The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I

Episode Date: February 6, 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 1. 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. Onto a celebratory note, I'm pleased to announce that episode three of this series, Christ, Centre of the World, with my good friend Jonathan Pagio, 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 honour,

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. The 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. The 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 worshipping 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 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. Then you move a little bit to your right, and you're gonna 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. Mm-hmm. So there's 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 this is that. Right. Like, here's the old city, and here 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, and 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 traveled, like where Abraham came and he was 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. received as the foundation stone for the building of the world, according to Jewish theology. 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 later and that stands for about half a millennium and then that is destroyed in 70 C.E. 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 and 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. And 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 who 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 the bend and see the dome here is made of gold and symbolically gold is associated with the sun. And the dome is the, you can 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 of 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 Gladd is 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 towards the axis Monday 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 and the consequences 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, sort of voce, right, in soft voices, 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

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Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com slash jbp. This guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash jbp. Again, that's netsuite.com slash jbp. This is about as close as we'll get on this particular side to the top of the rock, but 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 yeah, 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. To make sure that- I pray before every word. Does that count? As long as your head is probably okay. Okay. 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 can start saying, solve, it would be a problem. This is probably, I assume this is why he 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 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 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 used 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. That's the plethora of facts. 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 converted, all the cognitive science is converging on that revelation, I would say. You know, 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 can 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 over-simplified narrative that's just devastating. That would be what happened as a consequence of the death of God. Right. While the differentiated, historically instantiated, unifying narrative collapsed, and then what

happened? Power. Yeah. Power. Right, right. 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 sides 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. Because everything has to be made of it. Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, so else to be made pretty much. Yeah Yeah, yeah, it's really nice to see that you know Makes it feel like a place instead of this just what hodgepodge. Yeah, which is every modern city now exactly so pathetic No, I don't take your place. It's cool. 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 Mimel Amal, 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 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 walk 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 a certain attempt to control the site. Jerusalem is filled with the cats. You're filling one of the rules there. The cats by the way are a British thing. The British brought in the cats to kill all the snakes. The cats killed the snakes. Apparently. They killed all the snakes The cats killed the snakes But they They didn't proceed to take over Apparently

That's what I was told the other day Cats are quite something Yeah And then they took over the entire area especially because Orthodox Jews have real restrictions on spaying and neutering So So the cats are all over the city

There are cats everywhere in Turkey too Cats everywhere in Greece Cats everywhere It sounds like every place the British said flood, right? Or cataclysm. They're cats. Yeah, exactly. In the church community you can have a lot of free-filling conversations about God and

the border on heresy and you're basically okay. Mainly because the skin in the game element of religion, which is here's a bunch of things you do to demonstrate you're part of the inner. If you're doing all that stuff and whatever doctrinal issues you have, you've already proved that the skin in the game. Because Christianity removes a lot of the skin in the game and rituals, right? So now the doctrine is the rituals. You're better bide by the doctrine.

Absolutely. Well, you see that extending itself most particularly in Protestantism, where everything's become propositionized. 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... That's a nice general principle, you know.

So what that would mean is in the absence of a shared drama, which would be embodied, then you can't tolerate propositional deviants. 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. Right, but it also might be that if we differ propositionally, we start to differ in terms of our actions so much that we can't have it 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 Lily together? Exactly. with me about and how do we know that's commensurate with Lillitium? 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 minusha and legalistic minusha For example, they'll take a commandment we'll take a commandment like in Hebrew, we have 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 the house of mourning.

It like, it compromises you into specific commandments. Well, that's good, because that also means you know when you're being good. The problem with Facebook, Google, and the other so-called free services is that they aren't really free, are they? You pay by letting these tech giants record your activity and sell it to advertisers. As the saying goes, if the product's free, you're not the customer, you're the product. The digital version of you is being bought and sold, and the scary thing is you never know who's buying. It could be marketers, lobbyists trying to change your mind about gun control, or even

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But tech experts at CNET and The Verge agree Express VPN is the number one VPN in the world I partner with Express VPN because I want viewers to have access to this important privacy protection Which is why right now you can get an extra four months free when you go to express VPN comm slash Jordan. That's EXP our ESS VPN comm slash Jordan to get an extra four months totally free VPN.com slash Jordan to get an extra four months totally free 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 gonna look at some texts that are well over 2,000 years old that contain Direct quotations from the Bible that we all know

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 two thousand year old script and these scrolls show continuity

of biblical text because they're 200 BC 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 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 one thousand 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. Mm-hmm. 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 is true and that's that's true from the Dead Sea Scrolls those are the 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 its Ottoman era some of it is before by 2000 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 the city of David,

which is fully 3300 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. 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 Elat Mazar,

she comes into our visitor center says, you need to move your offices. Ask her why. She says, beneath your feet you'll find the Palace of King David. 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 chapter 5, verse 11, it says, King Herum 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 it'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 euling 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 then son of your father's name.

She's digging here, and she finds two seals just like this one, right? This is what Hebrew used to look like. And on the seals there are names, G'dayas and Pashchor,, Juhal Sanashlemiah, 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 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...

See on top of the roofs. 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 then there's a valley, and then on the other side of the valley is Solan. So presumably Bathsheba's house would have been somewhere in Solan. If there's a window right there, this is where David is looking at 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 safer 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, then, 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, yeah, definitely, definitely. 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 a servant of an ideal. You're a servant of a person anymore, now you're a servant of an ideal, you're a servant of a higher power. And that means inherently limiting the power of human beings. Looks like this is a massive cistern. So you see here, it's an ancient cistern.

You can see the plaster here. Yeah, yeah. You can keep the water in. So people would have carved this out of the rock? Yeah, sure. One of the chances that theyrate 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 Siddiqui 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 gonna 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, but 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 goes on., goes on, it keeps true to his message, right, about what's gonna 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 going to hate this king thing. You probably shouldn't do it. And people are like, well, no, we want it anyway. And God says, OK, fine. If they want it, they're going to get it. Probably going to 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 gonna 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 2700 years, all the way up to modern times, one layer built atop the next. When you think about what makes a business truly successful, it's not just about having a great product. It's about having the right tools behind the scenes that make selling effortless.

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Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Jbp all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash jbp to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com slash jbp. This goes down several stories as they uncover additional layers of history over the course of 3,000 years. We're just told up there 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

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 gonna be rubble and there are gonna be foxes wandering on the on the holiest places and he says I'm seeing that happen right now which means that the other part's gonna come true. And one of the things about being here in the modern age, you get to see the destruction in the rear view 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 amazing. 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 Puy of Ceylon, cleansed before making their way up the half mile journey along the pilgrimage road up to the temple of the Temple Mount. These are the original flagstones from 2,000 years ago. Not stones that looked 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 if 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 a commemorative 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, captah. 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 for freedom against the Roman occupation. And scholars have long wondered why they're 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? Well, 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 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 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 they're 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 soap box, the only one of him, and 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.

Speakers' Corner. Speakers' Corner, the original Hyde Park, right? 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not going see a soapbox without wanting to climb it. Don't you think?

We've got to get some protesters over here. 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 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. It's also the nature of human beings. Like we don't really want to clear all the debris. You gotta 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 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. 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 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. So you could think that the central animating spirit for Noah is the intuition that calls you to batten down the hatches 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 out of his Hypersecurity 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 you bet yet It's continued 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. Right.

And that would be something like the logos. Mm-hmm. Right? So the, yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 and then, 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 and 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.

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 the sort of natural state of things. We think that creative innovation is the standard mode of human being. That's just not true. If you're placed in paradise, the first thing you do is you vacation, right? My tie's on the beach, man.

Exactly. That's an amazing thing in Genesis. Like even in paradise, human beings have to have something to do. Ah So I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this.

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