Dinesh D’Souza has spent much of his career defending Christianity. Yet one argument, he says, never sat quite right with him: that the Bible could be trusted as a historical record.
While studying in college, he encountered biblical higher criticism and came away thinking Scripture combined history with legend and some errors. He believed its authors were divinely inspired, but thought they could still have been mistaken about certain events.
“I sort of had this view of the Bible in which you couldn’t defend the Bible like line by line,” D’Souza recalled on a recent podcast, where he discussed his book, The Stones Cry Out: Biblical Archaeology, Prophecy, and the Last Days.
That began to change after a visit to Israel in 2022. There, archaeological finds gave him reason to take another look.
The missing argument
D’Souza was already familiar with Christian apologetics. His 2007 bestseller, What’s So Great About Christianity, took on prominent atheists’ arguments about science, philosophy, evolution and the existence of God.
He has said that the intellectual climate at Dartmouth unsettled the faith he had as a child. “I really couldn’t defend my faith, so I found myself drifting away,” he said in a 2007 interview.
He eventually regained his confidence and spent years debating Christianity’s critics. But the Bible’s historical reliability remained, as he describes it, a blind spot.
In Israel, he saw archaeological evidence connected with events he knew from Scripture, including the Assyrian invasion of Israel and the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem. Finds associated with less prominent biblical figures caught his attention, too.
“I was a little startled by all this,” he said.
He began studying biblical archaeology more closely, and continued for several years. His book, The Stones Cry Out, was published in October.
Two men from Jeremiah
One example involves Jehucal, son of Shelemiah, and Gedaliah, son of Pashhur. They were officials serving King Zedekiah near the end of the kingdom of Judah—names that can be easy to miss unless you know the book of Jeremiah well.
Jeremiah warned that Jerusalem would fall to the Babylonians. According to chapter 38, the king’s officials were angered by his preaching and accused him of weakening the city’s defenders. Jehucal and Gedaliah joined others in urging Zedekiah to silence the prophet.
Jeremiah was lowered into a cistern and sank into the mud. Another official later convinced the king to have him rescued. After that, Jehucal and Gedaliah fade from the biblical account.
More than 2,500 years later, their names appeared on clay seal impressions found by archaeologists in Jerusalem. A seal bearing the name Jehucal, son of Shelemiah, was discovered in 2005. In 2008, archaeologists found another bearing the name Gedaliah, son of Pashhur.
These small objects, called bullae, were used to seal documents. The documents have not survived, but the hardened clay preserved the names pressed into it.
“Suddenly these two, you could call them biblical extras, jump into the pages of history via the pathway of archaeology,” D’Souza said.
The seals don’t prove that the men took part in Jeremiah’s persecution or put him in the cistern. They do, however, offer independent evidence that men with those names lived in Jerusalem during the period described in the Bible.
For D’Souza, the detail is striking. If the book of Jeremiah had been written centuries after the events it recounts, he wonders, how would its author have known the names of two relatively minor officials?
Earlier documents or oral traditions might explain how those names were preserved. And the seals cannot tell us when the biblical text was written. Still, the discoveries have led D’Souza to reconsider some of his earlier assumptions about the Bible’s historical accuracy.
The quiet language of the dirt
Not every biblical event has left clear archaeological traces. D’Souza acknowledges that evidence for the Exodus is limited, and scholars continue to disagree about the dates and locations of other events in the Bible.
Even so, he argues that the growing number of discoveries—inscriptions, seals, buildings and records of ancient rulers—makes it harder to dismiss the Bible’s historical accounts as mere legend.
He has also come to think of archaeology as a kind of accommodation to modern skepticism.
“In this kind of latter secular age that we live in, God has sort of decided to start speaking a second language,” he said. “Not just the thunderous language of revelation, but the quiet language of the dirt.”
