.
So I tried to be a good Jewish person.
But... You know, there wasn't much more to it than that.
And if you would have pushed me, I would have said, well, you know, thousands of years ago, God took us out of Egypt and gave us the Lot, Sinai.
And so out of thanks for that, we still today do all these things.
But is there a God today who is actively involved in the world and cares about the Jewish people and Israel and all the things that it says in the Bible?
I don't know. And yet I read this book.
And you see all the things that has been happening over the last 2,000 years to the Jewish people and the return to the land of Israel, the restoration of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and all these amazing things.
And I said, wow, like, This doesn't just happen.
And you see the focus, the obsessive focus at places like the United Nations and in Europe and around the world and university campuses, the hatred of Israel.
And that if someone wants to build a little bit of an expansion onto their apartment in the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria or in Eastern Jerusalem, the whole world goes crazy for a tiny little country that in the whole world there's about 12 million, 13 million Jews.
The whole world is obsessed. I said, you know what?
That also seems to be divinely ordained in some way.
And I said, at that time, I want to be a part of this story.
And so I finished university in New York and met my wife there.
And seven months after we get married, we move to Israel, to Jerusalem.
We've been living there over 20 years now.
All three of our children born in Jerusalem, which is the greatest gift I'll ever give my children.
And the amazing thing is I get to share the significance of a place, the City of David, the place where Jerusalem began, Biblical Jerusalem, with significance not to the Jewish people, but you're talking about billions of Christians around the world where it's their heritage, where Jesus walked.
This is a place that has significance to so many people.
And yet somehow I find myself in this position getting to be here sitting with you and sharing the City of David with you.
And it's humbling.
It's a big responsibility.
It's a tremendous privilege, but it's an even bigger responsibility to represent Jerusalem well.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, we're going to talk about the importance of the restoration of the state of Israel, a little bit about Israeli politics, what's going on now.
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Code Dinesh. That's PatriotMobile.com slash Dinesh or call 878-PATRIOT. I'm back with Zev Ornstein, Director of International Affairs at the City of David Foundation in Jerusalem.
You can follow him on Twitter at Zev, Z-E-E-V-O-R-E-N-S-T-E-I-N. And we're talking about Israel and the Bible.
Zev, you made a striking point where you said that, you know, it's one thing for us to believe that God was once active in the world.
In fact, certainly if you look at the Hebrew Scriptures, in the very beginning, God is talking to Adam and Eve.
He seems to communicate in a very direct way with Abraham, even with Moses.
They may not see his face, but it's unmistakably him.
And yet then there's a movement in the Hebrew Scriptures in which God seems to somewhat recede.
His relationship even to the middle prophets is not as direct.
And then later, God seems to be in the same position as he is now.
So I think the point you're making is that finding God in history today is a trickier business.
And yet, you do have...
Explicit predictions in the Hebrew Scriptures that the Jews will return.
I mean, that's unmistakable.
Bible prophecy can be a little cloudy, but that's not cloudy.
And here we are, and I want to highlight the sort of extreme implausibility of that event.
And yet it occurs. You've had three wars, 1948, 1967, 1973.
In every case, Israel is victorious against massively combined armies.
So is this what you're saying?
It seems like a combination, a political and a religious epiphany hit you at the same time and you wanted to be in the middle of it.
Faith is a choice.
You could relate to the world as if it's just...
Always been like that, always will be like that.
Or you could relate to the world that there is something bigger at play and that we are, as people created in the image of God, that we have a certain purpose to fulfill the world, both individually and collectively.
And the more I became aware of the history of the modern state of Israel and the return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel and the world's obsession with Israel, not always positive, I realized there's something bigger at play And there's something that spoke to me, again, from, I guess, a spiritual place.
A feeling that perhaps what I was put in this world to do had something to do with that.
And what I found over the last...
You know, nine years working at the City of David and before that and other things I was doing, is that, you know, for me, I believe, at least for the season that I'm in right now, the call that I have is over here to share the significance of Israel, of Jerusalem, with people around the world,
in this case, certainly in the United States, of people involved in shaping public opinion, to understand why this place matters and why it matters not just to the Jewish people, But when I meet with, you know, administration officials, members of Congress, Senate, and so on, media personalities, I say, you know...
They say, well, we're very pro-Israel.
And I say, I appreciate that, but you should actually just be pro-America because the heritage that's being unearthed in the city of David, the place where Jerusalem began, one of the most archaeologically excavated sites in the world, the heritage that's being unearthed is your heritage because the bedrock that the Founding Fathers established the United States of America upon is the Judeo-Christian heritage.
Now, where does that heritage come from?
The Founding Fathers knew very well it comes from Jerusalem.
And therefore, the heritage that we're unearthing in the City of David is your heritage too.
The people of this great country, this is your heritage.
And when people deny Jerusalem's heritage, it's not just an attack on Israel or the Jewish people, it's an attack on America.
And the West, because Athens and Jerusalem, Rome to a degree, these are the cornerstones of Western civilization.
When you look at the two most hated countries in the world today, it's not Iran and North Korea or China.
It's Israel and the United States of America because they're the two countries in the world that still have been established and inspired by the Judeo-Christian heritage.
That's what is the basis of the special relationship between our two nations.
Yes, there's democracy and high-tech and shared enemies, but we're the only two nations left in the world that aspire and esteem this heritage.
You made, we were at dinner last night, and you made an interesting point about, I think a very striking point about the Bible and the Bible as a contrast to other, the works produced by other civilizations.
In some cases, great civilizations that build great empires and how their literature is, you may almost call it, is triumphalist.
Talk about that.
I was with a group of academics in the City of David.
And academics traditionally, if not exclusively, they are skeptical of the Bible.
And it's a divine authorship.
And so I said to them, I said, I will give you what I think is a compelling case for the divinity of the Bible.
I said, if you look at the Bible, as compared to other civilizations, you go to ancient Egypt, ancient Babylon, the way that the rulers speak of themselves, They're like God, all-powerful, all-knowing, mighty, no one is greater.
And then you look at the Bible and the way the Bible speaks of Israel and the Jewish people.
And it's not that we could do no right, but it's a whole book of showing how we struggle and we stumble.
You know, you have the exodus from Egypt, the splitting of the sea, the revelation at Sinai, and then we go and worship a golden calf.
We're about to enter the promised land.
Then a whole generation's like, oh, we don't really want it.
We want to go back to Egypt. Why include this stuff?
You look at David, one of the heroes of the Bible.
Why include the story of Bathsheba?
Why would anyone make this stuff up?
Why would we make up that we're worshiping a golden calf two minutes after we get the law at Sinai?
I mean, it's almost as if it was written by people hostile.
Yeah, you would think if it wasn't by God saying a bunch of anti-Semites must have written this, making Israel out to be the worst people.
But the point of the Bible is not to glorify Israel or any other people.
The point of the Bible is to make us better people.
Is to say, you know what?
We have not changed all that much in thousands of years.
The things that we struggle with thousands of years ago, lust, temptation, desire, greed, envy, ego, power, We still struggle with those things today, and therefore the Bible is a user manual for how to live a good life, how to live a purposeful, ethical, moral good life.
And we're still trying to learn those lessons today.
Let's take a pause when we come back more with Zev Ornstein from the City of David Foundation.
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Use discount code AMERICA. I'm back with Zev Ornstein from the International Affairs Director at the City of David Foundation in Jerusalem.
Zev, we were talking about the Bible, and I think you were making the point that the Bible is a sort of a blueprint for living a certain kind of life in obedience or in subordination to God.
And I think traditionally, we believe and you believe that the Bible is taken on faith.
But something remarkable is going on.
It's been going on for a while, but it's accelerated since the foundation of the state of Israel.
And this is, let's call it biblical archaeology, excavations that are occurring largely in Israel, some in Jordan, some elsewhere, that are uncovering stuff that is giving people, skeptics and seekers a new perspective on the Bible.
Talk a little bit about this discipline of archaeology, how you became interested in it, and what is it really doing?
And then we'll get to the City of David in particular.
So archaeology is very much like you have on TV these crime shows.
And the shows all start off the same.
There's a dead body. And now you spend the rest of the show trying to figure out who did it.
And you have clues and DNA and forensics and all that kind of stuff.
So archaeology is the same thing.
Just a couple of thousand years, it happened before.
Now you're trying to find the clues.
And it might not be a body.
It might not have some DNA evidence.
But there's still clues as to who was here before, what was happening here.
Now, there are ancient civilizations all over the world, but there are few that matter to people today as much as what's happening in Jerusalem.
Because unlike ancient Egypt or ancient Rome, or sorry, once upon a time there were these civilizations, Jerusalem still has deep resonance for billions of people around the world of many faiths and backgrounds.
And so when something is unearthed in Jerusalem, in the city of David, It's not just, oh wow, that's really interesting.
That's kind of cool. It actually has implications that are spiritual, sometimes political.
Contemporary. Contemporary, today.
And implications for the future as well.
And so, when people used to think, where's the original biblical city of Jerusalem?
People thought it was the old city of Jerusalem.
Until about 150 years ago, Queen Victoria of England wants to discover the treasures of the Bible, like the Ark of the Covenant.
She sends a man by the name of Captain Charles Warren to the Holy Land to find those treasures.
He comes to Jerusalem. He wants to search Mount Moriah, the Temple Mount.
Today you have the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque standing there.
But that is the site where the Binding of Isaac took place.
That is the spot where the Temple of Solomon stood for over 400 years, destroyed by the Babylonians 2,500 years ago, rebuilt, and then destroyed by the Romans in the year 70, the temple that Jesus would have visited during his lifetime as a Jew.
And This is a place that matters, right?
Still to this day, the Temple Mount matters a lot.
And so now he can't excavate the Temple Mount.
The Ottomans were there. The Muslims say, 1867, Charles, you're not going to dig up the Temple Mount.
So he says, if I can't dig on the Temple Mount, I'll dig near it.
He comes down the slopes of the Temple Mount, down into a barren 11-acre ridge.
And he ends up coming up with a theory that this 11-acre ridge is actually the site of biblical Jerusalem, the city of David, the place where Jerusalem began.
Except everyone thinks he's crazy.
Because there's nothing there.
They say it has to be the old city of Jerusalem.
He says, I'm telling you, this is the spot.
And over the next 150 years, the city of David becomes one of the most archaeologically excavated sites in the world, the most excavated site in Israel.
And today, everyone knows that Charles Warren was correct, that the original Jerusalem of King David, King Solomon, King Hezekiah, prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah, the place where the kings of the Bible ruled and the prophets of the Bible preached, is not the old city of Jerusalem, but the city of David, just outside the walls of the old city.
Absolutely amazing. I'm going to show a picture here.
I don't know if you can see it clearly.
Is this sort of a before and after?
Yeah, that's what it looks like today. It's what it looked like about a hundred plus years ago.
And the amazing thing is today, we're unearthing.
Whether it's coins with Hebrew writing going back thousands of years, whether it's inscriptions with the names of figures, Straight out of the pages of the Bible, like the biblical King Hezekiah, like the prophet Isaiah.
Literally, you could walk with the Bible in one hand.
You have the archaeology being unearthed on the other, and you see Jerusalem's biblical heritage, with significance not to millions but billions, is not simply a matter of faith, but a matter of fact.
It's real. You could see it.
You could touch it. And as we'll see in a moment, you could walk on it.
Amazing. You brought with you a coin, a shekel.
Can I see it? And I'd like you to talk just a little bit about its significance.
This is a, wow, look at that.
This is a biblical coin.
That's right. And it has a value.
That's right. And talk a little bit about coins and also about what you were telling us last night about false weights and measures.
So there's a saying that there are two things that are guaranteed in life.
Death and taxes. And this is a truth of both, because whoever was carrying this coin, one is not alive today.
But this represents, this is the temple tax.
This is the Bible talks about the book of Exodus, that once a year, all of Israel had to come and bring a silver half shekel coin.
For the upkeep of the sanctuary, of the tabernacle, of the temple.
We find this in an excavation of the pilgrimage road in the city of David.
2,000 years ago, in the time of Jesus, there was someone going up to the temple.
They had this coin in their pocket.
But somehow, by the time they, walking through the city of David, get up to the temple mount, the priest asks him for the silver half-shackle coin.
And it's not there anymore.
It fell out. He dropped it.
He dropped it. We find it 2,000 years later now.
The priest would say to this person, silver half-shackle coin, please.
He would give it to him in the case that he hadn't lost it.
Now, what would the priest do?
He would put a weight, a becca weight on the scale.
Now, the becca, the Bible also mentions in Exodus that the becca is in the weight of a half shekel coin.
And so you would put the weight on one side, you put the coin on the other to make sure that it was kosher, that it matched.
One of the things that the Bible says is an abomination is false weights and measures.
Even back then, just not only today, we have corruption when it comes to business, but, you know, thousands of years ago, we haven't changed all that much.
And so we find in the City of David a weight, a becca weight, along the pilgrimage road excavation.
We find the silver half-shekel coin along the pilgrimage road excavation.
Archaeologists weigh it and it matches.
This was a kosher silver half-shekel coin.
And we've actually found in the City of David false weights as well, showing that not everyone was always so honest.
And it's an amazing thing that when you're in the place where the Bible happened, you see the words of the Bible come to life.
In a place that, as we speak, where we got to visit together, is being unearthed.
In a few years' time, you're going to have millions and millions of people literally able to walk in the footsteps of their ancestors, in the footsteps of the Bible.
Let's take a pause. We'll be right back.
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I'm back with Zeb Ornstein, Director of International Affairs at the City of David Foundation in Jerusalem.
This is an organization doing very important work, not only in archaeology, but also in education.
And Zeb, we were talking about these amazing discoveries of seals and coins.
Now, the City of David sort of tourist office, if you will, was right up there.
And people, I guess, would stop by to get information.
But then an anthropologist named Elliot Mazar came up to you and told you, you got to move this office.
Talk about that and talk about why and what she was getting at.
So 2005, Dr.
Eilat Mazar, world-renowned archaeologist, she comes into our visitor center.
And she says to us, you need to move your offices.
We ask her why. She says, beneath your feet, you will find the palace of King David.
That's one of those moments. What do you say to that?
So he said, Dr. Mazar, people have been digging in the city of David for the last nearly 150 years.
No one's ever said that before.
What makes you so certain this is the place?
She says very simply, the city of David is a city on a hill.
And if you're going to have a palace in a city on a hill, where will you find the palace?
The top of the hill. She says, this is the top of the city of David.
This is where you'll find the palace of King David.
We said, Dr. Mazar, with all due respect, maybe 3,000 years ago in the time of David, maybe people build their palaces at the bottom of the hill, maybe in the middle of the hill.
We're not going to move our visitor center simply because for you to be queen today, you would build your palace right here.
So what else do you have to support your theory?
She shows us something found about 60 years before, a royal Phoenician capital that would have stood atop an ancient column or pillar.
And she says, this proves that this is a location of King David's palace.
So what's the connection? She said, well, if you know the Bible, you wouldn't ask questions like that.
And we said, well, help us out.
And she says, well, the first thing David does after conquering Jerusalem and making it his capital is he reaches out to his neighbors in the north, the Phoenicians.
And in 2 Samuel 5, verse 11, it speaks of how the Phoenicians are the ones who come and build King David's palace, which is why we find Phoenician stone masonry.
So she now begins to dig with the Israel Antiquities Authority, and they find at the base of the walls, massive thick walls, 20 feet thick, thicker than the walls of the White House, pottery and other organic material, which she dates to the time of King David.
Others date to shortly a period right after David, but there is near consensus this was the royal government center of the Davidic dynasty, the original Capitol Hill going back to the time of King David.
In the same excavation, a few years later, Dr.
Mazar finds two seals, in Hebrew, Dating back 2,500 years ago, which bear the names of two of the four advisors who tell King Tzedekiah, the last king of the Davidic dynasty, to kill the prophet Jeremiah.
We find their seals in the palace in an ash layer with antiquities dating back to the period of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem.
So you have the right people at the right place at the right time, all in an excavation that just a few years ago was still underground.
Now, Not that long ago, I hosted a delegation of European Union officials.
And they said, well, what do the Palestinians think about all this stuff?
I said, well, their leadership, they hate the city of David.
They said, well, why is that?
I said, well, the story that the Palestinians have been telling for many, many decades now is that Jerusalem is a colonial project.
You're occupiers and colonizers.
You have no heritage here.
You don't belong here. And I said, what's the problem with that?
The problem with that is the City of David.
Because every single day, we are an unearthing heritage that is showing not simply as a matter of faith, but a matter of fact that the Jewish and Christian heritage in Jerusalem is real.
You could see it. You could touch it.
It's what you might call an inconvenient truth.
And I said to them, you know, if you want to separate the archaeology from the politics, I have a simple, foolproof, guaranteed way to do that.
They were very excited. What is it?
I said, all that has to happen.
You can still put out your peace plans and whatever you want.
The heads of the European Union, the heads of the United Nations, the heads of the Palestinian leadership just have to acknowledge one thing.
That the Jewish people, and by extension Christians, have been in Jerusalem for thousands of years.
That the archaeology incontrovertibly shows that.
This is not a big ask. Just recognize it and now call for whatever peace plans you want.
And one of the heads of the European Union looks at me and says, they will never agree to that.
I said, well, you know, what do you want from us?
We are uncovering the heritage.
And again, it's our shared heritage.
For Americans, this is your heritage, too, that is actively at the United Nations, throughout Europe, college campuses, Palestinian leadership, being actively denied and attempted to erase.
And let me come at this from a little different angle, which is that we're talking about events that occurred, not just 2,000 years ago, which would be Christ, but when you go back to David, what are we talking about?
3,000 years ago. 3,000 years ago.
Stuff that you would think would have absolutely washed away by the sands of time.
And for centuries, there was, I think I'm right in saying, no independent confirmation outside of the Bible that these people were real.
It seemed, in fact, to many skeptics and even scholars that, look, this is sort of like...
You know, the kings of Troy, the Trojan War, yeah, I mean, we don't expect to find, you know, the bones of Achilles, because Achilles was made up by Homer.
The bard was passing on a legend, and the Bible was seen to be in that category.
But what we're now seeing is that, whether or not you accept the supernatural aspect of the Bible, the historicity of it.
There was a King Hezekiah, there was a King David...
You had a palace and you had successors and they lived right here.
And these are their seals.
I mean, this is like kind of bone chilling stuff.
And the amazing part about it is up until about a century ago, certainly in the West, it was taken for granted that the Bible was true.
People believed. A hundred years later, you could hardly find a university campus anywhere in the West where there isn't a whole department about biblical criticism, where believers are oftentimes mocked and scorned by the culture.
And yet at a time with unprecedented denial, we have unprecedented discovery taking place, showing that the biblical heritage of Jerusalem is not simply a matter of faith, but a matter of fact.
And people now have the freedom to make a decision on their own.
You have the skeptics, you have the denial, but you also have the discovery.
Amazing. Let's take a pause.
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I'm back with the remarkable Zev Ornstein, the Director of International Affairs at the City of David Foundation.
You can follow him on Twitter at Zev, Z-E-E-V-O-R-E-N-S-T-E-I-N. We're talking about archaeology, the Bible.
We're talking about Israel.
Zav, you were making, I think, a point of capital importance, which is that at a time when America and the West appear to be pulling away from Christianity, from Judaism and Christianity, and not that this is something totally new, but I think what is new is the degree of hostility to the Judeo-Christian tradition.
It's naked, it's open, it's vicious, and at this very time, it almost appears mysteriously that God is speaking back through the stones.
And I say that because these discoveries are occurring now.
Now, in some cases, when we speak now, archaeologically, we mean in the last 50 years.
But there are things that you guys have dug up, like in the last five or the last two years, Talk about one of those most astounding archaeological digs, and that is the one you're focused on now, the Pilgrimage Road and the Pool of Siloam.
That's right. What is the Pilgrimage Road and what is the Pool of Siloam?
By the way, I'm going to show a picture here.
This is a photo.
What is this, Seb? Is this a...
What you can see there is on a very rainy day, part of the pool filled up with water.
Yeah. You know, day to day, you don't have that much water in the pool.
But the amazing thing is 2004, the southern end of the city of David, there's a road.
Beneath the road, there's a sewage pipe.
And the sewage pipe bursts.
The municipality of Jerusalem has to send in construction crews to repair the sewage pipe.
But Jerusalem is not just another municipality.
The city of David, the place where Jerusalem began, is not just another part of Jerusalem.
And here you don't only send in construction crews, you also send in archaeologists.
The archaeologists are supervising, the bulldozers and dump trucks are doing their work.
And the archaeologists here scraping and scratching, it doesn't sound right.
They clear everyone out. Turns out, in repairing the sewage pipe, they find a series of ancient stone steps, 2,000 years old, which we said is the time of Jesus.
And the archaeologists say there's only one other set of steps that look just like those steps, the southern steps leading up to the Temple Mount from 2,000 years ago.
So they said, all right, well, what are these steps that we found here in the southern end of the city of David?
And they realized they had found the steps leading down to the ancient Pool of Siloam.
Now, what is the Pool of Siloam?
For Christians, the Christian scriptures speak about the site of the healing of the blind man at the Pool of Siloam in the city of David.
Now, the Bible tells us three times during the year, on Pentecost, Tabernacles, and on Passover, All of Israel is going up on pilgrimage up to the temple.
Now before you can go up to the temple, you have to wash, cleanse, bathe, go to a ritual bath.
The historian Josephus says you would have had nearly 3 million people 2,000 years ago going on pilgrimage up to the temple, say on Passover.
So, we know the pool is about an acre and a half in size, but up until about a month or so ago, right around when you visited, we only had those steps of the pool until about a month ago, where now, for the first time in 2,000 years, we will have the ability to excavate the entirety of the Pool of Ceylon, 2,000 years old, dating back to the time of Jesus, the size of two Olympic-sized swimming pools.
We are going to excavate the entirety of the pool.
Now, the archaeologist said, If we know where the Pool of Siloam is, and we know where the temple stood on the Temple Mount a half mile apart, how did the millions of pilgrims get from the pool all the way up to the Temple Mount?
They widen the excavation and they discover the pilgrimage road.
The road that our ancestors, whether you're Jewish or Christian, 2,000 years ago, the road that they walked on when they went on pilgrimage up to the temple.
Not a road like that, not stones that look like those.
This actual road, these actual stones from 2,000 years ago.
We find there... Which we saw together in Ancient Soapbox, where you would have done the Dinesh D'Souza show 2,000 years ago.
You would have gotten up there.
We didn't have all the podcasting technology, and you would have just spoken.
That was the town hall.
I've been asked by many congressmen and senators and officials, what's the likelihood that Jesus walked on this road?
They say, look, I don't want to tell you stories.
Let me give you a conservative estimate.
The likelihood that he walked on this road, the pilgrimage road, In the city of David is 100%.
So how do you know? Well, if you believe there was a historic Jesus 2,000 years ago, he was Jewish.
He went with all the Jews down to the Pool of Siloam to cleanse.
He would have walked up through the city of David along the pilgrimage road up to the temple on the Temple Mount.
The Pool of Siloam in the city of David is 100% the same Pool of Siloam from 2,000 years ago.
The pilgrimage road is the same pilgrimage from 2,000 years ago.
The Temple Mount is the same Temple Mount from 2,000 years ago.
Not simply a matter of faith, but a matter of fact.
And as we speak, you have archaeologists with the Israel Antiquities Authority that are unearthing both the pool and the pilgrimage road.
And in a few years from now, you will be able to literally walk in the footsteps of the Bible.
To literally begin the journey from the Pool of Siloam, walk all the way up the half-mile journey coming out of the footsteps of the Western Wall right next to the Temple Mount.
This is Jerusalem's heritage being literally brought back to life.
I mean, Zeb, you know, in Israel, there are some sites that are disputed, right?
People say, well, is this the Via Dolorosa?
And there are even two rival sites where the crucifixion may have taken place.
It could have been here. It could have been there.
But what's interesting about the pilgrimage road and about the Pool of Salome is there's no dispute.
That was the pool.
This is the road.
And so this gives you the confidence to be able to say that...
This is where the Jews made their way.
And the scene to me is very captivating, right?
Because you could just see throngs of people, people selling stuff on both sides of the road.
You mentioned a little, you know, almost little podiums.
And presumably when, you know, Jesus is 12 years old, he gets lost.
His parents are looking for him. I think you told us, or someone told us, this is probably where Joseph stood.
And well, he was yelling, had anyone seen my son?
You know, in other words, this...
Talk about bringing scenes in both the Hebrew and the Christian scriptures back into life in a way that I think is completely different from reading them or even listening to them.
Really amazing stuff.
Let's take a pause. We'll be right back.
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I'm back with Zev Ornstein, Director of International Affairs at the City of David.
We're talking about the really important work that the City of David is doing, both archaeologically and educationally.
And I want to make a plea to you to check this out and to support the City of David.
Debbie and I were deeply moved by what we saw when we were in Israel, and I'll come back to that in a minute.
But I want to ask Zev, Zev, talk about a couple of the ongoing projects of the City of David that are significant.
So we mentioned we're excavating the entirety now of the Pool of Siloam, the entirety of the Pilgrimage Road, the location of King David's Palace, and many other excavations within the City of David, which are really bringing our shared heritage with its roots in Jerusalem back to life.
And even around the vicinity of the City of David, we have a site, for instance, known as the Biblical Gehenna, the Biblical Hell.
Now, why is Gehenna called Gehenna?
In Hebrew, the place is called Ge-Ben-Hinom, which is the Hinom Valley.
Ge-Ben-Hinom said quickly is Gehenna.
Now, how did this place, just adjacent to the City of David, become associated with Biblical Hell?
Well, there was a nasty form of idolatry.
That thousands of years ago took place in this valley, which was an idolatry called Molech.
Now what was Molech? Parents would take their children up on a high tower, there'd be a huge fire pit below, and they would throw their children into the fire.
Of all the idolatry that God hates, God hated this one the most.
Now what's the amazing thing?
During COVID, what we did because we had challenges excavating underground because of all the restrictions, we took our teams, they went to the Hino Valley, and we have now taken this place that in modern times was a place where you had gangs and drug dealers and violence, and now we are rehabilitating biblical hell so that today it is a biblical park.
Where kids, young people, older people of all faiths and backgrounds, handicapped accessible, are able to come and pick and plant and grow and build and, you know, press olives and bake pita bread with wheat that's grown on the site and shear sheep and make wool and all these things that are connecting people to Jerusalem's heritage through their hands, through nature, but also taking a place that was associated with hell and bringing it back to life in a positive, redeeming way.
You're almost sanctifying it by...
I mean, I guess you could have decided, hey, listen, we're going to reconstruct Moloch.
But I mean, that's a tricky, dangerous thing to do, right?
Because you don't want to...
So you decided to go the opposite way and create something that represented harmony, that represented productivity and growth.
And a place where parents could actually look forward to going with their children and children could actually look forward to going with their parents and knowing that all of them are actually going to make it all at the end of the day.
Wow. I mean, each year, Debbie and I, we basically like to pick one cause, one organization, and make it the prime focus of any kind of philanthropy that we do.
And we're only mentioning this because I want it to be an encouragement to you.
So last night, Debbie and I gave Zeb a check for $100,000 for the City of David Foundation.
And I'm mentioning it because I want you to consider really supporting this organization because, in my view, I mean, it's good to support missions around the world.
It's good to have the gospel preached.
But what we have here is the validation beyond a reasonable doubt of the authenticity of the Hebrew and the Christian scriptures.
So think of the impact of that too.
Tens of millions of people around the world who come to Israel, who see for the first time.
Debbie and I were actually with a couple from Canada, who I would describe as, you know, lapsed Catholics from Montreal, very cosmopolitan.
And we could observe the emotional and spiritual impact of what they saw in Israel in general, but in the pilgrimage road in particular, on them.
It just sort of rocked them.
And it told us that this is a very powerful form of mission work.
So, with that, we're going to put up the website, and we want you to consider supporting the City of David and the great work they're doing.
Zev, let's close out by me asking you about, you were actually telling us something last night that we didn't know about, and that is the actual meaning of the word Jew.
You were like, let me tell you what the word Jew means.
And I was like, you know, I've never thought about that.
Yeah, I have no idea.
So in the Bible, in the five books of Moses, certainly, when a name is given for someone, it then gives the meaning behind the name.
And so Judah was the fourth child, the fourth son of the matriarch Leah.
And it says when she names Judah, and Jews come from Judah, the name is, this time I will give thanks to the Lord.
So what does it mean to be Jewish?
It means to give thanks for the blessings that we have in life, the ones that come from God, the ones that come from men, And to be, one, thankful for all the blessings we have.
And also to be, like it says in Genesis 12-2 and Genesis 12-3, to be a source of blessing for the world.
And that's the essence of what it means to be Jewish.
Are we always living up to that aspiration?
No. But certainly that is what we aspire to be.
And I believe it's not an exclusively Jewish idea to...
Have gratitude. We're sitting here in the United States of America, one of the most blessed countries in the world and also one of the countries that's brought the most blessing into the world.
And it's sad to see that so many people are taking it for granted.
Same thing with Israel. No country's perfect, but those are two of the most blessed countries and countries that have brought the most blessing into the world.
And I, for one, am grateful to have been able to live in both of them.
And I think for us, you know, if you feel blessed, as Debbie and I certainly do, then we urge you to consider blessing Jerusalem and blessing in particular this project, which seems to me is of inestimable value.
Why? Because at a time when America and the West are becoming more skeptical, Maybe more disenchanted, to use an academic phrase, with the faith.
Here we have the Bible springing back to life in a manner that you can see and touch.
And I think, Zab, you say that in a year or in a couple of years, we'll be able to go to the pilgrimage road and the public will be able to walk that road that countless Jews, including one Jew named Yeshua, Jesus, walked.
On his way to the temple where all these astounding events took place.
So Zev, it's been a delight and a pleasure.
Thank you for stopping by and wish you all the best in the great work you're doing.
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