There is only one nation in the world whose identity, whose very existence, is based on a book. That nation is Israel and the book is the Bible. The Bible makes the astounding claim that God himself gave the land of Israel to the Jews, to the descendants of Abraham. Approximately 4000 years ago, the Bible chronicles how the Jews have lived in their ancestral homeland for thousands of years before being scattered to the ends of the earth.
Thus, of all groups in existence today, the Jews are the earliest inhabitants of the Land of Israel. Of course, the Jews didn’t leave voluntarily. They were driven out. But the Bible also predicts that those same people would return to reclaim their land and reestablish their nation. These predictions were made thousands of years ago, in 1948. They came true.
The Bible is also the moral foundation of Western civilization, and of the principles that made America without the Bible, Western civilization would not be what it is. Which is to say we would not be who we are. The philosopher Leo Strauss says that Western civilization is constructed on two pillars Athens and Jerusalem. Athens represents classical reason, philosophy, free speech to scientific outlook, and the origins of democracy.
Jerusalem represents the Bible and the fruits of the Bible. Those fruits include the idea of divine creation, the story of liberation reflected in the Book of Exodus, the Ten Commandments, the wisdom of the Psalms and the Hebrew prophets, the influence of Jesus, whom Christians call Messiah. If Athens represents reason, Jerusalem represents divine revelation, and divine revelation is more vulnerable to attack.
Because the Bible doesn’t prove things, it declares them. Quote in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Who’s talking? We don’t know. Who could it be? No one other than God was there. Yet the Bible claims to be inspired by God, the closest we can get to God Himself speaking. We live today in a world where the claims of the Bible are under attack, or at least skeptical scrutiny.
The criticism is both political and historical. Many in the Islamic world, and also in the West, regard Israel as a colonizer. And the Arabs of that region, the so-called Palestinians as the, colonize throughout the world. Many regard the Bible as a mythical or fictional account of people who never existed in events that never happened. Something similar to the Homeric epics or Greek mythology.
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Are the foundations of America and the West based on fiction and myth? We now have a unique way to test the claims of the Bible through biblical archeology. Biblical archeology is a full fledged scientific field, sometimes called Near Eastern archeology. Yet little of this archeology makes sense without the Bible. It operates with the Bible in one hand and the tools of archeology in the other, comparing the claims of Scripture with the artifacts found in the field.
Biblical archeology relies on material objects that come out of the ground coins, stone inscriptions, ostraca, or writings on pottery. Clay seals once used to secure correspondence. Ruins of ancient civilizations, bone fragments, skeletal remains and other artifacts to confirm or refute, and in some cases supplement and illuminate the biblical narrative. Let’s embark on a journey to discover for ourselves the latest findings of biblical archeology, to verify whether the Bible is an account of real people and true events.
Here are some key questions. The original patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, were nomads who lived around 4000 years ago. Have they left any trace of their existence? The Bible says Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed through fire and brimstone. Can we find the ruins of those so-called sin cities and confirm the biblical account of their destruction? There is no direct evidence of the Exodus when Israel came out of Egypt.
It’s in the Bible and in Hollywood films like the Ten Commandments. But is there indirect evidence for this crucial narrative of oppression and liberation some 3500 years ago? Did Joshua lead the ancient Israelites into the Promised Land? And did the walls of Jericho fall in the way that the Bible records? King David is a central figure in the Bible who said to have ruled around 1000 BC and founded a dynasty, the House of David, prior to 1990.
If you were asked to prove the existence of David without relying on the Bible, you could not do it. Can we do it now? David’s successor, King Solomon, is portrayed in Scripture as a wise and powerful king who ruled over a large and wealthy Israelite kingdom. Was he? The prophet Isaiah lived in the eighth century BC under the rule of King Hezekiah, one of the righteous kings of the Bible.
Can we authenticate the historicity of both men prior to the Babylonian conquest of Israel and the destruction of Solomon’s Temple and the early sixth century BC, King Zedekiah clashed with the prophet Jeremiah over his warnings of imminent invasion and impending doom. How has biblical archeology thrown light on these events, validating them down to their minor details? While Jesus has an historical figure who lived in the early fourth century A.D. is not open to doubt.
Is it possible to walk in his footsteps by retracing the actual places where he was born, lived, and taught for centuries? Figures like Pontius Pilate and the high priest Caiaphas have inhabited the pages of the Bible, but without reliable historical attestation outside the Bible. Can we prove that they were real? And what was the actual site of Jesus’s crucifixion?
Biblical archeology has the power to take people and events that have for centuries been regarded as matters of faith, and now establish them as matters of fact. For the first time, we do not merely believe we know, and many of the most astonishing discoveries have occurred recently, with new discoveries continually being made sure. Lots of things in the Bible, such as the miracles, cannot be corroborated.
Other things, such as Noah’s Ark or the Tower of Babel, remain and shrouded in mystery. But if the people and events in the Bible can be verified and verified, moreover, from sources hostile to the biblical figures themselves, that counts for a lot. Even more significant is the question are there any significant archeological findings that contradict or refute the Bible?
If the answer is no, then our confidence in the overall truth of the Bible is greatly strengthened. This is not a theological investigation, but rather a scientific and archeological one. The project is aimed at establishing and validating the historicity of the Bible. If the Bible is true as history, we can draw our own conclusions about the theology. But certainly the biblical foundation of Israel and of Western civilization would be more secure in that case.
The American Founders vision of a society modeled on Jerusalem and Zion, a city on a hill, would seem less utopian and more historically grounded. The familiar attacks on Israel as a usurping or colonizing power would be discredited, since it’s not really possible for a people to colonize their own ancestral homeland. The contemporary project to revive America and the West, to recover the original sources of the vitality of our civilization would be fortified and vindicated.
Born in Mumbai, India, Dinesh D’Souza came to the United States as an exchange student in 1978. After graduating from Dartmouth College, he served as a policy analyst in the Reagan White House and a scholar in two prominent think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is a New York Times best-selling author who has written books on politics, religion, culture, and economics— including Illiberal Education, The End of Racism, What’s So Great About America, and United States of Socialism—and three books on Christian apologetics: What’s So Great About Christianity, Life After Death, and Godforsaken. D’Souza has made eight political documentary films and produces a daily podcast called The Dinesh D’Souza Podcast, which is seen and heard by about 100,000 people daily.
