Doran Spielman’s When the Stones Speak: The Remarkable Discovery of the City of David

Is the Bible a history book? Did the stories in it (or some of the more literal-sounding ones) really happen? Or are we modern people obliged in conscience to take the Biblical tales as mostly metaphorical, analogical, symbolic, poetical and – in sum – nonfactual? Ought we to take them as stories that – let’s face it – “ain’t necessarily so”?

The question is partly historical – answers to be filled in by archeology. But it is also existential. What kind of creatures are we? And what kind of a world do we live in?

One time an old friend and I got to talking about what would happen if Jesus came back. We meant literally. We pictured him making his way through the Eastern Gate of Jerusalem’s Old City. Under rulers pre-dating the birth of modern Israel, the Eastern Gate had been made impassable by stones blocking the entrance – but Jesus coming down from above could certainly make short work of that! Continuing beyond the Eastern Gate, we pictured him crossing into West Jerusalem where he’d announce a press conference for that very afternoon, to be held in the lobby of the King David Hotel.

And nobody would come.

Why not? Where was everybody? Where was the press, always hungry for a scoop? Oh, they’d be at a hotel lobby across town, for a scoop that promised to be even more of a headline grabber. Satan would be holding his own (rival) press conference, scheduled for the very same hour! 

Hey, if it bleeds, it leads.

These reflections reveal my frame of mind when I began reading When the Stones Speak. Sure, sure, they excavated the actual city of David, the Biblical city, south of the present Old City, and otherwise just as the Good Book describes it. Yeah, yeah. If it’s true and verifiable, nobody will want to accept it; if it’s guesswork, or mere unsubstantiated hypothesis, everybody will jump on that with all the sodden, salivating, grim glee of the post-modern scoffer.

That said, today we have carbon dating. We can tell the age of stones. We have DNA analysis of ancient human remains and the capacity to compare it to the DNA of Jews of today whose tradition deems them descendants of people who’d be numbered among those present at the court of the Biblical Kings David and Solomon, in the period when the twelve Israelite tribes were united under the Davidic monarchy. (On the DNA results, see chapter eight, notes #17 & 18, also chapter fourteen, note #2.). We have the ruins of King David’s palace. (On the ruins of the Davidic palace, see chapter five, note #5.). We have stones that were part of the First Temple (chapter eleven, p. 173).

The First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. The prophet Jeremiah is recorded advising the king not to resist the Babylonian siege since, on account of its sins, the Lord was not going to defend Jerusalem. One of the courtiers got together with other court flunkies who got the inconvenient prophet out of the way by throwing Jeremiah down a cistern, in hopes he would die there. The ringleader of this effort was a man named “Yehuchal, the son of Shelemiah.” The archeologists have found a seal, with letters on it written in the paleo-Hebrew of Biblical times, bearing the name of a courtier of the period of the Babylonian siege. And that name is, you guessed it, Yehuchal son of Shelemiah (pp. 60f)!

As these digs continue, evidence piles up that a number of Biblical stories are confirmable, at least in terms of the empirical context they reference. Of course, there is no archeological evidence that God was a player in these stories. 

The author tells how political enemies from abroad have mounted serious efforts to stop these digs or else discredit them. So far however, at least by the time of the May 2025 publication of When the Stones Speak, these well-financed and intensely motivated adversaries have been unable to stop the archeological digs reported in the book, with the evidence they’ve produced of the Bible’s historicity.

*. *. *

What does it all mean to me personally? 

DNA evidence is at least part of the story. That means that I am, at least in part, descended from the Biblical Israelites. No wonder Jews are hated! 

Also, for those whose notions of the divine require that the Deity be “ineffable,” “metaphoric,” “analogical,” or in some other way a byproduct of our wishful fantasies – hey, tough luck.

God used to be a real player,

in a real story,

and – for all we know –

God still is!

Related Content: History’s Spiritual Side | The Blessing