Pod Insights The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast Jerusalem & the Axis Mundi | Foundations of the West Episode I with Ben Shapiro About this episode Watch the entire series, “Foundation of the West,” exclusively on DW+: dailywire.com/foundationsofthewest
In this episode, Ben Shapiro and our host explore the profound impact Jerusalem has had on shaping Western civilization, particularly in bridging the gap between God and man.
This is just the beginning! The full five-part docuseries, along with exclusive bonus content, is available on Daily Wire Plus. Join our host and esteemed colleagues as they travel through the historic cities of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, reflecting on their lasting influence on Western ideals.
The series has already made waves, with Episode III: Christ, Center of the World being nominated for Best Documentary at the 32nd Annual Movieguide Faith & Values Awards Gala. This nomination highlights content that inspires and offers hope to society, a central aim of this series.
Explore Foundations of the West on Daily Wire Plus and discover the profound journey that shaped the principles of Western culture.
Watch now at dailywire.com/foundationsofthewest
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Jordan B. Peterson? Last year, Daily Wire Plus and I released a fantastic series on the origins of Western culture, entitled Foundations of the West. This series had a tremendously positive impact. Because of this, Daily Wire and I have decided to share the first episode with you, free of charge. You're about to watch episode 1. In it, Ben Shapiro and I discuss the lasting impact Jerusalem has made on Western culture, bridging the gap between man and God. The rest of the five-part docu-series is available exclusively on Daily Wire Plus. There you'll find all episodes, as well as additional bonus content.
0:41 Jordan B. Peterson? I traveled alongside my esteemed colleagues through the ancient cities of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, cities that have shaped Western culture. I invite you to watch them. My hope is that when you do so, you learn something deep and profound, as I did, about our Western ideals. It was a very worthwhile journey. On to a celebratory note, I'm pleased to announce that episode 3 of this series, Christ: Center of the World, with my good friend Jonathan Paget, has been nominated for Best Documentary at the 32nd Annual Movie Guide Faith and Values Awards Gala. I'm told that the nominating committee pays special attention to content that inspires
1:24 Jordan B. Peterson? and gives hope to our society at large. That's exactly what we aim to do with this series, and to be recognized for that is a great honor, for which I and the entire Daily Wire team are truly thankful. You can watch the entire series on DailyWire.com/FoundationsOfTheWest. Give it a go, it might propel you to greater adventure. Thank you for your time, attention, and your continued support of my work, and of Daily Wire Plus.
2:07 Jordan B. Peterson? Western civilization rests on three mighty pillars. Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. Jerusalem offered a morality based in the spiritual world. Athens concentrated more particularly on the logos revealed in the material domain. Rome offered the advantages and perils of power, empire, and reach. I'm joined on the first part of my journey by the redoubtable Ben Shapiro. We discuss the origins of the conflict between and eventual integration of the spiritual with the scientific and material.
2:44 Jordan B. Peterson? The history of Western civilization begins in Jerusalem.
3:37 Jordan B. Peterson? That's the cemetery there, right?
3:38 Speaker 01 This is Mount of Olives.
3:39 Jordan B. Peterson? That's the Mount of Olives.
3:40 Speaker 01 It's hard to see it, yeah.
3:41 Jordan B. Peterson? Oh wow, this is amazing.
3:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:44 Jordan B. Peterson? We're in Jerusalem because the Jews converged on the idea that the central reality of the world was something like an animating spirit. Where's the Garden of Gethsemane?
3:58 Speaker 01 Uh, that's here.
3:59 Jordan B. Peterson? Is that it there?
4:00 Speaker 01 Where the church is, yeah. This whole area is the gardens of Gethsemane. Jerusalem is the birthplace of Western civilization. It's the first place where people seriously start to think in a communal way about the idea that there is a set of godly values that rest above human authority.
4:16 Jordan B. Peterson? There's probably no difference between the emergence of monotheism and the spread of civilization. Because people might say, "Well, why is it so necessary that there is a God?" The answer to that is because there has to be a central animating spirit. And then you might ask, "Well, why does there have to be one God?" And the answer is because you don't have unity without worshiping the same God. You have to be doing the same thing. You have to be possessed by the same spirit. The eternal Jewish question is, what is the proper nature of that central animating spirit? And the Bible is actually an answer to that question.
4:54 Speaker 01 In order to truly understand the modern-day conflict in the Middle East, this is a great view, because what you see is that everything is right on top of each other. And so when you look across the landscape, you can see the Temple Mount up and to the left. And then you move toward the Mount of Olives, and you're looking at Jewish graves going back centuries. And then you move a little bit to your right, and you're gonna see an Arab village that used to be a Jewish village. They have very small pockets of places where Jews are living, protected by barbed wire. Everything is right on top of each other. And so whenever people suggest, "Well, you know, just a quick population separation and you're done." It's not quite that simple.
5:27 Jordan B. Peterson? All the geography here is high-resolution. Everything is marked. Everything is half-territory and half-map. Everything. It's no wonder there's so much conflict.
5:38 Speaker 01 When you say "high-resolution," it's also just, everything is geographically incredibly close together. When people say "East Jerusalem," they mean like this, is that. Here's the old city, and here's David, and that's East Jerusalem.
5:50 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah, well, it's kind of reminiscent of Manhattan that way.
5:53 Speaker 01 Exactly. Except here, everything's 3,000 years old.
5:57 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah, right, right.
5:58 Speaker 01 It's crazy. You don't realize how new America and Western civilization is. In the Anglo-American history is so new compared to biblical history. It's amazing.
6:06 Jordan B. Peterson? It's even true of European history. Most of the places we think of as old in Europe are like 300 years old, 500 years old.
6:13 Speaker 01 In America, the entire history of the country, it's like, "Oh, my gosh, I visited Plymouth Rock." Wow, that's 400 years old. Over here, that's like a house that somebody built five seconds ago.
6:24 Speaker 01 They did map out the biblical road that the fathers in the Bible traveled. Like where Abraham came, and he wandered down in this direction, ended up up there with the sacrifice of Isaac.
6:37 Speaker 01 I took Jordan Peterson to the Temple Mount because it's perceived as the foundation stone for the building of the world, according to Jewish theology.
6:49 Speaker 01 So we're now at the holiest site on earth for Jews. The third holiest site for Muslims is Al-Aqsa, which is this mosque right here. This is certainly the most contentious area on planet Earth.
7:03 Speaker 01 So if you go back about 3,000 years, the Temple Mount is created by flattening part of the top of the mountain and then building retaining walls and filling all of that with dirt, which is how you end up with this about three football field-sized giant area. And that's where the original first temple stood. It was destroyed in 576 BCE. And then it was rebuilt about 70 years later, and that stands for about half a millennium. And then that is destroyed in 70 CE, approximately 1,000 years later or so. The Dome of the Rock is built directly on top of where the Holy of Holies would have been and where the foundation stone is located. This is where Muslims believe that Muhammad ascended to heaven in his dream. He used this rock as sort of the launching off point, ascending to heaven.
7:47 Speaker 01 And that foundation stone is visible. You can walk into Dome of the Rock and you can actually see that. In sort of Jewish theology, the foundation stone is the idea that God used this stone as the basis for all creation. It's called in Latin, the axis mundi. The idea that there is a spiritual center to the world, that's what we mean when we said this is the foundation stone. So there are a couple of ideas that this place is the actual mountain on which Abraham is about to sacrifice Isaac, which of course is sort of a seminal point in the Bible. Also Jacob's ladder. Jacob lies down, he puts his head on the stone, where he has the dream about the angels going up and down the ladder. There is an idea in Jewish commentary, and Christian commentary as well, that this is the location of that.
8:31 Jordan B. Peterson? There's a dispute here about what should sit at the center of the world. And the world in this situation is, in some real way, a map that's laid on the territory. And a map is a conceptual device that people use to orient themselves as they move forward. And a map has to have a center point to allow for orientation. And there's dispute about what the center point would be. I guess it's partly because everybody has to share the same map in order to get along in the same territory. And so you have different groups of people will insist upon a different mapping structure. And if two groups that are isolated come together, they have different maps. All of this is a dispute about what the center point of the map is going to be. So I was mentioning the bend.
9:15 Jordan B. Peterson? You see, the dome here is made of gold, and symbolically, gold is associated with the sun. And the dome is the... You could think about it as the sun rising in the morning. And one of the reasons that the sun rising in the morning would be at the center point of the map is because the axiom that orients the map is something like the primacy of consciousness. To worship the primacy of consciousness and to have that consciousness emerge on the border between darkness and light is proper symbolically, because consciousness actually emerges at the border between order and chaos. The foundation stone is here, the Holy of Holies was here. Right. The place where Jacob Glatter stretched up to heaven. Right. That's all the same idea, right? All the same place. That's all the same center axis of the world, right? Exactly.
10:00 Jordan B. Peterson? Around which everything rotates and which orients us toward... The axis money points to the North Star. So that gives you orientation at night, right? Because you can look up and you can see a fixed point in heaven, which is the North Star. And you can orient yourself completely in the world if the consequences are. What does it mean for consciousness to be primary? Well, you can't have something without there being awareness of it. Even when we talk about our cosmological models extending back 14 billion years, we say there was a big bang. And what we say "sorovoché", right? In the soft voices, "if someone was there, this is what they would have seen." But of course, there was no one there.
10:43 Jordan B. Peterson? The reality itself presumes an observer, an experiencer. And consciousness is that experiencer. And we don't know its nature. It's an irreducible mystery. Now, the nature of that consciousness in the... Judeo-Christian tradition is conceptualized and symbolized as the word, right? It's this process that brings ordered existence out of the void, the chaotic void into clarity.
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12:18 Speaker 01 This is about as close as we'll get on this particular side to the dome of the Rapa, but this was the second temple platform. I mean, this was like, it's slightly elevated probably over time because it's been 2,000 years. But yeah, and they built the dome directly on top of it.
12:33 Speaker 01 Here's a supervisor from WAC coming over.
12:36 Jordan B. Peterson? I'm checking this out for what purposes?
12:38 Speaker 01 To make sure that I'm not praying, to make sure that.
12:41 Jordan B. Peterson? I pray before every word, does that count?
12:44 Speaker 01 As long as you're head is probably okay.
12:45 Jordan B. Peterson? Okay.
12:46 Speaker 01 If I were to whip out a sitter right now. A prayer book and start saying Psalms would be a problem. This is probably, I assume this is why you wanted me to have the hat on for this part of the journey. So Jordan and I go up to the Temple Mount and we're walking around. That's literally all we are doing. We're walking the perimeter of the Temple Mount under guard because that's what you do according to the law. You're not allowed to carry up, if you're a Jew or a Christian, any religious items. If you're Muslim, you can do whatever you want. You're not allowed to pray up there openly if you're a Jew or if you're a Christian. If you're Muslim, you can do whatever you want. The simple fact that Jordan and I are walking around up there gets caught on tape. And people who are, I would say malicious in intent, decide that they are going to characterize this as Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro invade the Temple Mount. People are literally paid to be up there pretty much every day,
13:28 Speaker 01 ready to jump on any incident that they can turn into some sort of narrative about predations on Islamic rights up there, which is an absurdity. The only people who actually have the full rights of movement and prayer on the Temple Mount on a daily basis are Muslims. This is the origin of Western civilization. If you believe that it's Jerusalem and Athens, which is sort of the typical structure that people use to discuss, then this is the center of Jerusalem, this is the Axis mundi, and we're walking through it right now, you're walking through not just history, but the foundation for the entire modern world. Western civilization, traditionally speaking, has been thought of as the marriage of Jerusalem and Athens. Jerusalem is the foundation of a godly morality.
14:10 Speaker 01 Human beings who are bound by a higher power in an understandable universe where they can discover God through the process of reason and revelation. And then that has to be balanced with Athens, which is traditionally seen as human rationality and human reason. So if the idea is revelation is religion and reason is science, then essentially the marriage of those two things is Western civilization.
14:34 Jordan B. Peterson? You know that Athens and Jerusalem idea as the twin pillars? They're not exactly twin pillars, they're one pillar stacked on top of the other. Because the Jerusalem part of it is the narrative that's been coming down from the top. And the Athenian part of it is the realization of the logos of the material structure that's rising from the bottom. And Western civilization meets right in the middle. And partly what we're trying to puzzle out right now, really, in our culture is the further details of how the narrative and the material interpenetrate. And you see that here because this place is a place where the narrative and the material are fighting to interpenetrate. And it's multiple narratives competing to map the underlying territory.
15:17 Jordan B. Peterson? There's too many potential stories in the material substructure. Right, that's the plethora of facts.
15:23 Speaker 01 Right.
15:23 Jordan B. Peterson? Right, so you need an orienting structure that descends from above to extract out the proper facts from the material.
15:30 Speaker 01 Right.
15:30 Jordan B. Peterson? And that's the union of Jerusalem and Athens.
15:32 Speaker 01 That makes perfect sense.
15:33 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah, well, and that's all converged, all the cognitive science is converging on that revelation, I would say.
15:39 Speaker 01 You know, when, when people sort of mock faith, which is what they try to say that Jerusalem is, and Jerusalem is really sort of, I would say, informed faith, meaning that it's not sort of principles that are taken from nowhere, but you do need, you do need the ratification of a revelatory structure in order to just say, these are things that are inarguable.
15:58 Jordan B. Peterson? The scientific insistence that you can have a narrative-free encounter with the facts and orient yourself is simply not true.
16:06 Speaker 01 And then every time they try to pull away from narrative, the narrative just...
16:09 Jordan B. Peterson? Well, if you destabilize, what happens is if you destabilize a fundamental differentiated functional narrative and destroy it, it gets replaced with a low-resolution, catastrophically oversimplified narrative that's just devastating. That would be what happened as a consequence of the death of God.
16:30 Speaker 01 Right.
16:30 Jordan B. Peterson? Well, the differentiated, historically instantiated, unifying narrative collapsed, and then what happened?
16:37 Speaker 01 Power.
16:38 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah.
16:38 Speaker 01 Power, will.
16:39 Jordan B. Peterson? Right, right.
16:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:40 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. One pixel stories.
16:43 Speaker 01 Right, exactly.
16:44 Jordan B. Peterson? Everything's power.
16:47 Jordan B. Peterson? Tell me about the wall.
16:48 Speaker 01 This is all exterior wall that is, you can see by the side of the rock that it's Ottoman era, right, it's smaller, it's stones.
16:54 Jordan B. Peterson? The whole city's built out of this rock.
16:56 Speaker 01 Jerusalem stone, yeah.
16:58 Jordan B. Peterson? It's Jerusalem stone.
16:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:59 Jordan B. Peterson? That's the Jerusalem stone, and there must be strict building codes in Jerusalem. Everything has to be made of...
17:04 Speaker 01 Pretty much, yeah.
17:05 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah, so it's a hamlet name. Yeah, it's really nice to see that, you know. It makes it feel like a place instead of this...
17:13 Speaker 01 Just hodgepodge.
17:14 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah, which is every modern city now is so pathetic.
17:17 Speaker 01 The geography here is plain. It's cool, it's a gorgeous city, it's beautiful. One of the coolest things about walking through Jerusalem is that you can see the progress over time. It's almost like walking forward through time. You start off on the Temple Mount, which is fully 3,000 years old, and then you walk through the old city of Jerusalem, which is somewhere between 1,000 and 500 years old, and then you walk directly into Mammelamal, which is about 20 years old. They all use the same basic building material. There's building restrictions in Jerusalem that you have to build out of Jerusalem stones, that there's sort of architectural similarity and continuity of aesthetics. And more American cities should do this. One of the big problems in American architecture is that it's just basically a hodgepodge, whatever people felt like that day. But there is nothing worse than when you see an old Gothic cathedral, and then right
18:01 Speaker 01 next door, somebody's built like a modern monstrosity. And there is nothing, I think, more beautiful than walking through a city that recognizes its past while simultaneously reaching for the future. Jordan and I walked past this model of the old city of Jerusalem, and you can see what it looked like in the time. And all of Jerusalem is built around this idea that the ancients and the modern are all of one piece.
18:24 Speaker 01 So this is an attempt to control the site. Jerusalem's filled with the cats. Very fulfilling, you're up. One of the rules there.
18:32 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah, yeah, I see a cat.
18:36 Speaker 01 The cats, by the way, are a British thing. The British brought in the cats to kill all the snakes. They killed all the snakes.
18:41 Jordan B. Peterson? The cats killed the snakes?
18:42 Speaker 01 The cats killed the snakes. But they proceeded to take over...
18:45 Jordan B. Peterson? I don't know if cats kill snakes.
18:46 Speaker 01 Apparently.
18:47 Jordan B. Peterson? Cats are quite something.
18:49 Speaker 01 Yeah. And then they took over the entire area, especially because Orthodox Jews, they have real restrictions on spaying and neutering. So the cats are all over the city.
18:59 Jordan B. Peterson? There's cats everywhere in Turkey, too. Cats everywhere in Greece.
19:03 Speaker 01 Probably every place the... Sounds like every place the British set foot, right?
19:08 Jordan B. Peterson? Drawn like them, their cats.
19:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
19:16 Speaker 01 In the Jewish community, you can have a lot of free-filling conversations about God and then the order on heresy, and you're basically okay. Mainly because the skin-in-the-game element of religion, which is, here's a bunch of things you do to demonstrate you're part of the inn.
19:28 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah.
19:29 Speaker 01 If you're doing all that stuff, then whatever doctrinal issues you have, you've already proved that you're the skin-in-the-game.
19:34 Jordan B. Peterson? Right, right.
19:35 Speaker 01 Because Christianity removes a lot of the skin-in-the-game rituals, right? So now the doctrine is the ritual.
19:43 Jordan B. Peterson? Yes, absolutely. Well, you see that extending itself most particularly in Protestantism, where everything's become propositionalized.
19:50 Speaker 01 Exactly. You also see it in any area that becomes completely propositional. You see an inability to tolerate diversity at all. And that's why the objection to nationalism, which is like, well, you know...
20:03 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah, that's a nice general principle. You know, so what that would mean is, in the absence of a shared drama, right, which would be embodied, then you can't tolerate propositional deviance.
20:14 Speaker 01 Right, exactly. What destroys the ability to have propositional conversation is a feeling of bad faith. The reason you're doing this is to avoid the responsibility. The reason that you're saying this is because you want to destroy the system.
20:24 Jordan B. Peterson? Right, well, it also might be that if we differ propositionally, we start to differ in terms of our actions so much that we can't inhabit the same space.
20:32 Speaker 01 Exactly.
20:33 Jordan B. Peterson? And that would always be the unspoken issue, which is like, well, if you disagree with me on this, what else do you disagree with me about? And how do we know that's commensurate with religion?
20:44 Speaker 01 Exactly. So, I was thinking that, you know, what's kind of fascinating is that if you see Judaism as an attempt to concretize this spiritual, this is why everything is focused on minutia and legalistic minutia. So, for example, they'll take a commandment. We'll take a commandment, like, in Hebrew, "You're supposed to love your brother as yourself." And we'll say, okay, what this means is, when your brother is poor, you have to give him some money. It means that when you are...it means that when somebody dies, you have to visit the house of mourning. It concretizes into specific commandments.
21:13 Jordan B. Peterson? Well, that's good, because that also means you know when you're being good.
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22:48 Speaker 01 Jordan and I are at the shrine of the book. This is where you'll find the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were the most ancient versions of the biblical texts, discovered in 1947. So we're going to look at some texts that are well over 2,000 years old that contain direct quotations from the Bible that we all know.
23:08 Jordan B. Peterson? Well, that was quite the discovery.
23:10 Speaker 01 Right, exactly. So this is...
23:14 Speaker 01 Straight from the Book of Isaiah. One day, there's a little Arab kid who's throwing rocks. He throws a rock into a cave and hears a shattering noise. And he runs in there, and there are just these urns. These urns are filled with 2,000-year-old script. And these scrolls show continuity of biblical texts, because they're 200 B.C. And they contain verbatim phraseology from the Bible. And so the idea that the Bible is completely sort of a made-up construct, and it's not a preservation of older material, is debunked by some of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
23:48 Jordan B. Peterson? People find it surprising that the oral traditions are conserved and that the texts are conserved. But the alternative is even more hard to believe, which is that scattered, small, human populations are stunningly creative enough to modify the texts. And they're not. You know, creative people are actually very rare.
24:07 Speaker 01 Right.
24:08 Jordan B. Peterson? And so there are periods of time in the Egyptian dynasties where the archaeological record shows no technological transformation whatsoever for 1,000 years. And Egypt was extremely dynamic.
24:19 Speaker 01 Right.
24:20 Jordan B. Peterson? By archaic standards. And so the truth of the matter, too, is that the older a story is, the more likely it is to be way older than that. So, because in a tribal society, the rule in a tribal society is nothing changes for 50,000 years.
24:36 Speaker 01 Right. Oh, yeah, yeah, I mean, for sure. The idea that people have been writing down the Bible for thousands of years, and hundreds of years before Christ, at the very least, that obviously is true. And that's true from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Those are the oldest extant remnants. But that doesn't mean that it was made up in that generation. I mean, the presumption is that hundreds of years beforehand, people were doing that as well. The Old City of Jerusalem? It's old, but it's not that old. So some of it's Ottoman era, some of it is before. But 2,000 years old in Jerusalem is like, kind of old. Then there's like the really old stuff, which is what we're about to see at City of David, which is fully 3,300 years old.
25:16 Speaker 01 For hundreds of years, thousands of years, people saw in the Bible as a historical document. One of the things that's really amazing about looking at all the archaeological digs in Jerusalem and seeing, as piece by piece, they verify details in the Bible, is that as they uncover pieces of that historical truth, not only does it reunify you with the history, but it also reunifies you with the idea that things that are ancient in origin and have tended to stand the test of time, might be kind of valuable. And so you dispense with the importance of that sort of stuff at your own peril. The city of David is located just below what is now traditionally known as the Old City of Jerusalem. The city of David is the original location of Jerusalem, actually. Archaeologists think that this site is the palace of King David.
25:59 Speaker 03 My name is Zev Ornstein, and I'm the Director of International Affairs here at the City of David, which is the biblical site of ancient Jerusalem, the place where Jerusalem began.
26:10 Speaker 03 2005, all this is underground. One morning, an archaeologist by the name of Ela Mazar, she comes into our visitor set and says, "You need to move your offices." I ask her why. She says, "Beneath your feet, you'll find the palace of King David. What do you do with that?" Right? So, you know, we asked her why. So she shows us something. It's in the Israel Museum today, found 60 years ago. You have over here, royal Phoenician capital. So if you look at these columns over here, imagine a column, this is sitting on top of the column. This proves that where we're standing is the location of King David's palace. What's the connection? In 2 Samuel, Chapter 5, Verse 11, it says, "King Herem of Tyre sent envoys to David with cedar logs, carpenters, and stonemasons, and they built a palace for David." The Phoenicians are the ones who the Bible says built David's palace. We find here the royal Phoenician
26:52 Speaker 03 capital. Why? Well, because the Phoenicians were the ones who built David's palace. They start to dig. They find, to the north, to the east, walls about eight meters thick. It's clear there's a massive structure here. The question is, from what time period? They find pottery and other organic material at the base of the walls that Dr. Mazar dates to 3,000 years ago, to the time of David. Other people date it to about 100 years after David. So the debate is not what this area was. This was the original Capitol Hill, the royal government building center of the Davidic dynasty. And the other thing that we have over here is two clay seals, right? In ancient times, before you had encryption and encoding and whatever, you'd write your letter, then you would roll it up, tie it up, and before you'd hand it to the messenger, you'd take your ring, stick it into the clay, and now on your ring, and now on the clay, is your name and then son of your father's name.
27:35 Speaker 03 She's digging here, and she finds two seals just like this one. This is what Hebrew used to look like. And on the seals, there are names. G'dayas and Paschor, Juchas and Ashlemiah. Two of the four ministers that made up the security cabinet of King Zedekiah, the last king of the Davidic dynasty, right before the Babylonian destruction. I mean, they're real people. Their seals were found in the royal government center of the Davidic dynasty, where you would expect the ministers of the king to be. Right? Not simply as a matter of faith, but as a matter of fact. And a few meters away from here, the same doctor Mazar finds the seal of King Hezekiah and of the prophet Isaiah. So, I mean, you asked before, how legitimate is this? I mean, the seals here are incontrovertible. Was King David here, ruling here? Or his grandson? I can't tell you. The Davidic dynasty was ruling from here. This is where it was, not the old city.
28:20 Speaker 01 Bathsheba was probably taking...
28:21 Speaker 03 So, think about Bathsheba. It says, what happened to Bathsheba? Right? It says, one night, the A.C.'s not working in the palace. He goes down to the balcony, and he looks down into the city. What does he see? He sees a woman bathing on the roof. How is it possible for him to see someone bathing on the roof, unless he's at the top of the city? Now he can look down. When you're in the place where the... And see on top of the roofs. So, think about it. When you're in the place where the Bible happened, the words of the Bible come to life.
28:42 Speaker 01 You understand the story of David and Bathsheba very clearly when you look at the geography. You have David looking out from his palace, and he sees onto the roof of Uriah, and Bathsheba is bathing up there. He sins with Bathsheba, and then the prophet Nathan comes and chastises and tells him that he's done a grave evil and a grave wrong, and he's forced to atone for that wrong. You can see the geography there, right? Because the palace is sort of on top of a hill, and then there's a valley, and then on the other side of the valley is Silon. So presumably, Bathsheba's house would have been somewhere in Silon. If there's a window right there, this is where David is looking out and seeing Bathsheba bathing naked on the roof, which is always... If you know that the king is sitting up there with his window, you know, bathing on the roof seems like a risky proposition.
29:27 Speaker 01 Here you start to see the beginnings of the idea of a constitutional monarchy. So there are even hints of this in Deuteronomy. One of the laws in Deuteronomy is that the king is supposed to carry around his own safer Torah. He's subject to the law. The king is not above the law. So Judaism is very clear about that, and so is Christianity, and henceforth the idea of limitations on absolute government are part and parcel of the whole system.
29:48 Jordan B. Peterson? And one of the things that, to me, lends historical credence to those sorts of stories is that it doesn't exactly show David in a positive light. So what kind of propaganda is that?
29:57 Speaker 01 Exactly. That's definitely one of the things in favor of biblical narrative, is that when you show all the warts...
30:02 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah, right.
30:03 Speaker 01 And suggest that you're not propagandizing.
30:04 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. That happens a lot.
30:08 Speaker 01 That's the entire Exodus story, right? The idea is that you have an absolute monarch in Pharaoh, and he is a god, and so everything he says goes. And then people are brought forth from slavery to freedom, but the freedom requires subjugation to god, right? You're still a servant, but you're not a servant of a person anymore. Now you're servants of an ideal, you're servants of a higher power. And that means inherently limiting the power of human beings.
30:31 Speaker 01 Looks like this is like a massive cistern.
30:33 Speaker 03 So what you see here is an ancient cistern. You can see the plaster here along this wall, keeping the water in.
30:41 Jordan B. Peterson? So people would have carved this out of the rock?
30:43 Speaker 03 Yeah, sure. One of the challenges that the Israelite still has is, you know, water scarcity. And so here's how you'd store water. Now, keep in mind, we're coming from next to the palace. This is not a private person's cistern. This, you can see, is a massive cistern. So the cistern that archaeologists believe could have been the cistern where Jeremiah was thrown into a pit. Jeremiah was perceived at that time to be a traitor. He had said that if the people don't change their ways, Jerusalem is going to be destroyed, but he was a prophet of doom. Nobody wanted to hear what he had to say. And the advisors of King Sida Kaya got tired of hearing this guy go around calling for the surrender of the city, and so they throw him down into a pit.
31:23 Speaker 01 Now, can I tell you for sure Jeremiah's thrown into this pit? I can't tell you that. Right? And if not this pit, one near here like this one. But it says what happens.
31:29 Jordan B. Peterson? All pits are the same. Pretty much.
31:31 Speaker 03 If they're thrown into them. So, but here you say, "So what's the plan?" He's gonna drown, right? It's a sister. But the Bible makes it clear, there's no water. There's mud. And he's sinking into the mud. Until a servant to the king goes before Setacaya, and he says, "You might not like what Jeremiah's saying, but it's not him who said it. It's a prophet. It's a man of God, right? The words are God's words. You can't do this to Jeremiah." And the king says, "All right, you're right. Go, take thirty people with you, and pull Jeremiah up out of the pit." And then it goes on to say how he, you know, goes on, it keeps Trudeau's message, right? About what's gonna happen to Jerusalem, right? But this is where, the back of the last days of Jerusalem, before the Babylonians destroy it, you have Jeremiah here sinking into the mud,
32:15 Speaker 03 hearing the destruction, the impending destruction up above. This is where it's playing out. We take for granted today the ability to be critical of our leadership, to hold our leaders accountable. But going back thousands of years, there was a position in biblical times, that of the prophet, whose role was to go to the highest levels of society and to hold those leaders accountable and let them know that there are consequences for falling short. There are consequences for making poor decisions, unethical decisions.
32:44 Speaker 01 Both the Judaic side of government and the Greek side of government are predicated on the idea that there are limitations to what government can do. You can make the case that the biblically-based system is more of a limited monarchy, where the powers of the king are fairly limited. But the kingship is derived not from the people. And the Greek system is that authority is derived from the people and is almost unlimited. When Aristotle talks about how there are three types of governments and all have the capacity to devolve into tyranny, that's what he's talking about, right? You can have a benevolent monarch, which is more like the biblical system. But even the Bible is pretty divided over whether kings are good or necessary. Samuel gives a whole speech before the appointment of King Saul about, "You guys are really gonna hate this king thing. You probably shouldn't do it."
33:29 Speaker 01 And the people are like, "Well, no, we want it anyway." And God says, "Okay, fine. If they want it, they're gonna get it. Probably gonna get it good and hard, but that's the..."
33:37 Speaker 03 Every single day here in the city of David, we're unearthing antiquities that show not simply as a matter of faith, but as a matter of fact, Jerusalem's biblical heritage coming to life. We are standing right now in the Givati parking lot excavation. Now, you might wonder, why would you name an archaeological excavation after a parking lot? Not too long ago, there was actually a parking lot here. And one day, we said, we're going to build our visitor's center here. And the Israel Antiquities Authority said, well, hold on. Before you build anything, we need to make sure there's nothing exciting beneath your feet. They come with ground penetrating radar. They scan down and they find 10 layers of ancient Jerusalem civilization. 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.
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35:15 Speaker 01 This goes down several stories as they uncover additional layers of history over the course of 3,000 years. We're just told up there, this above our heads would have been a Roman mansion, actually.
35:26 Speaker 03 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, you have remnants of the fire, of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians.
35:53 Speaker 01 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.
36:05 Jordan B. Peterson? One of the things that's so interesting about this archaeological dig is that
36:11 Jordan B. Peterson? people are using the techniques of scientific archaeology to revitalize the interpretive narrative. Because you see the truth of the story revealed in an artifact, which is so cool. You were commenting earlier that people have lost faith in Jerusalem, let's say, and are starting to lose faith in Athens too. Maybe because one cannot exist without the other, not in the West. The fact that we had to turn to the object to revitalize the narrative at this time, well, it makes a certain amount of sense conceptually, but it's also quite a striking phenomenon. So, yes, this was real. These things happened. Whatever real means in a context like that.
36:52 Speaker 01 It's also amazing because the suffering which, you know, Jews commemorate the destruction of Jerusalem till this day. You know, the suffering which is temporary. And then you see, you know, there's a famous story in the Talmud about rabbis visiting the place where they're overlooking the Temple Mount. And they see all the destruction. And there are three rabbis, and two of them are crying. And Rabbi Akiva is laughing, and they ask him, "Why are you laughing?" And he says, "Well, you know, it says in the prophets that it's going to be rubble, and there are going to be foxes wandering on the holiest places." And he says, "I'm seeing that happen right now, which means that the other part's going to come true." And one of the things about being here in the modern age is that you get to see the destruction in the rearview mirror. And then you get to, you know, you look almost straight up, and you can see the rebuilding of Jerusalem. It's an amazing, amazing thing.
37:38 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah, well, I mean, one of the things that does keep you going through catastrophe is the faith that something can be rebuilt from the rubble.
37:47 Speaker 01 587 BCE is the year that the Babylonians invade Israel and they destroy the first temple. And you would imagine that this would have been the end of Judaism, and therefore no Christianity and no further Western civilization, right? Typically, in the olden days, when a civilization was destroyed and its chief city burned to the ground, they kind of dissipate into history. You never hear of them again. That's not what happens here. Judaism existed in exile for thousands of years. Then Judaism can survive that and then revivify itself, not once but twice. And then they come back to the land of Israel in 1948 and reestablish a thriving state. I mean, it's an unbelievable story of heroic perseverance, but also of the presence of God in history.
38:26 Speaker 01 This pilgrimage road is the road that hundreds of thousands of people would use every single year, several times a year, in order to bring their sacrifices to the Temple Mount. It's in pretty good condition.
38:36 Speaker 03 It is amazing, yep. 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 thought, "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. It seems like someone was deliberately breaking open the pilgrimage road. And the question is, why? So they looked through the writings of the historian Josephus.
39:20 Speaker 03 And Josephus says, "In the year 70, the Romans are destroying Jerusalem. The temple atop the Temple Mount in flames. The last Jews of Jerusalem seek refuge from the Romans where? In the drainage channel beneath the pilgrimage road, the ancient sewer system."
39:38 Speaker 03 Archeologists trouvent des grandes tasses de cuisine, ce qui signifie que les gens qui étaient là-bas étaient là pendant des jours, des semaines, des mois, jusqu'à ce que les Romains trouvent toutes et tuent toutes. Maintenant, les Romains étaient si fiers de leur conquête sur Jérusalem qu'ils ont fait une monnaie de récompense. Voici l'empereur romain Vespasien, et sur la monnaie vous avez un legionnaire romain qui se tient au-dessus d'une femme juive qui pleure sur sa chaise. Sur la monnaie, il est écrit "Judea capta", "Judea a été captée", et ici vous avez l'arche de Tite de Rome. Sur l'arche, vous avez les trésors du temple qui ont été emmenés de Jérusalem et à Rome. Maintenant, sur cette route, sur la route du pilgrimage, les archeaux trouvent des centaines, si pas des milliers de ces petites monnaies de bronze datant de la période de 166 à 170, la période connue comme la grande révolte, la grande révolte juive pour la liberté contre l'occupation romaine.
40:24 Speaker 03 Et les chercheurs ont longtemps demandé pourquoi ils faisaient ces monnaies? Parce que à ce moment-là, les monnaies étaient inutiles. Elles n'avaient aucune valeur monétaire. Et s'ils voulaient vraiment combattre les Romains, pour quoi ont-ils utilisé le métal? Pour faire des armes. Pourquoi ils en perdent-ils sur une monnaie inutile? Je vais vous montrer une telle monnaie. Cette monnaie ici est 2000 ans vieille. Regardez-la ici. 2000 ans vieille. Et cette monnaie, il est écrit en écrits hébreux anciens pour la liberté de Zion. Zion, bien sûr, est un autre nom pour Jérusalem. Cette monnaie représente une espérance, un désir, un rêve et une prière. Que l'un jour, le peuple juif retournerait à Jérusalem souveraine. Les mots sur cette monnaie, "pour un Jérusalem libre", ils sont arrivés. Il a pris un peu plus de temps que ce qu'ils pensaient. Mais cette espérance, ce désir, ce rêve et cette prière sont arrivés devant nos yeux
41:09 Speaker 03 et il y a un Jérusalem libre aujourd'hui pour des gens de toutes les faiths et backgrounds. Ce n'est pas juste une autre pièce de l'histoire. C'est une continuation d'une histoire qui a été poursuivie pendant des milliers d'années. Les gens qui vont sur cette route dans le futur, ce sont leurs ancêtres qui sont allés sur elle 2000 ans plus tôt, qui prirent le même Dieu, avaient le même langage, coutumes, traditions et festivals. C'est vivant, c'est réel. Et nous la ramène ici, dans cette excavation.
41:32 Speaker 01 Une des choses vraiment cool sur la route du pilgrimage est que pour les chrétiens, il y a 100% de certitude que c'est là que Jésus est allé. Il y a peut-être beaucoup de questions sur où Jésus était à des moments différents dans la Bible. Il n'y a pas de question que Jésus ait parcouru la route du pilgrimage parce que tous les Juifs l'ont fait. Il y a une roche là où les échos seraient présents et ils feraient des déclarations politiques. Jésus était probablement le gars à côté qui criait à la gente: "Arrêtez de vous inquiéter trop des détails de votre sacrifice et commencez à vous inquiéter de votre proximité avec Dieu." Et tout le monde est probablement regardant à Jésus comme: "Qui est-ce? C'est un job?" "Ah, rien ne va de lui. Ils vont continuer avec leur vie."
42:04 Speaker 03 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.
42:26 Jordan B. Peterson? Speaker's corner.
42:27 Speaker 03 Speaker's corner, the original Hyde Park, right? 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.
42:41 Jordan B. Peterson? It's hard to see a soapbox without wanting to climb it.
42:45 Jordan B. Peterson? Don't you think?
42:45 Speaker 01 We gotta get some protesters over.
42:47 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
42:48 Speaker 01 Otherwise it's not gonna work.
42:50 Speaker 01 That's the thing about Jerusalem is that when stuff gets destroyed, it doesn't get fully destroyed. It just gets kind of built on top of, which is the story of civilization in a lot of ways, right?
42:57 Jordan B. Peterson? Right.
42:58 Speaker 01 We like to pretend that when we level things, they're completely leveled. Nothing is completely leveled. It's mostly leveled, and then you just build up.
43:03 Jordan B. Peterson? No matter how hard the communists try, you mean, to obliterate the past and build the new man.
43:11 Speaker 01 That's also the nature of human beings. Like, we don't really want to clear all the debris. You gotta have something to build on.
43:17 Jordan B. Peterson? This is that idea of a foundation stone too, is that if our perception is hierarchical, which seems to be the case, you either have a foundation stone, or you have fragmentation. Those are the only options.
43:31 Speaker 01 Right.
43:31 Jordan B. Peterson? And we know what the psychological consequences of fragmentation are. There's two. Anxiety, because it marks fragmentation. Like, anxiety occurs when you have too many pathways forward. And hopelessness. And the reason you get hopeless is because if you don't know where you're going, no positive emotion can mark out the path, because positive emotion specifies movement forward on a path. And so, if there's no hierarchy that unites, you get fragmentation, and if you get fragmentation, you get anxiety and hopelessness. And that's that. There's no getting around that. That's what those systems are there to mark. And so, that's why the monotheistic impulse is so interesting,
44:15 Jordan B. Peterson? because it's an impulse to unify everything, well, and to make it hierarchical in the most fundamental sense, right? It's like, well, does it hit a pinnacle? And the answer is, well, to the degree that it's hierarchical effectively, then it hits a pinnacle. And then the question is, well, what should... This is the question, right? What should be at the pinnacle? Or what should be the base? Those are two different metaphors. So, part of what the biblical corpus is trying to do is to take characterizations of the positive patriarchal animating spirit, that's a good way of thinking about it, multiple characterizations of that spirit, and then to make this insistence by aggregating the books,
44:57 Jordan B. Peterson? that all of those manifestations of those somewhat discriminable spirits are manifestations of the same central thing. Right. So, you could think that the central animating spirit for Noah is the intuition that calls you to batten down the hatches when, if you're wise, when a time of crisis is coming. So, that's a spirit that might seize you, and might seize multiple people at the same time. And it's a spirit you could attend to and allow to inhabit you or not. So, and then in Abraham, God is the spirit that calls Abraham out of his out of his hyper-security and wealth, in some sense, into adventure. Right. And then the juxtaposition of those stories, that's metonymy, the juxtaposition of those stories implies that Spirit A and Spirit B
45:42 Jordan B. Peterson? are, in some sense, manifestations, you bet. So, the Bible is doing that continually. It's like, and it's not propositional. It's not attempting to explain God as like a meta-object, in some sense, or an object in the world. It's an animating spirit. It's a, it's a pattern of perception and action, and not the pattern of the thing that's being perceived in the object. It's the pattern of perception itself. And so, then, when you have the union of Athens and Jerusalem, in some sense, you say, well, fair enough, God is the pattern of perception and not the object. But the juxtaposition would say, the pattern of perception is seeing a reflection in the object that's similar to the pattern of perception itself. And that would be something like the logos, right?
46:27 Jordan B. Peterson? So, the, yeah, yeah, yeah. The logos of nature and the logos of the spirit unite. And that's Western civilization.
46:37 Jordan B. Peterson? Modern people often ask themselves, "Why do I have to study history?" Well, you're a historical being. You need to know who you are and where you came from and what you stand on. Why you think the things you think. What is the appropriate manner to live? Those aren't optional questions. Well, they are, because you can fail to answer all of them and then... But then you live in a chaotic, desolate, nihilistic wasteland of anxiety and hopelessness. The alternative is to place yourself in the proper tradition. And you have to understand what proper tradition is. And part of that understanding is to start to grapple with the complexities and realities of those traditions.
47:20 Speaker 01 If Jerusalem is the idea of man meeting God, and this is where revelation becomes reality, then the question becomes, "How does man deal with revelation? How do we actually work in a world in which values are discoverable, in which they're important? And that requires that reason come to the fore and reason become a paramount concern for human beings.
47:40 Speaker 01 How does man respond to a universe that is knowable? What kind of resources can human beings bring to a mysterious but knowable universe?
47:48 Speaker 01 That other half, that rational component, is really cultivated to the utmost in Greece.
47:55 Jordan B. Peterson? Well, you might ask, "What's wrong with being a populist?"
47:58 Speaker 01 If the people want it, then it must be good, but that obviously is not true.
48:01 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah, you just look at Twitter.
48:02 Speaker 01 Right.
48:04 Jordan B. Peterson? And I'm not saying slavery isn't wrong. The issue is, why is it wrong?
48:08 Speaker 01 Is it wrong because people voted it so?
48:10 Jordan B. Peterson? Well, you're right. No, it's not exactly that. It's not that at all.
48:14 Speaker 01 We stopped by the shrine of the book. We find it astonishing that texts are preserved for this long or that ideas are preserved for this long. But it's sort of the natural state of things.
48:21 Jordan B. Peterson? We think that creative innovation is the standard mode of human being, and that's just not true.
48:28 Speaker 01 If you're placed in paradise, the first thing you do is you vacation, right? On the beach, man. Exactly. That's an amazing thing in Genesis. Like, even in paradise, human beings have to have... Have something to do. Something to do.
50:00 Speaker 01 The
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