Zev Orenstein
speaker
36 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Zev Orenstein’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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This is one of the largest active excavations going on in Jerusalem today, going back some 2,700 years, all the way up to modern times, one layer built atop the next.
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.
It is, 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 Pool of Siloam, cleansed before making their way up the half-mile journey along the pilgrimage road up to the temple on the Temple Mount.
These are the original flagstones from 2,000 years ago. Not stones that look 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 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 to commemorate a 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 capta. 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.
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? 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 real. And we're bringing it back here in this excavation.
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.
Speaker's Corner, the original Hyde Park, right? Mm-hmm. 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.
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