On a Friday night in Jerusalem in 2007, David Be’eri recited the prayers welcoming Shabbat at the Western Wall and then, along with two colleagues, headed toward his next stop. Be’eri had been invited to the wedding of a local Arab family and dropped in to congratulate the happy couple before walking home to have Shabbat dinner with his wife and children. One of the Arab guests at the wedding celebration, a man named Wahil, happened to work for Be’eri, and noticed his boss walk through the door. He then noticed a man walk in after Be’eri, raise a butcher’s knife, and attempt to stab Be’eri from behind. Wahil pushed Be’eri away from the blade and tackled the assailant.
This was no random crime. Be’eri had founded an archaeological foundation overseeing the most historically significant digs to take place in the area in a century. The discoveries made by Be’eri’s team have reinforced some prevailing historical assumptions and challenged others, but above all else, they have proved without a shadow of a doubt the 3,000-year-old connection between the Land of Israel and the Jewish people. The fact that this was happening in the 21st century, with cameras and newsreels documenting all of it contemporaneously, meant that almost as soon as a discovery was made (and authenticated), it became part of the historical record. Forget facts on the ground, these were facts in the ground.
And that made David Be’eri a wanted man in the eyes of Palestinian extremists.
The history, the archaeology, and the derring-do behind the excavation of Ir David—the City of David—are all told with verve by Doron Spielman in his new book, When the Stones Speak.1 It is, in part, a memoir. Spielman served for two decades as vice president of the City of David Foundation, the organization founded and led by Be’eri. Spielman witnessed many of the discoveries firsthand, and his enthusiasm for the project and his admiration for Be’eri are present on nearly every page of When the Stones Speak. Though Be’eri is a 72-year-old mustachioed sabra, one can’t help but picture Nicolas Cage or Harrison Ford in his place throughout this book, as he leads teams of curious Israelis single file through dank tunnels with no idea where they will end up or how easy it will be to get back out.
Spielman’s experience has prepared him for the task of answering a question that is much more complicated than it might seem: Just what, exactly, is the City of David?
The simple answer is that it is a place. In 1867, Queen Victoria dispatched the adventurer Charles Warren to go digging around Jerusalem. Warren and his team eventually discovered a spring. It turned out to be a water channel used by King David that is mentioned in the Bible but had never been found. The location of the channel led to a revelation: David’s original city was located outside the walls of what we call the Old City of Jerusalem. Warren had discovered the actual seat of the biblical king.
“Twenty-three excavations over the past one hundred years have confirmed that Captain Charles Warren was right: Over the course of thousands of years, the inhabitants of Jerusalem had moved only a few hundred yards away from the City of David, the original location of Jerusalem from the Bible, to safer ground at the top of the mountain,” Spielman writes. Each time the city was conquered, and a new set of walls built around it, the original city was buried a bit deeper. Subsequent discoveries in the City of David made clear just how much history was preserved underneath the ground where no one had thought to look.
More was to follow. In 1914, on land purchased by Baron de Rothschild, an archaeologist named Raymond Weill discovered a Second Temple–era plaque, providing proof of Jewish worship in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. Weill later found fortifications of the City of David, an ancient pool, and tombs carved into the mountain. Later, Kathleen Kenyon discovered what was interpreted to be evidence of King David’s palace.
But most of the truly earth-shattering discoveries would have to wait nearly another half century. After Israel’s founding and during the 1948–1967 Jordanian occupation of the area, Arabs scrambled to settle the City of David. “By 1967,” writes Spielman, “all of Charles Warren’s excavation sites were covered over, either with hastily built homes or with garbage.” Property disputes continued for decades after Israel retook the land in the Six-Day War. Be’eri eventually bought some of the land, a few plots of which were likely originally owned by Rothschild before being illegally confiscated and transferred after 1948 to Arab landowners. These plots were now back in the hands of someone who wanted to uphold Rothschild’s legacy of unearthing the history beneath the dirt and sand.
And that is what Be’eri would do. In 2005, digging practically beneath Spielman’s office, archaeologist Eilat Mazar found a massive stone structure. Pottery shards and organic material (such as an olive pit) dated the structure to the time of King David. In fact, Mazar believed she had found King David’s palace. Some archaeologists disagreed on what she had discovered, but they agreed on the time period in question. The ancient City of David was rising from the past. With another Mazar discovery—this one an ancient seal from the time of the prophet Jeremiah—so was the Bible.
“King David’s palace became a beacon calling people home,” Spielman writes. “Israelis began to flock to the site, whether from secular or religious backgrounds, whether from the military or the yeshivas.”
If this sounds like a pilgrimage, there was a more literal one to come.
In 2004, a sewer-main break forced archaeologists to suspend their work while tractors and heavy machinery cleared the area around the broken pipe. One of the archaeologists noticed a tractor was about to break what looked like a large limestone step and forced the frustrated driver to hit the brakes. That single step turned out to be part of the staircase. The staircase led to a massive ritual bath that Jewish pilgrims from the entire area had used to purify themselves before going to the Holy Temple on festival days. Along with the ritual bath, the team found a road that had been crafted so the newly pure pilgrims could walk from the bath to the Temple without encountering impurities. Underneath it all was a tunnel connecting the City of David to the Temple Mount.
The book is full of such stories, along with detailed accounts that take the reader inside some of these underground expeditions as they happened.
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The value of When the Stones Speak is twofold. The preceding discoveries, and the history they teach, are one. The other is a lesson in the geopolitics of the Middle East—specifically the way contentious Israeli politics, the threat of Arab violence, and diplomatic standoffs play just as much a role in the historic excavations as shovels and hard hats.
It also illustrates a distinctive element of the Palestinian penumbra of the Arab–Israeli conflict: a total denial of Jewish connection to the land. In this, the book explains not only the distant past but the recent, post–October 7 turn of events as well.
The contentious Israeli politics showed up in Supreme Court challenges to the legality of the digs, the nasty rivalry between factions of Israel’s archaeologists playing out in the media, and the accusations of corruption and financial impropriety levied at the City of David from its opponents who considered Be’eri’s team a bunch of crazy settlers.
The threat of Arab violence was present in the multiple plots to assassinate Be’eri, the riots in the Arab
neighborhood of Silwan adjacent to the City of David, and the radical Islamic preachers who descended on Jerusalem in an attempt to whip up a frenzy and intimidate the Jews and Arabs who worked on the digs.
All this led to diplomatic standoffs. UN agencies amplified the unfounded accusations, eventually debunked, that the digs were damaging the foundations of Arab homes, while Western politicians displayed their weak stomach for “controversial” projects that upset the status quo and encouraged Israel to surrender to the heckler’s veto of Palestinian threats.
One such example is worth mentioning. Late in the George W. Bush administration, Spielman received a call from Michael Oren, the celebrated historian and future Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Oren had heard from Elliott Abrams, who was at the State Department at the time, that a couple of curious memos were making their way up the chain of command. These memos described the City of David excavations as deeply problematic. It was Abrams’s job to review such memos before passing them along to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and he told Oren that the memos were one-sided and seemed designed to elicit a public condemnation from Rice in order to influence the Israeli Supreme Court against the digs. If there was another side to this story, Abrams said, it should be included for the secretary of state. Oren had Spielman give the State Department the rest of the story. Years later, leaked State Department cables made clear that Spielman’s balancing out of the memo almost certainly averted diplomatic disaster.
In retrospect, it seems plausible that Abrams had saved the most important archaeological dig in Israeli history because he recognized what was really going on: The UN was trying to manipulate the State Department to influence the Israeli Supreme Court.
Indeed, the U.S. plays an outsize role in this story. American media can sway global public opinion with one well-placed and well-timed story; American Jewish support, both financial and political, kept the project going at key moments; and American anti-Zionist activists drowned the public discourse in lies and Palestinian propaganda to shape a false narrative of Israeli evildoing.
Sound familiar? It should. This is the game plan Israel’s enemies have exploited since October 7. And the attacks of that day—and since—demonstrate why the story of the City of David is so important. Put simply, there is no such thing as an academic argument when it comes to the Jewish state. The big lie that Jews aren’t indigenous to the Land of Israel—a claim that would have been laughed out of the room at any other point in world history—has become fodder for the wildfire of violent anti-Semitism scorching the West in recent years.
Which is to say: Defending the facts of the Jews’ place in history is literally a matter of life and death. Spielman’s splendid book is a testament to the power of the truth and the sacred obligation the Jewish people have to keep fighting for it.
1 Center Street, 304 pages
Photo: Jacek Sopotnicki/Getty Images
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