The bedrock of American liberty was laid in Jerusalem

When considering the sites upon which the foundations of the United States were established, Plymouth Rock, Valley Forge and Independence Hall come to mind. Yet America's Founding Fathers looked far beyond them for the inspiration to build a nation.

In October 2020, the United States formally recognized the City of David — the historic site of biblical Jerusalem — as a heritage site. Not as a Jewish heritage site, nor as an Israeli one, but as an American heritage site.

Why would the United States recognize a site more than six thousand miles beyond its borders as part of its own national heritage? Why, in 2025, would Argentina's President Javier Milei do the same, calling the City of David a source of inspiration for his republic? And why, this past week, would Guatemala become the third nation to do so?

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The answer is something Americans are in danger of forgetting.

The moral bedrock on which the United States was built — and on which it endures — traces back to Jerusalem's biblical heritage. Equality before the law. Inherent human dignity. The right to speak truth to power. These revolutionary ideas didn't come from Athens, and they didn't originate in Rome. They came from Jerusalem.

Consider what they replaced: rulers who sat above the law, accountable to no one, in societies where only a select few were deemed worthy of rights at all.

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Yet in Jerusalem, 3,000 years ago, King David was confronted by the prophet Nathan over a moral failing, rather than execute the man who dared challenge a king, David took ownership — acknowledging his own accountability to the law, declaring that he had sinned before God and vowing to make amends.

Thomas Paine knew the source of that ideal. In Common Sense, the pamphlet that inspired the American Revolution, he pointed to the Book of Samuel and declared that in America, the law is king.

Four centuries later, in the same city, a young man named Jeremiah challenged a throne whose courts were corrupt and under which the poor were being crushed. Officials, unwilling to heed his call to change their ways, threw him into a cistern to sink in the mud and die.

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The personal seals of two of those officials — Jehucal son of Shelemiah and Gedaliah son of Pashhur, the men named in the Book of Jeremiah as plotting to put the prophet to death for the crime of speaking truth to power — were unearthed in the City of David by the archaeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar. The names in the ground match the names on the page. The First Amendment's protections of speech and dissent didn't begin in America. Their roots run back to Jerusalem.

Athens executed Socrates for asking too many questions. Jerusalem made holding truth above human power a sacred duty. Benjamin Franklin proposed seven words as the motto for the Great Seal of the United States: Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

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And Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.

Not endowed by the king, nor by the government. By the Creator.

The idea that every person carries inherent worth, simply by being made in the image of God, begins in Genesis — and found its first national expression in Jerusalem.

This was no secret to America's Founders. Of some 15,000 political writings of the founding era, the most-cited source was not Locke or Montesquieu. It was the Bible — cited more than both combined. They told us exactly where they got it.

These nations did not come to honor Israel and the Jewish people specifically. They came to connect themselves to Jerusalem and her story — to the ideals, rooted in this city, on which they were founded and on which they hope to endure.

In September 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood on the newly unearthed Pilgrimage Road at the City of David — the half mile that carried pilgrims from the Pool of Siloam up toward the Temple — and echoed the same sentiment: "The United States was founded… on the very powerful principle that the rights of mankind come from their Creator… But that idea did not come from the ether. It did not come from someone's imagination. It was deeply rooted in the teachings of ancient words, thousands and thousands of years old, that find their genesis here, literally on the very spot on which I stand."

As America enters her 251st year, what is the source of the ideals from which she will draw her sense of national purpose, meaning and destiny? Jerusalem offers an answer — the same inheritance it has offered for millennia, and one as relevant today as it was three thousand years ago.