The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro
Thu, 6 Feb 2025
Watch the entire series, “Foundation of the West,” exclusively on DW+: dailywire.com/foundationsofthewest In this episode, Ben Shapiro and our host explore the profound impact Jerusalem has had on shaping Western civilization, particularly in bridging the gap between God and man. This is just the beginning! The full five-part docuseries, along with exclusive bonus content, is available on Daily Wire Plus. Join our host and esteemed colleagues as they travel through the historic cities of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, reflecting on their lasting influence on Western ideals. The series has already made waves, with Episode III: Christ, Center of the World being nominated for Best Documentary at the 32nd Annual Movieguide Faith & Values Awards Gala. This nomination highlights content that inspires and offers hope to society, a central aim of this series. Explore Foundations of the West on Daily Wire Plus and discover the profound journey that shaped the principles of Western culture. Watch now at dailywire.com/foundationsofthewest
Last year, Daily Wire Plus and I released a fantastic series on the origins of Western culture entitled Foundations of the West. The series had a tremendously positive impact. Because of this, the Daily Wire and I have decided to share the first episode with you free of charge. You're about to watch episode one.
In it, Ben Shapiro and I discuss the lasting impact Jerusalem has made on Western culture, bridging the gap between man and God. The rest of the five-part docuseries is available exclusively on Daily Wire+. There you'll find all episodes, as well as additional bonus content. I traveled alongside my esteemed colleagues...
through the ancient cities of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, cities that have shaped Western culture. I invite you to watch them. My hope is that when you do so, you learn something deep and profound as I did about our Western ideals. It was a very worthwhile journey. On to a celebratory note.
I'm pleased to announce that episode three of this series, Christ, Center of the World, with my good friend Jonathan Paggio, has been nominated for Best Documentary at the 32nd Annual Movie Guide Faith and Values Awards Gala. I'm told that the nominating committee pays special attention to content that inspires and gives hope to our society at large.
That's exactly what we aim to do with this series, and to be recognized for that is a great honor, for which I and the entire Daily Wire team are truly thankful. You can watch the entire series on dailywire.com slash Foundations of the West. Give it a go. It might propel you to greater adventure. Thank you for your time, attention, and your continued support of my work and of Daily Wire Plus.
Western civilization rests on three mighty pillars, Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. Jerusalem offered a morality based in the spiritual world. Athens concentrated more particularly on the logos revealed in the material domain. Rome offered the advantages and perils of power, empire, and reach. I'm joined on the first part of my journey by the redoubtable Ben Shapiro.
We discuss the origins of the conflict between, and eventual integration of, the spiritual with the scientific and material. The history of Western civilization begins in Jerusalem. Hmm. That's the cemetery there, eh?
This is Mount of Olives.
That's the Mount of Olives. Oh, wow, this is amazing.
Yeah.
We're in Jerusalem because the Jews converged on the idea that the central reality of the world was something like an animating spirit. Where's the Garden of Gethsemane?
That's here. Where the church is. Yeah, this whole area is the Gardens of Gethsemane. Jerusalem is the birthplace of Western civilization. It's the first place where people seriously start to think in a communal way about the idea that there is a set of godly values that rest above human authority.
There's probably no difference between the emergence of monotheism and the spread of civilization. You know, because people might say, well, why is it so necessary that there is a God? The answer to that is because there has to be a central animating spirit. And then you might ask is, well, why does there have to be one God?
And the answer is because you don't have unity without worshiping the same God. You have to be doing the same thing. You have to be possessed by the same spirit. The eternal Jewish question is, what is the proper nature of that central animating spirit? And the Bible is actually an answer to that question.
In order to truly understand the modern-day conflict in the Middle East, this is a great view, because what you see is that everything is right on top of each other. And so when you look across the landscape, you can see the Temple Mount up and to the left, and then you move toward the Mount of Olives, and you're looking at Jewish graves going back centuries, and then you move a little bit
to your right and you're going to see an Arab village that used to be a Jewish village. They have very small pockets of places where Jews are living protected by barbed wire. Everything is right on top of each other. And so whenever people suggest, well, you know, just a quick population separation and you're done. It's not quite that simple.
All the geography here is high resolution. Everything is marked. Everything is half territory and half map. Everything. This is no wonder there's so much conflict.
When you say high resolution, it's also just, everything is just geographically incredibly close together. When people say East Jerusalem, they mean like this, is that. Right. Like, here's the old city, and here's David, and that's East Jerusalem.
Yeah, well, it's kind of reminiscent of Manhattan that way.
Exactly. except here everything's 3,000 years old.
Yeah, right, right. It's crazy.
You don't realize how new America and Western civilization is in the Anglo-American history is so new compared to biblical history. It's amazing.
It's even true of European history. Most of the places we think of as old in Europe are like 300 years old. Right, exactly. 500 years old.
In America, the entire history of the country, it's like, oh, my gosh, I visited Plymouth Rock. Wow, that's 400 years old. Like, well, over here that's like a house that somebody built five seconds ago.
Right, right, right.
They did map out the biblical road that the fathers in the Bible travel, like where Abraham came and he's like wandered down in this direction, ended up up there with the sacrifice of Isaac. I took Jordan Peterson to the Temple Mount because it's perceived as the foundation stone for the building of the world, according to Jewish theology.
So, now we're going to make the walkthrough.
So we're now at the holiest site on Earth for Jews. The third holiest site for Muslims is al-Aqsa, which is this mosque right here. This is certainly the most contentious area on planet Earth.
So if you go back about 3,000 years, the Temple Mount is created by flattening part of the top of the mountain and then building retaining walls and filling all of that with dirt, which is how you end up with this about three-football-field-size giant area. And that's where the original first temple stood. It was destroyed in 576 BCE.
And then it was rebuilt about 70 years later, and that stands for about half a millennium. And then that is destroyed in 70 CE. Approximately a thousand years later or so, the Dome of the Rock is built directly on top of where the Holy of Holies would have been and where the foundation stone is located. This is where Muslims believe that Muhammad ascended to heaven in his dream.
He used this rock as sort of the launching off point, ascending to heaven, and that foundation stone is visible. You can walk into the Dome of the Rock and you can actually see that. In sort of Jewish theology, the foundation stone is the idea that God used this stone as the basis for all creation. It's called in Latin the Axis Mundi.
The idea that there is a spiritual center to the world, that's what we mean when we say this is the foundation stone. So there are a couple of ideas that this place is the actual mountain on which Abraham is about to sacrifice Isaac, which of course is sort of a seminal point in the Bible. Also Jacob's Ladder.
Jacob lies down, he puts his head on the stone, where he has the dream about the angels going up and down the ladder. There is an idea in Jewish commentary and Christian commentary as well that this is the location of that.
There's a dispute here about what should sit at the center of the world, and the world in this situation is in some real way a map that's laid on the territory. And a map is a conceptual device that people use to orient themselves as they move forward. a map has to have a center point to allow for orientation. And there's dispute about what the center point would be.
I guess it's partly because everybody has to share the same map in order to get along in the same territory. And so you have different groups of people will insist upon a different mapping structure. And if two groups that are isolated come together, they have different maps. And all of this is a dispute about what the center point of the map is going to be.
So I was mentioning to Ben, you see the dome here is made of gold. and symbolically gold is associated with the sun and the dome is the, you could think about it as the sun rising in the morning and one of the reasons that the sun rising in the morning would be at the center point of the map is because the axiom that orients the map is something like
The primacy of consciousness, to worship the primacy of consciousness and to have that consciousness emerge on the border between darkness and light is proper symbolically because consciousness actually emerges at the border between order and chaos. the foundation stone is here, the Holy of Holies was here, the place where Jacob Gladys stretched up to heaven, that's all the same idea, right?
That's all the same center axis of the world, right? Around which everything rotates and which orients us toward... The axis money points to the North Star, so that gives you orientation at night, right? Because you can look up and you can see a fixed point in heaven, which is the North Star, and you can orient yourself completely in the world as a consequence of that.
What does it mean for consciousness to be primary? Well, you can't have something without there being awareness of it. Even when we talk about our cosmological models extending back 14 billion years, we say there was a big bang. And what we say, sotto voce, right, in a soft voice is, if someone was there, this is what they would have seen. But of course, there was no one there.
The reality itself presumes an observer, an experiencer, and consciousness is that experiencer, and we don't know its nature. It's an irreducible mystery. Now, the nature of that consciousness in the Judeo-Christian tradition is conceptualized and symbolized as the word, right? It's this process that brings ordered existence out of the void, the chaotic void, into clarity.
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This is about as close as we'll get on this particular side to the Dome of the Rock. This was the second temple platform. I mean, this was like, it's slightly elevated probably over time because it's been 2,000 years. But then they built the dome directly on top of it. Here's a supervisor from the walk coming over. I'm checking this out for what purposes? To make sure that I'm not praying.
I pray before every word.
Does that count? As long as it's in your head, it's probably okay. If I were to whip out a sitter right now, a prayer book, and start saying psalms, it would be a problem. I assume this is why you wanted me to have the hat on for this part of the journey. So Jordan and I go up to the Temple Mount and we're walking around. That's literally all we are doing.
We're walking the perimeter of the Temple Mount under guard because that's what you do according to the law. You're not allowed to carry up, if you're a Jew or a Christian, any religious items. If you're a Muslim, you can do whatever you want. You're not allowed to pray up there openly if you're a Jew or if you're a Christian. If you're a Muslim, you can do whatever you want.
The simple fact that Jordan and I are walking around up there gets caught on tape and people who are, I would say, malicious in intent decide that they are going to characterize this as Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro invade the Temple Mount.
People are literally paid to be up there pretty much every day, ready to jump on any incident that they can turn into some sort of narrative about predations on Islamic rights up there, which is an absurdity. The only people who actually have the full rights of movement and prayer on the Temple Mount on a daily basis are Muslims. This is the origin of Western civilization.
If you believe that it's Jerusalem and Athens, which is sort of the typical structure that people use to discuss, then this is the center of Jerusalem. This is the Axis Mundi, and we're walking through it right now. You're walking through not just history, but the foundation for the entire modern world.
Western civilization, traditionally speaking, has been thought of as the marriage of Jerusalem and Athens. Jerusalem is the foundation of a godly morality. Human beings who are bound by a higher power in an understandable universe where they can discover God through the process of reason and revelation.
And then that has to be balanced with Athens, which is traditionally seen as human rationality and human reason. So if the idea is revelation is religion and reason is... science, then essentially the marriage of those two things is Western civilization.
You know that Athens and Jerusalem idea as the twin pillars, they're not exactly twin pillars. They're one pillar stacked on top of the other. Because the Jerusalem part of it is the narrative that's been coming down from the top. And the Athenian part of it is the realization of the logos of the material structure that's rising from the bottom. And Western civilization meets right in the middle.
And partly what we're trying to puzzle out right now really in our culture is the further details of how the narrative and the material interpenetrate. And you see that here because this place is a place where the narrative and the material are fighting to interpenetrate and it's multiple narratives competing to map the underlying territory.
there's too many potential stories in the material substructure. Right, that's the plethora of facts. Right. Right, so you need an orienting structure that descends from above to extract out the proper facts from the material. Right. And that's the union of Jerusalem and Athens. That makes perfect sense. Yeah, well, and that's all converged, all the cognitive science is converging on that.
Revelation, I would say.
When people sort of mock faith, which is what they try to say that Jerusalem is, and Jerusalem is really sort of, I would say, informed faith, meaning that it's not sort of principles that are taken from nowhere, but you do need the ratification of a revelatory structure in order to just say these are things that are inarguable.
The scientific insistence that you could have a narrative-free encounter with the facts and orient yourself is simply not true.
And then every time they try to pull away from narrative, the narrative just
Well, if you destabilize, what happens is if you destabilize a fundamental, differentiated, functional narrative and destroy it, it gets replaced with a low resolution, catastrophically oversimplified narrative that's just devastating. That would be what happened as a consequence of the death of God. Right. Well, the differentiated, historically instantiated, unifying narrative collapsed
And then what happened? Power. Yeah, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. One pixel stories. Everything's power.
Tell me about the wall. This is all exterior wall. That is, you can see by the side of the rock, that it's Ottoman era, right? It's smaller stones. The whole city's built out of this rock. Jerusalem stone, yeah. It's Jerusalem stone.
Yeah. That's the Jerusalem stone. And there must be strict building codes in Jerusalem. Everything has to be made up. Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, so it gives it a homogeny. Yeah, it's really nice to see that, you know. It makes it feel like a place instead of this. Just hodgepodge. Yeah, which is every modern city now. Exactly.
It's so pathetic. No, the geography here is great. It's a gorgeous city. It's beautiful. One of the coolest things about walking through Jerusalem is that you can see the progress over time. It's almost like walking forward through time.
You start off on the Temple Mount, which is fully 3,000 years old, and then you walk through the Old City of Jerusalem, which is somewhere between 1,000 and 500 years old, and then you walk directly into the Mele Mal, which is about 20 years old. They all use the same basic building material.
There's building restrictions in Jerusalem that you have to build out of Jerusalem stones, that there's sort of architectural similarity and continuity of aesthetics. And more American cities should do this. I mean, one of the big problems in American architecture is that it's just basically a hodgepodge of whatever people felt like that day.
But there is nothing worse than when you see an old Gothic cathedral, and then right next door somebody's built like a modern monstrosity. And there is nothing, I think, more beautiful than walking through a city that recognizes its past while simultaneously reaching for the future. Jordan and I walked past this model of the old city of Jerusalem, and you can see what it looked like in the time.
And all of Jerusalem is built around this idea that the ancients and the modern are all of one piece.
So this is an attempt to control the site. Jerusalem's filled with the gas. You're fulfilling one of the rules there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I see the cap.
The cats, by the way, are a British thing.
The British brought in the cats to kill all the snakes. They killed all the snakes. The cats killed the snakes? The cats killed the snakes. But they proceeded to take over.
Apparently.
That's what I was told the other day. Cats are quite something.
And then they took over the entire area, especially because Orthodox Jews, they have real restrictions on spaying and neutering. So the cats are all over the city.
There's cats everywhere in Turkey, too. Oh, really? There's cats everywhere in Greece, too.
Cats everywhere. Probably every place, sounds like every place the British set foot, right? Brought with them their cats. Yeah, exactly.
In the Jewish community, you can have a lot of free-feeling conversations about God and then border on heresy and you're basically okay. Mainly because the skin in the game elements of religion, which is here's a bunch of things you do to demonstrate you're part of the... Yeah.
If you're doing all that stuff, then whatever doctrinal issues you have, you've already proved that's the skin in the game. Right, right, right.
Because Christianity removes a lot of the...
The British in the game had rituals, right? So now the doctrine is the rituals. You better abide by the doctrine.
Absolutely. Well, you see that extending itself was particularly in Protestantism, where everything's become propositionalized.
Exactly. You also see it in any area that becomes completely propositional. you see an inability to tolerate diversity of thought at all. And that's why the objections to nationalism, which is like, well, you know... Yeah, that's a nice general principle.
So what that would mean is in the absence of a shared drama, which would be embodied, then you can't tolerate propositional deviance.
Right, exactly. What destroys the ability to have propositional conversation is a feeling of bad faith. The reason you're doing this is to avoid the responsibility. The reason that you're saying this is because you want to destroy the system.
It also might be that if we differ propositionally, we start to differ in terms of our actions so much that we can't inhabit the same space. Exactly. And that would always be the unspoken issue. It's like, well, if you disagree with me on this, what else do you disagree with me about? And how do we know that's commensurate with living together?
Exactly. So I was thinking that, you know, what's kind of fascinating is that if you see Judaism as an attempt to concretize the spiritual, this is why everything is focused on minutia and legalistic minutia. So, for example, they'll take a commandment. We'll take a commandment, like, in Hebrew, you're supposed to love your brother as yourself.
And we'll say, okay, what this means is when your brother is poor, you have to give him some money. It means that when you are, it means that when somebody dies, you have to visit a house of mourning. It concretizes into specific commandments.
Yeah. Well, that's good because that also means you know when you're being good.
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Jordan and I are at the Shrine of the Book. This is where you'll find the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were the most ancient versions of the biblical text discovered in 1947. So we're going to look at some texts that are well over 2,000 years old that contain direct quotations from the Bible that we all know. Well, that was quite the discovery. Right, exactly.
So this is straight from the Book of Isaiah. One day there's a little Arab kid who's throwing rocks. He throws a rock into a cave and hears a shattering noise and he runs in there and there are just these urns. These urns are filled with 2,000-year-old script. And these scrolls show continuity of biblical text because they're 200 B.C. and they contain... verbatim phraseology from the Bible.
And so the idea that the Bible is completely sort of a made-up construct and it's not a preservation of older material is debunked by some of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
People find it surprising that the oral traditions are conserved and that the texts are conserved, but the alternative is even more hard to believe, which is that, like, scattered small human populations are stunningly creative enough to modify the texts, and they're not. You know, creative people are actually very rare.
And so there are periods of time in the Egyptian dynasties where the archaeological record shows no technological transformation whatsoever for 1,000 years. And Egypt was extremely dynamic by archaic standards. And so the truth of the matter, too, is that the older a story is, the more likely it is to be way older than that.
So, because like in a tribal society, the rule in a tribal society is nothing changes for 50,000 years. Right.
Oh, yeah, yeah, I mean, for sure. The idea that people have been writing down the Bible for thousands of years and, you know, hundreds of years before Christ at the very least, that obviously is true, and that's true from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Those are the oldest extant remnants, but that doesn't mean that it was made up in that generation.
I mean, the presumption is that hundreds of years beforehand people were doing that as well. the old city of Jerusalem. It's old, but it's not that old. So some of it's Ottoman era, some of it is before. But 2,000 years old in Jerusalem is like kind of old. Then there's like the really old stuff, which is what we're about to see at City of David, which is fully 3,300 years old.
For hundreds of years, thousands of years, people saw in the Bible this historical document.
One of the things that's really amazing about looking at all the archaeological digs in Jerusalem and seeing as piece by piece they verify details in the Bible is that as they uncover pieces of that historical truth, not only does it reunify you with the history, but it also reunifies you with the idea that things that are ancient in origin and have tended to stand the test of time might be kind of valuable.
And so you dispense with the importance of that sort of stuff at your own peril. The City of David is located just below what is now traditionally known as the Old City of Jerusalem. The City of David is the original location of Jerusalem, actually. Archaeologists think that this site is the Palace of King David.
My name is Zev Orenstein, and I'm the Director of International Affairs here at the City of David, which is the biblical site of ancient Jerusalem, the place where Jerusalem began. 2005, all this is underground. One morning, an archaeologist by the name of Eilat Mazar, she comes into our visitor center, says, you need to move your offices. We ask her why.
She says, beneath your feet, you'll find the palace of King Deid. What do you do with that, right? So, you know, we asked her why. So she shows us something. It's in the Israel Museum today, found 60 years ago. You have over here, Royal Phoenician capital. So if you look at these columns over here, imagine a column. This is sitting on top of the column.
This proves that where we're standing is the location of King David's palace. What's the connection? In 2 Samuel 5, verse 11, it says, King Hiram of Tyre sent envoys to David with cedar logs, carpenters, and stonemasons, and they built a palace for David. The Phoenicians are the ones who the Bible says built David's palace. We find here the royal Phoenician capital. Why?
Well, because the Phoenicians were the ones who built David's palace. They start to dig. They find, to the north, to the east, walls about eight meters thick. It's clear there's a massive structure here. The question is, from what time period? They find pottery and other organic material at the base of the walls that Dr. Mazar dates to 3,000 years ago, to the time of David.
Other people date it to about 100 years after David. So the debate is not what this area was. This was the original Capitol Hill, the royal government viewing center of the Davidic dynasty. And the other thing that we have over here is two clay seals, right?
In ancient times, before you had encryption and encoding and whatever, you'd write your letter, then you would roll it up, tie it up, and before you'd hand it to the messenger, you'd take your ring, stick it into the clay, and now on your ring, and now on the clay is your name and the son of your father's name. She's digging here, and she finds two seals just like this one.
This is what Hebrew used to look like. And on the seals, there are names. Two of the four ministers that made up the security cabinet of King Tzedekiah, the last king of the Davidic dynasty, right before the Babylonian destruction. I mean, these are real people.
Their seals were found in the royal government center of the Davidic dynasty, where you would expect the ministers of the king to be, right? Not simply as a matter of faith, but as a matter of fact. And a few meters away from here, the same Dr. Mazar finds the seal of King Hezekiah and of the prophet Isaiah. So, I mean, you asked before, how legitimate is this?
I mean, the seals here are incontrovertible. Was King David here, ruling here, or his grandson? I can't tell you. The Davidic dynasty was ruling from here. This is where it was, not the old city.
Bathsheba was probably taking it.
So think about it. Bathsheba, it says, what happened to Bathsheba? Right? It says one night the AC is not working in the palace. He goes out into the balcony and he looks down into the city. What does he see? He sees a woman bathing on the roof. How is it possible for him to see someone bathing on the roof unless he's at the top of the city.
Now he can look down when you're in the place where the, right. So think about it. When you're in the place where the Bible happened, the words of the Bible come to life.
You understand the story of David and Bathsheba very clearly when you look at the geography. You have David looking out from his palace, and he sees onto the roof of Uriah, and Bathsheba is bathing up there. He sins with Bathsheba, and then the prophet Nathan comes and chastises and tells him that he's done a grave evil and a grave wrong, and he's forced to atone for that wrong.
You can see the geography there, right? Because the palace is sort of on top of a hill, and there's a valley, and then on the other side of the valley is Silwan. So presumably, Bathsheba's house would have been somewhere in Silwan.
If there's a window right there, this is where David is looking out and seeing Bathsheba bathing naked on the roof, which is always... If you know that the king is sitting up there with his window, you know, bathing on the roof seems like a risky proposition, you know? Here you start to see the beginnings of the idea of a constitutional monarchy. So there are even hints of this in Deuteronomy.
One of the laws in Deuteronomy is that the king is supposed to carry around his own Sefer Torah. He's subject to the law. The king is not above the law. So Judaism is very clear about that, and so is Christianity. And henceforth, the idea of limitations on absolute government are part and parcel of the whole system.
One of the things that to me lends historical credence to those sorts of stories is that it doesn't exactly show David in a positive light. So what kind of propaganda is that? Exactly.
That's definitely one of the things in favor of biblical narrative is that when you show all the warts, it suggests that you're not propagandizing.
Yeah, definitely, definitely. And that happens a lot.
That's the entire Exodus story, right? The idea is that you have an absolute monarch in Pharaoh, and he is a god, and so everything he says goes. And then people are brought forth from slavery to freedom, but the freedom requires subjugation to God, right? You're still a servant, but you're not a servant of a person anymore. Now you're servants of an ideal. You're servants of a higher power.
And that means inherently limiting the power of human beings. Looks like this is a massive cistern.
So what you see here is an ancient cistern. You can see the plaster here along this wall to keep the water in.
So people would have carved this out of the rock?
Yeah, sure. One of the challenges that this still has is water scarcity.
And so here's how you'd store water. Now, keep in mind, if we're coming from next to the palace, this is not a private person's cistern. This, you can see, is a massive cistern. So the cistern that archaeologists believe could have been the cistern where Jeremiah was thrown into a pit. Jeremiah was perceived at that time to be a traitor.
He had said that if the people don't change their ways, Jerusalem is going to be destroyed. But he was a prophet of doom. Nobody wanted to hear what he had to say. And the advisors of King Zedekiah got tired of hearing this guy go around calling for the surrender of the city. And so they throw him down into a pit. Now, can I tell you for sure Jeremiah's thrown into this pit? I can't tell you that.
Right? And if not this pit, one near here like this one. But it says what happens?
All pits are the same. Pretty much.
If you're thrown into them. So, but here you say, so what's the plan? He's going to drown, right? It's a cistern. But the Bible makes it clear. There's no water. There's mud. And he's sinking into the mud until a servant of the king goes before Zedekiah and he says, you might not like what Jeremiah is saying.
it's not him who said it it's a prophet it's a man of god right the words are god's words you can't do this to jeremiah and the king says all right you're right go take 30 people with you and pull jeremiah up out of the pit and then it goes on to say how he you know goes on it keeps true to his message right about what's going to happen to jerusalem right but this is where
the back to the last days of Jerusalem before the Babylonians destroy it. You have Jeremiah here sinking into the mud, hearing the destruction, the impending destruction up above. This is where it's playing out. We take for granted today the ability to be critical of our leadership, to hold our leaders accountable.
But going back thousands of years, there was a position in biblical times, that of the prophet, whose role was to go to the highest levels of society and to hold those leaders accountable and let them know that there are consequences for falling short. There are consequences for making poor decisions, unethical decisions.
Both the Judaic side of government and the Greek side of government are predicated on the idea that there are limitations to what government can do. You can make the case that the biblically-based system is more of a limited monarchy, where the powers of the king are fairly limited. but the kingship is derived not from the people.
And the Greek system is that authority is derived from the people and is almost unlimited. When Aristotle talks about how there are three types of governments and all have the capacity to devolve into tyranny, that's what he's talking about. You can have a benevolent monarch, which is more like the biblical system, but even the Bible is pretty divided over whether kings are good or necessary.
Samuel gives a whole speech before the appointment of King Saul about you guys are really gonna hate this king thing. You probably shouldn't do it. And people are like, well, no, we want it anyway. And God says, okay, fine. If they want it, they're gonna get it.
Probably gonna get it good and hard, but that's the... Every single day here in the city of David, we're unearthing antiquities that show not simply as a matter of faith, but as a matter of fact, Jerusalem's biblical heritage coming to life. We are standing right now in the Givati parking lot excavation. Now, you might wonder, why would you name an archaeological excavation after a parking lot?
Not too long ago, there was actually a parking lot here. And one day we said, we're going to build our visitor center here. And the Israel Antiquities Authority said, well, hold on. Before you build anything, we need to make sure there's nothing exciting beneath your feet. They come with ground penetrating radar. They scan down and they find 10 layers of ancient Jerusalem civilization.
This is one of the largest active excavations going on in Jerusalem today, going back some 2,700 years, all the way up to modern times, one layer built atop the next.
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This goes down several stories as they uncover additional layers of history over the course of 3,000 years. We were just told up there that this above our heads would have been a Roman mansion, actually.
So we're about to enter into a compound that goes back about 2,600 years. And the Bible talks about how in Jerusalem you had all these big structures here that when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BCE, they burned all these structures to the ground along with the temple. And if you come in here, you'll see something incredible.
In the walls, literally, we have remnants of the fire, of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. That is ash. That is ash from 2,500 years ago, from the actual fires when the Babylonians burned Jerusalem. That's what you're holding in your hand right now.
One of the things that's so interesting about this archaeological dig is that People are using the techniques of scientific archaeology to revitalize the interpretive narrative. Because you see the truth of the story revealed in artifact, which is so cool. You were commenting earlier that people have lost faith in Jerusalem, let's say, and are starting to lose faith in Athens too.
Maybe because one cannot exist without the other, not in the West. The fact that we had to turn to the object to revitalize the narrative at this time, well, it makes a certain amount of sense conceptually, but it's also quite a striking phenomenon. So yes, this was real. These things happened. whatever real means in a context like that.
It's also amazing because the suffering which, you know, Jews commemorate the destruction of Jerusalem till this day, you know, the suffering which is temporary and then you see, you know, there's a famous story in the Talmud about rabbis visiting the
a place where they're overlooking the Temple Mount, and they see all the destruction, and there are three rabbis, and two of them are crying, and one, Rabbi Akiva, is laughing, and they ask him, why are you laughing? And he says, well, you know, it says in the prophets that it's going to be rubble, and there are going to be foxes wandering on the holiest places.
And he says, I'm seeing that happen right now, which means that the other part is going to come true. And one of the things about being here in the modern age is that you get to see the destruction in the rearview mirror and then you get to, you know, you look almost straight up and you can see the rebuilding of Jerusalem. It's an amazing, amazing thing.
Yeah, well, I mean, one of the things that does keep you going through catastrophe is the faith that something can be rebuilt from the rubble.
587 BCE is the year that the Babylonians invade Israel and they destroy the first temple. And you would imagine that this would have been the end of Judaism and therefore no Christianity and no further Western civilization, right? Typically in the olden days, when a civilization was destroyed and its chief city burned to the ground, They kind of dissipate into history.
You never hear of them again. That's not what happens here. Judaism exists in exile for thousands of years, that Judaism can survive that and then revivify itself, not once but twice. And then they come back to the land of Israel in 1948 and reestablish a thriving state. I mean, it's an unbelievable story of heroic perseverance, but also of the presence of God in history.
This pilgrimage road is the road that hundreds of thousands of people would use every single year, several times a year, in order to bring their sacrifices to the Temple Mount. It's in pretty good condition.
It is, yeah. So we're standing on the pilgrimage road. We're about halfway up. It's about a half mile long, right? And what we have here is this is the road that 2,000 years ago that our ancestors, when they would have first gone to the Pool of Siloam, cleansed before making their way up the half-mile journey along the pilgrimage road up to the temple on the Temple Mount.
These are the original flagstones from 2,000 years ago. Not stones that look like these. These are the original stones. When they first began excavating the pilgrimage road, they found that there were potholes. They said, okay, well, potholes today, potholes 2,000 years ago. But then they found another one and another one and another one, evenly spaced, always in the same spot.
And someone was deliberately breaking open the pilgrimage road. And the question is why? So they looked at the writings of the historian Josephus, and Josephus says in the year 70, the Romans are destroying Jerusalem. The temple atop the Temple Mount inflames. The last Jews of Jerusalem seek refuge from the Romans where? In the drainage channel.
beneath the pilgrimage road, the ancient sewer system. Archaeologists find whole cooking pots, meaning the people who were down there were there for days, weeks, months, until the Romans find them all and kill them all. Now, the Romans were so proud of their conquest over Jerusalem that they meant to commemorate a coin.
Here's the Roman Emperor Vespasian, and on the coin you have a Roman legionnaire towering above, a Jewish woman on her knees crying. On the coin it says, Judea capta. Judea has been captured. And here you have the Arch of Titus in Rome. On the arch you have the temple treasures that were being marched out of Jerusalem and into Rome.
Now, along this road, along the pilgrimage road here, archaeologists find hundreds, if not thousands, of these small bronze coins dating back to the period from 66 to 70, the period known as the Great Revolt, the Great Jewish Revolt for freedom against the Roman occupation. And scholars have long wondered, why are they minting these coins? Because at that time, the coins were worthless.
They had no monetary value. And if they really wanted to fight the Romans, what should they have used the metal for? To make weapons. Why are they wasting it on a worthless currency? I want to show you one such coin. This coin here is 2,000 years old. Take a look at this here. 2,000 years old. And that coin... It says, in ancient Hebrew writing, for the freedom of Zion.
Zion, of course, is another name for Jerusalem. That coin represents a hope, a wish, a dream, and a prayer that one day the Jewish people will return to Jerusalem as sovereign. The words on that coin, for a free Jerusalem, they've come true. It took a little bit longer than they thought it would, but that hope, that wish, that dream, and that prayer is coming true before our eyes.
And there is a free Jerusalem today for people of all faiths and backgrounds. This is not just another piece of history. It's a continuation of a story that's been going on for thousands of years. The people who will walk this road in the future, it's their ancestors who walked on it 2,000 years ago, who worshiped the same God, had the same language, customs, traditions, and festivals. It's alive.
It's real. And we're bringing it back here in this excavation.
One of the things that's really cool about the pilgrimage road is that for Christians, there is 100% certainty this is where Jesus walked. There may be a lot of questions about where Jesus was at different times in the Bible. There's no question that Jesus walked the pilgrimage road because all the Jews did. There's a rock there where speakers would stand and they'd make political statements.
Probably Jesus was the guy on the side yelling at people, stop worrying so much about the specifics of your sacrifice and start worrying about your closeness with God. And everybody's probably looking at Jesus and like, who's that in that job? Like, nothing will come of him. They move on with their day.
a 2,000-year-old ancient soapbox, the only one of its kind found in Jerusalem. And you can imagine when those millions of pilgrims are going up to the temple, you can imagine the likes of whom 2,000 years ago would get up here and preach a religious message, a political message, an ethical message. This is where it's happening, with the shops and stalls all along the way.
This is the biblical superhighway, the beating heart of Jerusalem, 2,000 years ago.
Speaker's Corner.
Speaker's Corner, the original Hyde Park, right? Mm-hmm. for the Jewish people, for early Christianity. This is where the heritage, the values that have shaped Western civilization in many respects, playing out right where we're standing right here. It's hard to see a soapbox without wanting to climb it.
Don't you think? We've got to get some protesters over here.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's not going to work exactly. That's the thing about Jerusalem is that when stuff gets destroyed, it doesn't get fully destroyed. It just gets kind of built on top of, which is the story of civilization in a lot of ways, right? We like to pretend that when we level things, they're completely leveled. Nothing is completely leveled. It's mostly leveled.
No matter how hard the communists try, you mean, to obliterate the past and build the new man.
That's also the nature of human beings. We don't really want to clear all the debris. You've got to have something to build on.
This is that idea of a foundation stone too, is that if our perception is hierarchical, which seems to be the case, you either have a foundation stone or you have Fragmentation. Those are the only options. Right. And we know what the psychological consequences of fragmentation are. There's two. Anxiety, because it marks fragmentation. Like anxiety occurs when you have too many pathways forward.
And hopelessness. And the reason you get hopeless is because if you don't know where you're going, No positive emotion can mark out the path, because positive emotion specifies movement forward on a path. And so if there's no hierarchy that unites, you get fragmentation. And if you get fragmentation, you get anxiety and hopelessness. And that's that. There's no getting around that.
That's what those systems are there to mark. And so that's why the monotheistic impulse is so interesting, because it's an impulse to... unify everything, and to make it hierarchical in the most fundamental sense, right? It's like, well, does it hit a pinnacle?
And the answer is, well, to the degree that it's hierarchical, effectively, then it hits a pinnacle, and then the question is, well, what should, this is the question, right? What should be at the pinnacle, or what should be the base? Those are two different metaphors. So part of what the biblical corpus is trying to do is to take characterizations of the
the positive patriarchal animating spirit, that's a good way of thinking about it, multiple characterizations of that spirit, and then to make this insistence by aggregating the books that all of those manifestations of those somewhat... Discriminable spirits are manifestations of the same central thing. Right.
So you could think that the central animating spirit for Noah is the intuition that calls you to batten down the hatches when, if you're wise, when a time of crisis is coming. So that's a spirit that might seize you. It might seize multiple people at the same time, and it's a spirit you could attend to and allow to inhabit you or not.
And then in Abraham, God is the spirit that calls Abraham out of his hyper-security and wealth, in some sense, into adventure. Right. And then the juxtaposition of those stories, that's metonymy, the juxtaposition of those stories implies that spirit A and spirit B are in some sense manifestations.
Length, yeah.
So the Bible is doing that continually. And it's not... propositional, it's not attempting to explain God as like a meta-object in some sense, or an object in the world. It's an animating spirit. It's a pattern of perception and action, and not the pattern of the thing that's being perceived in the object. It's the pattern of perception itself.
And so then when you have the union of Athens and Jerusalem in some sense, you say, well, fair enough. God is the pattern of perception and not the object, but the juxtaposition would say, the pattern of perception is seeing a reflection in the object that's similar to the pattern of perception itself. And that would be something like the logos.
The logos of nature and the logos of the spirit unite. And that's Western civilization. Modern people often ask themselves, why do I have to study history? Well, you're a historical being. You need to know who you are and where you came from and what you stand on, why you think the things you think, what is the appropriate manner to live. Those aren't optional questions.
Well, they are because you can fail to answer all of them, but then you live in a chaotic, desolate, nihilistic wasteland of anxiety and hopelessness. The alternative is to place yourself in the proper tradition. And you have to understand what proper tradition is, and part of that understanding is to start to grapple with the complexities and realities of those traditions.
If Jerusalem is the idea of man meeting God, and this is where Revelation becomes reality, then the question becomes, how does man deal with Revelation? How do we actually work in a world in which values are discoverable, in which they're important? And that requires that reason come to the fore and reason become a paramount concern for human beings.
How does man respond to a universe that is knowable? What kind of resources can human beings bring to a mysterious but knowable universe? That other half, that rational component, is really cultivated to the utmost in Greece. Well, you might ask, what's wrong with being a populist? If the people want it, then it must be good. But that obviously is not true. Yeah, you just look at Twitter. Right.
And I'm not saying slavery isn't wrong. The issue is, why is it wrong?
Is it wrong because people voted it so?
Well, right. No, it's exactly that. It's not that at all.
We stop by the shrine of the book. We find it astonishing that texts are preserved for this long or that ideas are preserved for this long. But it's sort of the natural state of things.
We think that creative innovation is the standard mode of human being, and that's just not true.
Thank you.
Thank you.