When the Stones Speak

Doron Spielman, an American-born Israeli who spent more than two decades at the City of David and served as its former vice president, presents a personal account of how excavating this major archaeological site in Jerusalem unearthed evidence of Jewish indigenous presence stretching back more than 3,800 years. The book interweaves memoir, archaeological history, and political argument, centering on Spielman's claim that these discoveries challenge a sustained campaign by Palestinian leaders and international institutions to deny the Jewish people's historical connection to the Land of Israel.

Spielman opens on October 8, 2023, standing in military uniform near Sderot, Israel, the day after the massacre carried out by Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist militant group. He reframes the book's subject: The erasure of Jewish history is not an abstract dispute but a precondition for violence. He traces this denial through Palestinian leaders who deny the Holocaust's anti-Semitic motivations and the existence of a Jewish temple in Jerusalem, and through the Hamas charter comparing Jews to Nazis. He provides a condensed history from Abraham's journey to Canaan around 1850 BCE, through King David's establishment of Jerusalem as capital around 1000 BCE, to the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and Emperor Hadrian's renaming of Judea as "Syria Palestina," after the long-extinct Philistines, to sever the Jewish bond with the land.

The narrative turns to the site's modern rediscovery. In 1867, Queen Victoria sponsored the Palestine Exploration Fund, a British archaeological society, which sent Second Lieutenant Charles Warren of the Royal Engineers to search for biblical antiquities in the Ottoman-controlled Holy Land. After disappointing results near the Temple Mount, Jerusalem's contested hilltop holy compound, Warren ventured outside the Old City walls and found a tunnel and shaft containing pottery thousands of years older than anything inside the city. He connected this water channel to King David's biblical capture of Jerusalem from the Jebusites, the city's pre-Israelite inhabitants. In 1880, a teenage shepherd named Jacob Eliyahu discovered the Siloam Inscription, a tablet inscribed in ancient Hebrew describing tunnel construction that matched the Bible's account of King Hezekiah's diversion of the Gihon Spring during the Assyrian siege of 702 BCE, making it the oldest biblical inscription ever found.

Baron Edmund de Rothschild, the French-Jewish financier, began legally purchasing land around the site beginning in 1880. He commissioned archaeologist Raymond Weill, who found evidence of a synagogue from the Second Temple period. World War I interrupted the work, and the 1929 Hebron massacre killed 69 Jews and forced remaining residents to flee. After the 1948 War of Independence, Jordan occupied East Jerusalem for 19 years, destroying 58 synagogues, desecrating 38,000 tombstones, and encouraging families to build homes over the buried archaeological sites. In 1999, the Waqf, the Islamic organization managing the Temple Mount, used heavy machinery to bulldoze an enormous crater into the mount without archaeological supervision, destroying irreplaceable ancient material.

The book turns to Spielman's personal journey. He immigrated to Israel in January 2000 and joined the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) just before the Second Intifada, a major wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence. After army service, he met David Beeri, known as "Davidleh," the founder of the City of David National Park, and Yehuda Maly, Beeri's co-founder. Davidleh, a former elite military commander, had traced Rothschild's land ownership and restored Jewish ownership to key properties. Davidleh recruited Spielman to raise funds and expand the site.

In 2004, archaeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar proposed that King David's palace lay directly beneath the site's temporary office. Within two weeks her team struck a massive stone structure with walls 20 feet thick. Pottery and carbon-14 dating placed it around 1000 BCE, triggering fierce debate with "minimalist" academics who questioned the Bible's historical reliability. The following year, Eilat unearthed a clay seal bearing the name "Yehuchal, the son of Shelemiah" in paleo-Hebrew, an ancient script, matching a figure in the Book of Jeremiah. Three years after Eilat's death in 2021, a team including researchers from Tel Aviv University published findings concluding that Jerusalem during King David's era was larger than minimalists had claimed.

Also in 2004, a sewage leak led archaeologist Eli Shukron to discover a massive staircase beneath an orchard at the site's base. Professor Ronny Reich identified the design as matching ritual bath architecture and theorized the Pool of Siloam served as a purification site for Temple pilgrims. At the top, paved slabs disappeared under compacted earth; Reich proposed they formed the Pilgrimage Road, the ancient route from the pool to the Temple. Spielman and others crawled through a freezing drainage channel beneath the road, confirming the stairs continued overhead and finding clay jars belonging to Jews who hid from the Romans during Jerusalem's destruction in 70 CE.

The discoveries provoked organized opposition. In 2007, Raed Salah of the Northern Islamic Movement, an organization aligned with the transnational Muslim Brotherhood, falsely claimed the City of David was tunneling into the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Workers quit, and Davidleh survived an assassination attempt at an Arab wedding, saved by an Arab worker who had defied the threats. In 2008, opponents brought claims to Israel's Supreme Court alleging excavation damage to homes; the court froze work on the Pilgrimage Road. Michael Oren, the future Israeli ambassador to the United States, helped avert an official US condemnation, and in 2009 the court rejected the claims.

Meanwhile, excavators in the drainage tunnel reached the foundation stones of the Western Wall. The acquisition of the Givati Parking Lot proved critical: On the Ninth of Av, the Jewish fast day mourning the Temples' destruction, in 2000, the team discovered the Palestinian Authority was attempting to purchase the lot to build a center that would divide Jerusalem. After intense negotiations, the developers sold to the City of David. Excavation uncovered more than 11 layers of civilization, including clay seals bearing biblical names with walls covered in ashes from the First Temple's destruction in 586 BCE. Reaching the Western Wall carried geopolitical risk; a 1996 tunnel opening nearby had triggered deadly violence. The team coordinated with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office for a controlled media release, and during Passover 2011 the first tourists exited the tunnel.

Opposition escalated internationally. In 2014, the Obama White House condemned legal property sales in the area. In 2016, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) voted 24 to 6 for a resolution referring to the Temple Mount solely by its Arabic name and placing the Western Wall in quotation marks. Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Senator Ted Cruz led a bipartisan congressional letter condemning the resolution.

Among the most striking finds was a golden bell with an intact chime, identified as a bell from the High Priest's robe as described in the Book of Exodus. US Ambassador David Friedman became the first sitting American ambassador to visit. On June 30, 2019, after two excavation teams dug toward each other through the mountain and met, Friedman and Israeli officials gathered at the Pool of Siloam, the ancient purification pool at the Pilgrimage Road's starting point, to inaugurate the Pilgrimage Journey, walking together up the ancient road toward the Temple Mount.

In the epilogue, Spielman recounts his wife Sarah's family history. The Zenati family, the oldest known Jewish family continuously residing in Israel, traces its origins to priests who fled the Temple's destruction in 70 CE to Peki'in in the Galilee. In 2017, archaeologists unearthed a pillar in Peki'in bearing a Hebrew inscription with Jewish names from nearly two thousand years ago, transforming legend into verified history. Spielman concludes that the City of David serves to remind the Jewish people they continue the legacy of those who came before and to show the world they are an indigenous nation who have turned their hearts toward the same land for more than two thousand years.