Debunking Viral Claim About the Talmud and Minors
6 min view
8 min read
8 min read
Archeology broadcasts the truth about Jerusalem and Israel.
Some 20 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.
Herodian Drainage Channel Beneath the Pilgrimage Road, City of David Archives
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.
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.”
The Drainage Channel and the Excavator going down the ladder, City of David Archives
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.”
Doron Spielman, author of When the Stones Speak
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 20 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.
The clay seal of Yehuchal ben Shelemia, The Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University, courtesy of Dr. Eilat Mazar.
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, City of David Archives, photo: Koby Herati
Even more gripping is the story of discovering and excavating “the Pilgrimage Road,” a 700-meter series of expertly chiselled 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 Jerusalem 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.
The Siloam Pool, City of David Archives: Dudi Vakhnin
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 20 years, he provides an eye-witness account of the drama and suspense of using archeology to prove that the Jews are the indigenous people of the tract of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean 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.
It is interesting how Israel's Arabs are the only indigenous people that are afraid of archeology.
The Romans changed the name of Judea to Palestine, because the Jews kept revolting against the Roman's, now the Muslim Arab terrorists are stealing the identity of the Jewish people, and the Holy Temple was/ is the holiest site for the Jewish people, these Muslims do not pray facing Jerusalem like the Jews do, the Muslims pray facing Mecca and Medina, also in the Torah and Jewish holy books Jerusalem is always mentioned in the Muslim Bible Jerusalem is not mentioned at all, in the prophets it is mentioned before Moshiach comes Ismael wants to claim the land of Israelas thir inheritance but the land of Israel belongs to the Jews on condition they keep the Torah
Interesting.
This seems to be something that will fade and be destroyed if also do our individual part with keeping the Torah and commandments.
With such an extended exile, it's been a very long time since we saw truly open miracles. And the Ark is hidden and we may not even know what happened to the rocks that served to be a reminder of G-d stopping the Jordan River for Joshua and Israel.
Thank you, I just ordered the book and can't wait to read it. I will be in Jerusalem next month!
A simple question that Sara Rigler could have asked the Arab tour guide: Whose Jerusalem temple did the Romans destroy in 70 AD (500 years before the birth of Mohammed)? Pity that she didn't.
Pity that you said it was a pity that she didn't.
Pity - I can't understand what you're trying to say!
Thank you, Sara Yocheved for your validating article. I lived in the Old City in the 1990s and remember well the huge concern that the Wakf had excavated parts of the Temple Mount and disposed of a large amount of "debris" and wouldn’t allow Israeli/Jewish access to it. The lies being spread about no Jewish historical ties to the Land of Israel are supported in another gripping book: Moriel Bareli "When a Jew and Muslim Talk" is further recommended reading.
People did live there before Jews, or rather our ancestors as Judaism as a religion is (prehistoric-timeline-scale at least) fairly recent. But evidence suggests a) Jews descended from Israelites, ie Canaanites and b) Canaanites settled there ~10,000 years ago. Natufians, among others (Neanderthals, for instance, or if you're more restrictive an early failed try at Homo Sapiens migration out of Africa c.185,000 years ago (see for instance https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42817323).
Our ancestors, the ancient Israelites, were not Canaanites. Our Patriarchs and Matriarchs were all born in Padan-Aram, today's northern Iraq/northeastern Syria.
A closely allied idea is that because Israelis are settler-colonizers, which they aren't, they therefore "deserved" October 7 or worse--which, to be clear, ought to void any claims someone has to being vaguely moral.
The whole point of human rights is that they extend to every. Single. Human. Period. You get them by being human, and you cannot lose them, no matter what. As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights put it, they are "inalienable rights to all members of the human family". Consider Eichmann. Despite his known atrocities, he got a fair trial. When no one would defend him, rules were changed to allow foreign lawyers to. When he couldn't pay, Israel did. He was assumed innocent.
Even if all Israelis were grotesquely evil, October 7 would not be good, acceptable, or moral.
Not to worry: Hashem detests liars, so He will surely eliminate our enemy (as He has always done, b"H), who are the masters of all liars throughout recorded history.
And we are taught that when that happens—may we merit it very soon—it will make what happened to the ancient Egyptians look like child's play!
This is an excellent article! Thank you!
Outstanding!
Here's Hoping the P.M.Nethanyahu rids Gaza of Hamas and any future possibility of attack from there. We can't stop Mullahs and school teachers from teaching historical lies to vulnerable Arab youth, but we can neutralize the enemy that tries/wants to destroy us.
B.t.w., is the Arab an accredited tour guide?
The enemy within. Beware!
A whole library of archeological reports still wouldn't justify not granting equal rights to the Palestinians -- particularly now that, by Israel's open admission, the two-state solution is dead. Do we say that Jews in the US or Britain or Canada shouldn't have equal rights on the basis of archeology? It would be absurd. It's just as absurd in Israel.
Arab Moslem citizens of Israel do enjoy equal rights to the Jewish citizens of Israel, but they are not obligated to serve in the army as Jewish citizens are.
No other nation has ever evacuated flourishing territory within its borders to an enemy that seeks to destroy them and turns that place into a hell on earth even for its own people.
And what about all the humanitarian aid Israel has given to the so-called "Palestinians" whose "innocent civilians" have generally supported terrorists?
You blame Israel for saying that the two-state solution is dead, but you fail to proclaim the truth that it's the Arabs who killed it!
Israel is to blame only for acting on the hope that its brutal enemy really wanted peace.
BTW, your Q & A serves as a good example of a logical fallacy; your slanted & futile attempt at presenting a parallel is indeed—to use your own word—absurd.
How can Israel have real peace with Muslim Arab terrorists that want the world and Israel " Judenrein" ( free of Jews) like the Nazis( may their name be erased) and the best seller in the Muslim Arab countries is " Mein Kenif " ( my fight or my struggle) by Adolf Hitler( may his name be erased) in Arabic, in my opinion the above mentioned stem from Amelak, and Jews and Israel can't ever have peace with the nation of Amelak
Compelling article! As a goy I didn’t realize that the Muslims have been teaching anyone who’d listen that the Jews did not build the temple of God on the mount in Jerusalem!! Have assumed all this hate of Jews from them was enough! It is inconceivable to me that anyone could actually believe their propaganda & hate-speak!
May the Jews ALWAYS know they are God’s people, plain and simple truth! And EVERYONE will know that in the End times coming when Jesus comes to earth to rule over everyone and to care particularly for His people! Halleluya!