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This mellifluous account of archaeological discoveries in the City of David should be read by every anti-Semite: American Democrats, Antifa domestic terrorists, fake “Palestinian” paid activists, Holocaust deniers, Islamic terrorists, “professors” who disgrace my profession by teaching hatred against Jews, and twenty-first century Nazis. (The reader is asked to forgive the obvious redundancy in the list.)
Although the author is neutral politically (Spielman is fair in mentioning how Obama opposed the City of David excavations while President Trump supports the State of Israel), any non-Jewish reader would ineluctably come to the conclusion that the forces which opposed archaeological discoveries demonstrating that the Jews are not “settlers” or “occupiers” but indigenous to the Holy Land do so because of deep ideological biases and anti-Semitism.
Thus, Spielman’s summary of excavations not only proves that the Jews have a right to exist in the Holy Land, but also suggests (to me, at least) that “Palestinian” efforts to erase Jewish history are a contemporary form of Hitlerian intellectual dishonesty.
The obvious political conclusions that the reader would reach, however, are ancillary. Spielman’s 248-page work reads like an exciting mystery novel, where details of a plot are slowly revealed to the reader.
Consider, for example, the drama in the following passage summarizing how the archaeologist
Eilat Mazar predicted where King David’s palace was located. Then she found a massive structure dating back to King David’s time. Now she had a seal, unearthed from the excavation, that matched exactly with the name in the Bible. This was solid proof that the Bible was not just a book of fairy tales or myths, but that it reflected real people and real history. (64)
In a few sentences, Spielman recapitulates the several steps proving that the Jews “were there first” while arguing for an appreciation of the Bible as a valid historical record.
Similarly, Spielman writes convincingly about the importance of a tiny golden bell which archaeologists discovered that may have been torn off the High Priest’s robe while he was either working at the Temple or fleeing the Roman army’s advance: “Apparently, it had rolled through a crack in the road and had fallen down into the tunnel below, where it had rested—for two thousand years—until now” (220).
Rarely does Spielman wax poetic, but one epideictic struck me as particularly infused with poetic license:
In Jerusalem, the stones have a story to tell, a story not only about Jerusalem. Rather, it is all the stories of our people, both in the Land of Israel and in exile. It is as if the stones of Jerusalem gather the stories in our absence, catching them out of the air, storing them away safely, until a time we need to hear them, to remind us how we longed to come home. (93)
One can easily see how, if the various phrases were separated into their own lines, the passage would read as some of our best free verse.
Besides the mellifluousness of the prose, several facts caught my attention and may be helpful for ordinary readers who defend Jews who are attacked by woke academics, their indoctrinated students, and leftist media.
These facts move from (warning to the reader: a huge litany follows) the history behind the terms “Hebrews”, “Israelites”, and “Jews” (xxiii-xxiv);
to the fact that the origin of “Palestine” is a Roman invention [Emperor Hadrian renamed Judea to Syria Palestina as a (failed) effort to eradicate Jews from his empire (xxvii)];
to the fact that in 1880, a fifteen-year-old boy found “the oldest biblical inscription [written in the ancient Hebrew of the Israelites] ever discovered” (17);
to the fact that “History records that Jerusalem was attacked fifty-two times, captured or recaptured fifty-four times, and destroyed twice: once by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and once by the Romans in 70 CE” (31);
to the fact that “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” (97);
to the fact that
In research published by the National Academy of Sciences, genetic studies showed that contemporary Jewish communities can trace their roots to a common Middle Eastern source population several thousand years ago. The study showed that this ancient source population, from which modern Jews descend, shared distinct paternal and maternal lineages. Despite the wandering of the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora over the millenia [sic], they have maintained their unique genetic lineage going back to the Middle East. (111);
to the fact that “By the time Hadrian renamed the area ‘Palestina,’ the Philistines had already been extinct for over seven hundred years” (115);
to the fact that “The word Palestine never appears in the Quran, the central book of faith for all Muslims—not even once. / Neither does the word Jerusalem” (116; italics in original);
to the fact that
Perhaps most revealing that the choice to identify as “Palestinians” was one of expedience for some Arabs, and not part of a rich Islamic tradition, is that the very word Palestinian is of Latin origin, the language of Emperor Hadrian, and it cannot be pronounced in Arabic, which lacks the consonant P.
For this reason, one often hears native Arabic speakers referring to “Palestine” as “Balestine.” (118; italics in original).
With such an extensive litany of facts, Spielman is on solid ground when he asserts that, regarding whether the Palestinians could connect themselves to the ancient Canaanites, who “were there first” after the Hebrews left Egypt and entered the Holy Land, “there is no historical, genealogical, or archaeological basis for this claim” (114).
Although I am not Jewish, as a practicing Roman Catholic Christian, well aware that Our Lord deigned to come among us as a Jew and that the Jews of today are our brothers and sisters whom we must defend against those who would destroy their (and our) history and harm or kill them, Spielman’s work made me intensely proud of the Judeo-Christian heritage of the West, a heritage that I support in each daily Mass, in every rosary I pray, and in every Israel bond I purchase.
I trust that I am not alone, and it is encouraging to read that Spielman himself thinks so because, unlike the American media which views Israel as an aggressor in its defensive actions against Hamas terrorists or other belligerents, “average Americans, the ones whose voices you don’t hear chanting on the news, have a clear moral sense of right and wrong, and appreciate and support Israel” (215).