Last Month in Jerusalem, I took my daughter to watch U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee in conversation with Doron Spielman. Spielman is the former VP at the City of David archaeological site, about which he wrote an eye-opening book last year. (Which I reviewed for COMMENTARY.) The discoveries at the City of David have obliterated any lingering doubts about Jewish indigeneity in the Land of Israel.
My daughter had already seen these discoveries at the City of David on our trip, and here she watched another remarkable scene: the American ambassador to the State of Israel, a devout Christian and former red-state governor, passionately explaining the importance of Israel’s archaeological wonders to the past, present, and future of Western civilization.
“People can argue ideas and they can debate them,” Huckabee said. “You cannot argue the archaeology, which is a scientific uncovering of that which once was. It is perhaps the single most important archaeological discovery in all of history because it is so extensive and it so completely reveals what really happened here.”
I’ve been thinking about that event while reading the obituaries for Gabriel Barkay, the legendary Israeli archaeologist who died January 11. Before him, there simply had been no living figure of equal significance to the city of Jerusalem. The Jewish people owe Barkay a debt of gratitude—and if we follow Huckabee’s logic, so does all of Western civilization.
Barkay, who was born Gabriel Breslauer in Budapest in 1944, is associated with two particularly famous projects. In 1979, Barkay discovered the Ketef Hinnom scrolls in Jerusalem. Once successfully unrolled and translated, it became clear they contained a passage from the Book of Numbers dated to the Iron Age, making them the earliest known biblical text in existence.
The other is the Temple Mount sifting project. In 1999 and 2000, the Muslim authorities at the Mount illegally undertook a massive construction project and removed 9,000 tons of earth, destroying artifacts in the process and dumping the rest of the dirt in the Kidron Valley. Their goal was to replace the history-rich earth with an unauthorized mosque. Barkay led a broad group of Israelis who protested the ongoing destruction and then helped get funding for a project of volunteers to sift through the dirt discarded from the Temple site. That work continues today.
Because the truth has what you might call a “pro-Israel bias,” reality is controversial. Hence the acknowledgements in Barkay’s obituaries that his work was sometimes characterized as “right-wing.” Here is how the New York Times obituary phrases it:
“In 2005, he and others founded the Temple Mount Sifting Project, a crowdsourced program to examine the estimated 400 truckloads of dirt taken from the site. Since then, volunteers have identified about a half-million artifacts.
“The project was sometimes criticized as a tool of right-wing Israeli governments eager to establish historical claim to the Temple Mount.”
You’ll notice that it is considered “right-wing” because the facts of the case are politically unhelpful to the left wing. When it comes to Jews and Israel, the truth is considered provocative. It’s worth noting that this story was about the Arab authorities attempting to destroy hundreds of thousands of ancient artifacts—a crime against humanity that is described here with the same neutrality one might employ to describe the decision to take the dog for a walk. It is the Israeli archaeologists’ response to that crime—to ask that the crime not be carried out—that is deemed political. People can be very touchy when reminded of the existence of Jews.
Barkay’s dismissal of such pettiness was on the mark: “Sneezing in Jerusalem is an intensive political activity,” he told The Times of Israel in 2019. “You could turn your head to the right, or the left.”
Indeed, one lesson of Barkay’s life is that the Jewish people should not treat their own rights and existence and history as a delicate subject. People offended by the truth only deserve to hear the truth more often. And if they face resistance, Jews should raise their voices. As Huckabee advised the audience in Jerusalem last month:
“The Jewish people have the greatest story in the world. So tell it. It’s a wonderful story to be told. And you have the receipts. You have the Bible. And for heaven’s sakes, I would say use it and tell it with courage and boldness. Never speak it with apology as if, well, I don’t want to bring this up, but just so you know, we kind of have a place here. No, I think you say: Do you realize that our history traces back 3,800 years and we can follow the linear progress of that history from then until now. And there are prophecies throughout the entire Old Testament that say things that we are watching before our eyes.”
